Best demos

We put in lots of text in UR just to get though loading times. And when the loading was finished, we need to extend the effect some longer just to make the loading worthwhile. That made it feel slow, but we aimed to effects the have the duration of the music. So lots of fillers. This is a big difference compared to Amiga demos, most of them had just 1 music track and were a lot shorter (and felt quicker). We could have done that too, but we had too many tracks to fit in.

In my opinion, there are two aspects that were often mixed in the demos and that made their quality:
- An artistic aspect (original art direction, beautiful music and graphics),
- A technical aspect (with amazing things that we were not used to see).

On the artistic aspect, I have no doubt that we are able to do very good things nowadays.

It's on the technical side that I think there is the most challenge. The programmers have already pushed the MSX close to its limits and to create new original effects, you need a lot of imagination and technical knowledge.

That said, there are quite a few technical proof-of-concepts that we have seen on MRC that would surely have their place in a demo. I think for example of the Salutte's Kart demo and its SNES-like 3D effect.

I watched a lot of C64 demo's and there are some great ones out there. Just to name a few I very much like:

• Bonzai - Unboxed
• Booze Design - Uncensored
• lft - Lunatico
• Censor Design & Oxyron - Comaland

I know, I know: The C64 videochip uses de same memory as the processor so super fast access to the video memory is possible and the SID is more powerful than the PSG.
But MSX has a 2nd independent processor (VDP) that can handle a lot of graphic actions while the Z80 does something completely different. And a sound processor like SCC could blow the SID completely out of the water.

It's not so much the hardware that is the limiting factor here. Demo's like mentioned above should (in a somewhat other form) be possible on the MSX-2. It comes down to tricks I think. A lot is pre-rendered, pre-calculated or some other trick that looks like they re-draw the whole screen every frame.

Creativity (the artistic aspect) is I think very important, but we have a lot of creative people on the site.

@wolf_ I must say I disagree. Look at this effect. Do you think those heagons are redrawn every time the screen changes? They have like 4 different pages they switch and they only change the color registers for each character block to make it appear that a hexagon was removed / added or changed color. Granted: they do it brilliantly but this effect should be possible on MSX too in Screen 2 of 4. Same as the intro here.

The intro with the clouds is also very possible on MSX. Even in screen 0 I think.

There are also a lot of things the C64 can't do well where MSX has the upper hand. Like pallet changes (even mid screen) and 512 colors. Line drawing (with basic logic operations). More memory to work with. Our processor is faster (not much, but a little). So we have a lot going for us as well. We are in the same league of the C64 and the Amstrad CPC I think. We just have to exploit the things the MSX is excels at.

I know that disk loading is crap on MSX, although there are ways to even improve that a lot.

The whole idea behind making demos is to amaze the audience with things that shouldn't be possible, but can still be done through tricks. Like a illusionist or magician giving the illusion that something just happened that is impossible.

I think we haven't even scratched the surface yet.

HAHA! Now that's a challenge! Well I'll be working on my own demo first but maybe after that I'll give it a try.

But you must at least have some ideas of features you'd like to see in a demo? What, given the possibilities of MSX, would you like to see done well in a demo?