71K views · Jun 29, 2014 · 4:01 · 2 HN recommenders · 3 mentions · discussed 2018–2026
Onslaught's Bad Apple 64 is a Commodore 64 demo that streams over 2000 frames of the Bad Apple animation from a single disk side at 12fps, with each frame packed to around 70 bytes.
Why Hacker News points people here: Shared as an impressive example of squeezing video and compression onto a 1 MHz 8-bit machine in Bad Apple porting threads.
“C64 version using VQ compression”HN comment, 2021
“Heres another Onslaught demo that fits on a Floppy disk”
Another Onslaught demo fitting on a floppy disk
The remarkatble thing is less the compression of a 3:12 video with sound in 1MB, and more the c64 being able to decode it in realtime with a framerate > 10. I especially like the unique but still 64-flavoured compression artefacts of the video. Heres another Onslaught demo that fits on a Floppy disk: this video
“C64 version using VQ compression”
C64 Bad Apple using VQ compression
C64 version using VQ compression: this video A much much more impressive display of the same tech in this Onslaught Eclectic demo by the same author: Real time decode of video and audio from floppy at 16fps link
“the fact that Bad Apple has been”
Example of Bad Apple ported to the Commodore 64.
Oh no argument on that. I have a typical yuppie software job with decent pay, so generally I will buy the right tools for a job now instead of trying to make due with whatever I can scrap together. I'm not that busy of a person, but I certainly have more obligations than I did when I was sixteen, and now sometimes it really is worth it to spend an extra grand on something than it is to spend a week hacking together something from my existing stuff. Still, I look back at the hours I spent making terrible YouTube videos with my terrible computer really fondly. I was proud of myself for making things work, I was proud of the little workarounds I found. I think it's the same reason I love reading about classic computing (80's-90's era). Computers in the 80's were objectively terrible compared to anything we have now, and people still figured out how to squeeze every little bit of juice possible to make really awesome games and programs. The Commodore 64 and Amiga demos are fun to play around with because people will figure out the coolest tricks to make these computers do things that they have no business doing. I mean, the fact that Bad Apple has been "ported" to pretty much everything is something I cannot stop being fascinated by. [1] [2] [3] [4] [1] link [2] link [3] this video [4] link
