Classic PC demoscene productions running natively in the browser

It works, and has done for some time, surely. What more is there to add here above accurate playback?

> From 386SX-16 to Pentium 66 MHz, that's 10-20x difference in performance.

Yep, and some demos had specific requirements for not only minimal CPU but maximal because the assumptions inherent in small-code timing tricks would break beyond a certain speed or because of significant differences in relative instruction execution times (and sometimes the unpredictability of those execution times as the P5 architecture and some of its frankenstein-486-like competitors added branch prediction). Larger demos were more flexible as you didn't need the small-code tricks to squeeze into 4Kb or sometimes less, so 64K demos and larger could be more flexible wrt target CPU.

But cycle-accurate emulation has this sorted to: you just need the instruction cycle time accuracy to be matching a particular CPU running to the pace of a particular clock. And given the description of how this is being done (“The demo is run on an x86 emulator that records…”) I assume this is actually using cycle-accurate emulation!

I'm guessing the benefit here is that the overhead of playing back the demo on each client machine is lower when playing this recorded version, compared to each viewer's browser running the initial emulation live in the browser. That and doing something a new way was fun or otherwise intellectually stimulating for the dev(s) involved.

Absolutely

"How much of the sword emerged from the water" in Second Reality was a good measurement of CPU speed and video card performance, for example.

I remember seeing stuff in demos on my friend's Pentium Pro machine that I never saw on my 486SX-25 because routines ran faster and you could see more of the effect (since some demos were sync'd to the music and would move on irrespective of the progress of the effects). Heck-- just replacing my video card made a huge difference with some demos.

By “fight so hard” you mean “do a bit of basic editing before publishing the text”?

You wouldn't have thrown a junior's text straight at end users without any review in the past (at least I hope not, though obviously some teams actually were and still are that lax), why do you expect to get away with skipping the review/edit step with your clockwork colleague?

I guess the point is that a pre-compiled version could have HW checkpoints from a slow emulated run, so that it can then run at full speed and just advance the HW to the required timestate when a write is to occur (ie, instead of costly cycle-accurate emulationg, most HW operations can be batched inbetween time-sensitive checkpoints).

Then again, why not just record a video at that point? :P

But the focus shifted in recent years to treating "OCS" (ie "standard" Amiga500 with original chipset and 1mb,etc) more like a fixed platform like the C64 instead and imho has seen a bit of a revival since is mostly in the interesting part of pushing the OCS HW.

lol, that would be 160MB then, a fraction of what a Firefox Tab consumes and in todays hardware specs its a roundoff error :-D

(while back then you were the ultimate king if you had 8 MB of RAM available at all! :-)

But it did require a 386, which typically had 2 MB or more of RAM back then.

I think the biggest effect of AI here is that you can no longer make the inference from "that program looks impressive" to "the person who created it must be very skilful and/or invested a lot of effort in making it". So someone else seeing your work might not appreciate the level of effort and skill you put into it, or might even suspect you of lying if you say explicitly that you made it "by hand". I'm not going to say that we shouldn't care what others think; that's not realistic, most of us do want some recognition for things we've worked hard on. I think there will always be people interested in doing things the hard way, and among those people the "old" paths to recognition and respect still operate, it just gets harder because there has to be a lot of trust between them that no one's taken the easy way out (AI) and pretended otherwise.

A workaround for modern hardware is frame doubling then blanking every other frame (software black frame insertion). It halves the brightness, but modern monitors generally support higher brightness than CRTs so this just brings it back to the authentic level. It's possible with FFMPEG filters, although I don't remember how I accomplished it when I tried it years ago.

The importance of CRT flicker is one reason I greatly prefer DOS demos to C64 and Amiga demos. Those were mostly designed for 50Hz PAL CRTs, so the flicker is far more annoying than 70Hz VGA.

The entire point of the port was to add headless play for AI training. But porting the old interface and playing it in the browser was lots of fun. Can not upload that to GitHub, obviously.