Ant64 Proposed Demos

Overview

The Ant64 ships with a set of original standalone demo works — complete pieces designed specifically around what the hardware can do, not ports of ideas from constrained platforms. Each is intended to stand as a piece of work in its own right, independent of any hardware knowledge. The technical achievement is the means, not the end.

These works are separate from the boot intro system. The boot intro plays at power-on, lasts 5–6 seconds, and is primarily a showcase of the variant system and the machine's immediate personality. The demo works are longer, authored pieces — 60 to 180 seconds each — designed to be experienced as complete statements. They run via AntOS:

demo run silhouette
demo run copper
demo run weight
demo run heritage
demo run stateoftheart

Or from the workstation app's dedicated demo launcher page.

All five works will be released as public domain (CC0) with full source material upon the Ant64's commercial release. The release package for each work includes vector path data, EE bytecode, audio sequences, AI pipeline documentation, and companion technical notes. Another machine that wants to port any of these pieces gets everything it needs. Every port attributes the Ant64 as the originating platform.

The demo scene has always treated exceptional hardware releases as community property even when they weren't. Original works released under a clear CC0 dedication give that process a head start and make the Ant64 the machine that gave something to the scene rather than merely impressing it.

The Works

Work 1 — "State of the Art — Extended"

The centrepiece. A direct creative sequel to the Spaceballs Amiga demo from 1992.

Lineage

The original State of the Art by Spaceballs (1992) was one of the most influential demos ever made. Its central insight was deceptively simple: rotoscoped human movement, rendered at low resolution with a limited palette, set to a rave track. The figure moved with organic human fluency that no procedural animation of the era could match. The music was something you would have heard at a rave the previous weekend. The combination was immediately, viscerally impressive to anyone who saw it.

Every port of Bad Apple!! that has happened since — on the NES, Game Boy, oscilloscope, almost everything with a display — is a descendant of that same insight: that a human silhouette moving to music is one of the most immediately compelling things a computer can display, and that the raw resolution and colour count matter less than the fluency of the movement.

The Ant64 version is not a port. It is a sequel. The same creative DNA — human movement, rave music, bold visual aesthetic — applied to hardware that is a different class of device entirely. The figures are original AI-pipeline geometry. The music is original composition. No copyright dependencies.

It is called "State of the Art — Extended" because that is exactly what it is: the state of the art, extended by 33 years.

Creative Brief

Three figures. Three environments. One continuous piece of music that begins as a ProTracker MOD and evolves into a full synthesis arrangement. A structure that pays its respects to the original before demonstrating everything the original could not do.

Act 1 — The Homage (~45s)

A single figure against near-darkness, lit only by the visual equivalent of a UV light — a narrow bloom spectrum that catches edges and leaves the rest in shadow. The MOD track plays. Four channels. 125 BPM. The figure moves.

This section is deliberately close to the spirit of the original. Standard resolution. Limited colour range on the figure. The music constrained to its MOD playback form. Anyone who knows the 1992 demo will know where they are. The homage is sincere and technically faithful before anything else happens.

The figure is different — original geometry, original choreography. The music is different — original composition in the same rave tradition. But the feeling is the same: a human figure moving fluently to music that belongs to a specific moment in time, on hardware that was pushing its limits to display it.

Act 2 — The Expansion (~60s)

The second figure enters from the opposite side of the frame. Same style, different movement vocabulary — where the first figure is fluid and continuous, the second is percussive, punctuated, its movement events coinciding with drum hits.

The two figures interact. Not narratively — physically. When their vector outlines overlap, the clip regions combine: the overlap area becomes a window into a third environment not visible anywhere else on screen. The two figures create a shared space between them that neither occupies alone. The Copper manages three independent layer states simultaneously.

As the second figure enters, the MOD augmentation begins. The hoover sample on channel 3 gains the M-86 VA synthesis patch underneath it — the synthesised hoover playing beneath the sampled one, the two blending. A fifth voice enters the arrangement, then a sixth. The bass acquires a sub-octave. The music is growing without changing its structure.

The environments behind the figures begin differentiating. The first figure — still in near-darkness — gains the aurora effect above it, cold light sweeping from behind. The second figure is in the HAM24 nebula, warm colours visible through its silhouette. Where their outlines overlap, the combined clip region shows deep space — the starfield with full parallax depth and bloom. Three simultaneous environments, each exclusive to a spatial region, managed by the layer system and Copper in hardware.

Act 3 — Full Capability (~75s)

The third figure enters. This one is different in kind: where the first two were rendered as flat silhouettes with fill effects, the third figure is rendered with the full lighting pipeline. Its vector outline defines not just a clip region but a surface normal approximation — the EE computes a simplified 2D normal from the contour geometry per frame, and the blitter uses this to apply directional lighting. The figure has volume, not just shape. Shadows fall correctly across its internal geometry. The caustic light from the nebula environment lands on it with physically plausible falloff.

All three figures are now on screen simultaneously. The first in near-darkness with the aurora overhead. The second in the HAM24 nebula. The third lit volumetrically. Where any two outlines overlap, the environments behind them combine. Where all three overlap, all three environments are present simultaneously in a region the size of a few dozen pixels — a small window into everything the hardware can render at once.

The music has reached full arrangement: the original four MOD channels surrounded by 20+ synthesis voices, the full BBD chorus, the FDN reverb at hall size, the bass at full depth. The 303 engine fires a one-bar acid phrase on the drop. The jog dials on a live machine pulse with the beat via the Pulse connection.

The three figures begin a slow convergence toward the centre of the frame.

Finale (~20s)

The three figures merge — their vector outlines combining, overlapping, the EE blending the three control point sets simultaneously through a three-way tween. The combined shape is not three people. It is something in between, morphing continuously as the outlines resolve toward a single common path.

That path is the Ant64 logo.

Over 20 seconds the three figures become one shape becomes the logo. The music resolves on the final bar. The logo holds, clean, in the centre of a frame that still carries all three environments faintly behind it — a ghost of what was there. Then a cut to black.

Technical Showcase

Every major FireStorm capability is on display across the three acts:

Music

An original rave-tradition composition in four sections corresponding to the acts, plus the finale. Begins as a ProTracker MOD — four channels, 125 BPM, rave-era sample vocabulary: piano stab, hoover, kick, snare, hi-hat, bassline.

The MOD is authored specifically for this piece, not sourced from the Mod Archive. It is original and released CC0 alongside the other assets.

As the visual acts develop, the EE MOD player augments:

• Act 1: pure MOD, four channels, no augmentation
• Act 2 entry: hoover gains M-86 VA synthesis underneath; bass gains sub-octave
• Act 2 development: FM bell voices enter on the off-beat; string pad underneath
• Act 3: full synthesis arrangement, 20+ voices, BBD chorus, FDN reverb active
• Act 3 drop: 303 acid engine fires a one-bar phrase
• Finale: music resolves to a single sustained chord that holds through the morph

The composition is structured so that each augmentation step coincides with a visual threshold — the moment the second figure enters, the moment the environments differentiate, the moment the third figure's lighting model changes. Audio and visual evolution are synchronised at authoring time, not at runtime, so the relationship feels composed rather than coincidental.

Rare Variants

The demo is deterministic on each run but carries a small set of seeded variants accessible via specific conditions:

The Maze Variant — Act 3's third figure is replaced by the first-person DDA ray cast environment. The figure walks down the corridor toward the logo, which sits at the end of the tunnel. The other two figures' clip regions frame the corridor entrance. Triggered by running demo run stateoftheart --maze.

The 303 Extended — the acid phrase that fires at the Act 3 drop is extended to a full 16-bar pattern before resolving. The three figures hold position during the extended acid section. Triggered by a specific jog dial combination at demo launch.

The Silent Variant — the music is completely absent. The figures move in silence. The audio DSP is active but all voice volumes are zero. Unexpectedly moving. Triggered by running demo run stateoftheart --silent.

Public Domain Release Package

stateoftheart/
├─ vector/
│   ├─ figure_1_keyframes.bin   Act 1 and 3 figure — fluid movement
│   ├─ figure_2_keyframes.bin   Act 2 and 3 figure — percussive movement
│   ├─ figure_3_keyframes.bin   Act 3 figure — volumetrically lit
│   ├─ logo_path.bin            Ant64 logo as matching-count vector path
│   ├─ spans/                   precomputed scanline spans (all figures)
│   └─ README.md                path format, control point correspondence,
│                               three-way morph algorithm documentation
├─ audio/
│   ├─ stateoftheart.mod        original 4-channel MOD composition
│   ├─ augmentation.bin         per-instrument voice augmentation table
│   ├─ acid_phrase.bin          303 step sequence for the Act 3 drop
│   └─ patches/                 synthesis patch references (audio partition)
├─ code/
│   ├─ stateoftheart.ee         full EE bytecode, fully commented
│   ├─ tween.ee                 vector interpolation module (reusable)
│   ├─ tween3.ee                three-way vector morph module (reusable)
│   ├─ clip_dual.ee             dual-figure overlap clip management
│   ├─ normal_approx.ee         2D contour normal approximation
│   └─ mod_player.ee            EE MOD player module (reusable)
├─ pipeline/
│   ├─ PIPELINE.md              AI contour extraction and normalisation docs
│   ├─ source_reference/        reference animation footage (CC0)
│   └─ tools/                   conversion utilities, span cache generator
├─ TECHNICAL.md                 full technique documentation for porters
└─ LICENCE                      CC0 public domain dedication

The TECHNICAL.md companion document explains every technique used, what the original Spaceballs demo did and what the Ant64 version does differently, and what a porter targeting different hardware should expect to approximate. It is written for technically literate readers and does not soften the gaps.

Work 2 — "Silhouette"

The Bad Apple lineage piece. Original figure, original music.

A single figure rendered as a vector silhouette against environments that evolve across the piece — beginning as flat 1983-style silhouette-on-white and ending with the figure filled with a universe of effects, its final pose morphing directly into the Ant64 logo over 60 frames.

Running time: ~90 seconds.

The piece begins as four-voice POKEY-style synthesis with the figure as a flat opaque shape. Over the first 30 seconds the figure becomes a stencil — the starfield visible through it, parallax depth arriving, bloom on the stars, the HAM24 nebula replacing the black background. The figure's outline deforms subtly with bass frequency hits. A particle volume fills its interior.

Final section: the figure holds its last pose. The music builds to full arrangement. Then 60 frames of vector interpolation from the dancer's outline to the Ant64 logo. Every intermediate frame a valid filled contour carrying the full effects. The figure does not dissolve. It reshapes.

The music is an original composition in the POKEY tradition — melodic, warm — that begins constrained to four voices and grows to 20+ without the melody ever changing.

Full CC0 release package including the reusable tween.ee interpolation module.

Work 3 — "Copper"

The Amiga demo scene lineage piece.

A 120-second work that opens as a technically exact 1990 demo — rainbow bars, bobs, sine scroller, flat starfield — and evolves through the same hardware mechanism throughout: the Copper writing registers at scanline boundaries, with progressively more ambitious register targets.

The departure begins with a single shadow on one bob. Over 30 seconds the shadows spread, the bobs become spheres, the bars develop bloom, the scroller dissolves into particles. By the midpoint every element from the opening is still present — same positions, same timing — but rendered with 35 years of additional technique. The second half uses the Copper for effects the Amiga Copper could never drive: per-scanline volumetric density, HAM24 colour space switching mid-frame, aurora band sweeps with atmospheric falloff.

The music begins as an authentic ProTracker MOD and acquires synthesis voices as the visuals evolve. The four original channels remain audible underneath the full arrangement throughout.

The public domain release includes a companion document — From Bars to Volumetric: A Technical History of the Copper — that is itself worth reading independently of whether you own an Ant64.

Work 4 — "Weight"

An original work with no retro lineage.

A martial artist in the HAM24 underwater environment. Caustic light from above, correct and shifting. The figure lit in real time by frequency analysis from the audio DSP: bass frequencies drive warm low-side fill, high frequencies drive cool front fill. The figure is lit by its own music.

The granular engine and the figure's movement are in bidirectional feedback — the figure's velocity influences granular parameters in real time. Fast movement increases grain density and pitch scatter. Stillness returns the sound to a single pure tone. The audio is generating the visuals and the visuals are generating the audio.

Ends with just the Ant64 logo in silence at the centre of an empty frame. The restraint is part of the statement.

Running time: ~60 seconds.

Full CC0 release including the reference animation footage used for the AI pipeline (shot under CC0 specifically for this purpose), the granular patch, and the frequency-to-lighting mapping table.

Work 5 — "Heritage"

Contingent on permission from Gary Gilbertson.

Gary Gilbertson composed "Passionately" in 1983 for Phil Price's game The Tail of Beta Lyrae. It became arguably the most widely heard piece of music written for the Atari 8-bit computers. Atari used it without permission to anchor their main CES Chicago 1983 display; Gilbertson was characteristically generous about it. The piece belongs to the lineage the Ant64 comes from.

"Heritage" begins as close to authentic POKEY synthesis as the VA engine can reproduce — four voices, the specific waveforms, the envelope characteristics of the original hardware. Visually: GTIA-accurate colour palette, the resolution and specific character of that hardware's output, its limitations rendered with deliberate affection.

Then the same transformation the other pieces perform: the POKEY timbre acquires harmonics the original chip could not produce. The palette expands to HAM24's full colour depth. By the halfway point the arrangement of "Passionately" is playing at full FireStorm synthesis capability while the visual behind the title card has become whatever the Ant64 does at its most capable.

The piece does not try to outdo the original. It tries to show what the original would sound like if 1983 had access to 2026 hardware. The melody is Gilbertson's. The machine is new.

Contact: Gary Gilbertson is reachable through the Atari 8-bit community. Reference documentation: Demozoo entry and composer interview. If permission is granted, Gilbertson is credited on the original composition; the Ant64 arrangement is credited separately and released CC0. If permission is not granted, the other four works stand on their own.

Running time: ~90 seconds.

Ant64 Versions of Classic Megademos

Source Availability — What Has Been Released

Before designing Ant64 versions of classic works, the copyright and source availability situation for each landmark demo must be understood. The picture divides cleanly into one exceptional case and a set of works requiring direct contact.

Second Reality stands alone. Future Crew released the complete source code and data on the demo's 20th anniversary in 2013, explicitly placing it into the public domain using the Unlicense — the most permissive dedication available, expressly permitting commercial use. Every other landmark demo on the list is still under copyright and would require direct contact with the original creators before an Ant64 version could be released commercially.

The Demoscene Source Archive on GitHub collects released sources from various groups, and individual coders have published their personal archives, but none of the other landmark megademos appear there in releasable form.

Work 6 — "Second Reality — Ant64 Edition"

A full Ant64 version of the 1993 PC masterpiece by Future Crew. Fully legitimate — complete source and data released public domain by the original authors.

Why This Work Is Possible

Future Crew released Second Reality's complete source code and data on GitHub in 2013, dedicated to the public domain under the Unlicense. The dedication is explicit: anyone is free to copy, modify, use, sell, or distribute the software for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, by any means. This is not a grey area — it is the most permissive possible licence, chosen deliberately.

The Ant64 version builds on this foundation: the structure, sequencing, and creative ideas of the original are legitimate source material. New assets — audio using the FireStorm synthesis pipeline, visual effects rebuilt from scratch for the Ant64 hardware — are produced originally. The result is an Ant64 production that is both a homage and a technical statement in its own right.

The original source code on GitHub is the reference. The Ant64 edition ships its own CC0 release package alongside, contributing back to the same public domain pool.

What Second Reality Was

Second Reality debuted at Assembly 1993 and won the PC demo competition by a margin that ended debate about what personal computers could do. It was structured as 32 independent scenes — each a self-contained executable in the original — sequenced by a master loader. The scenes demonstrated:

• Real-time 3D polygon objects with shading
• Texture-mapped surfaces, mode 7-style floor planes
• Plasma and fire effects
• Voxel landscape flyover
• Moiré pattern generation
• Ray-traced still images used as transitions
• A city flythrough
• Vector ball choreography synchronised precisely to music
• A 3D object morphing sequence

The music — two tracks by Purple Motion and Skaven — was Gravis Ultrasound MOD format, and the synchronisation of visual events to musical events was unusually precise for the era. The whole thing ran on a 486 in real-time, which was incomprehensible to audiences used to pre-rendered animation.

The Ant64 Approach

The Ant64 version is not a port — porting DOS assembly to EE bytecode would produce an accurate emulation but not a showcase of what the Ant64 hardware specifically does. Instead, the structure and creative content of Second Reality is the starting point, and each scene is rebuilt to demonstrate the equivalent Ant64 capability at its actual ceiling rather than approximating what a 486 could do.

The scene-by-scene relationship:

The ray-traced stills are the most significant upgrade. In the original, photorealistic ray-traced images were pre-rendered and used as transition frames between scenes — the hardware could not do them in real time. The FireStorm SVO traversal engine and ray-triangle intersection hardware mean the Ant64 version can render comparable scenes live. The transition frames become interactive scenes. The viewer can observe them for as long as the sequencer allows, and they update in real time as the camera slowly sweeps.

Scene Structure

The Ant64 edition follows Second Reality's modular structure — each scene is an independent EE module, loaded and sequenced by the main demo runner. This matches the original architecture exactly (32 self-contained executables sequenced by a loader) while being natural for the EE's task-based execution model.

The scene count is reduced from 32 to approximately 20, with each scene longer and more developed than its original counterpart. Where Second Reality had brief showcases of individual effects, the Ant64 version gives each scene enough time for the effect to breathe and for the viewer to absorb the technical depth.

Scene outline:

01  Title / credits — bloom lines building the "Second Reality" title
    from particles, EE MOD player starting the first music track
02  3D object — textured polygon mesh, BSP hardware, 60fps
03  Floor plane — Mode 7 with per-scanline Copper matrix, starfield behind
04  Plasma — Copper 24-bit palette cycling, bloom making hot regions glow
05  Voxel landscape — hardware DDA height-field, 480-column parallel cast
06  Transition — live SVO ray-trace, camera sweep, replaces pre-rendered still
07  Fire — bloom particle system, 200+ particles additive, Tempest-preset glow
08  Vector balls → spheres — the old skool transition applied locally to this effect
09  City flythrough — BSP engine, textured spans, hardware sprites for objects
10  Moiré — Copper register manipulation creating interference patterns at 4K
11  Transition — second live SVO scene, different geometry
12  Music change — visual pause, the arrangement transitions from track 1 to track 2
13  3D morph — vector path tween between object shapes, 60fps continuous geometry
14  HAM24 photograph scene — demonstrating colour depth unavailable on 486
15  Underwater — HAM24 background, caustic overlay, figure silhouette if applicable
16  Parallax / depth — multi-layer starfield with full depth-of-field bloom
17  Tate mode — vertical arcade geometry, rotated CRT simulation
18  Aurora — full Copper band sweeps with atmospheric scattering
19  Second Reality closing sequence — logo build, bloom lines, homage text
20  Finale — EE-rendered Ant64 logo, music resolution, hold and fade

Scenes 6 and 11 (the live SVO ray-trace scenes) are the most technically ambitious and the clearest demonstration of the distance between 1993 PC hardware and the FireStorm FPGA. In the original, comparable imagery required hours of offline rendering. On the Ant64 it runs in real time.

Audio

The original Second Reality music by Purple Motion and Skaven is not part of the public domain release — the code and data were released but the music licensing is less clear. The Ant64 edition uses original music: two tracks composed in the same style and tradition as the originals, structured to fit the scene timing.

The tracks are authored as ProTracker MODs and played live by the EE MOD player with FireStorm synthesis augmentation — the same system used in State of the Art — Extended. The original's Gravis Ultrasound sample palette (piano stabs, pads, bass, percussion) is reproduced using the VA engine's sample playback voices with augmentation underneath. The arrangement grows as the demo progresses — later scenes play a fuller synthesis arrangement than early scenes.

If the original composers (Purple Motion and Skaven — both reachable through the current demoscene) are willing to permit use of the original tracks, the Ant64 edition would include an alternate audio option playing the original MODs directly. Both would be included in the CC0 release package where licensing permits.

The One Effect Second Reality Did That the Ant64 Does Differently

Second Reality's most famous individual moment is the 3D morphing object sequence — smooth real-time polygon mesh morphing between different 3D shapes. On a 486 in 1993 this was genuinely astonishing.

The Ant64's morphing system operates differently: rather than polygon meshes, it uses the same vector path tween system developed for the figure animation. The shapes are vector contour paths — outlines — that interpolate between each other as control point sets. The visual result is similar to the original's morphing objects but the mechanism is different: 2D contour morphing rather than 3D polygon mesh morphing. The Ant64 can do 3D polygon morphing via the blitter's textured triangle system, but the contour morph is more interesting in context because it connects the megademo showcase to the figure animation system, making the technical heritage of the tween module explicit.

Public Domain Release Package

secondreality_ant64/
├─ scenes/                      one subdirectory per scene
│   ├─ 01_title/
│   │   ├─ title.ee             EE bytecode, fully commented
│   │   └─ assets/              bloom line geometry, text data
│   ├─ 02_3d_object/
│   │   ├─ object.ee
│   │   └─ mesh.bin             polygon mesh data
│   ├─ 06_svo_raytrace/
│   │   ├─ raytrace.ee
│   │   └─ scene.bin            SVO tree data
│   └─ ...
├─ audio/
│   ├─ track1.mod               original composition, 4-channel ProTracker
│   ├─ track2.mod               second track
│   └─ augmentation.bin         per-instrument synthesis augmentation table
├─ sequencer/
│   ├─ main.ee                  top-level scene sequencer
│   └─ transitions.ee           inter-scene transition effects
├─ shared/
│   ├─ tween.ee                 vector interpolation (shared with other works)
│   ├─ mod_player.ee            EE MOD player (shared)
│   ├─ bsp.ee                   BSP scene management helpers
│   └─ bloom_particles.ee       particle system helpers
├─ ORIGINAL_SOURCE.md           link to Future Crew's public domain release
│                               and notes on what was used vs what is original
├─ TECHNICAL.md                 full technique documentation for porters
└─ LICENCE                      CC0 public domain dedication

The ORIGINAL_SOURCE.md is important: it explicitly documents which creative ideas and structural choices derive from the original Future Crew work and which are new. This is both honest attribution and useful context for anyone who wants to understand what the Ant64 edition adds.

Works Requiring Direct Contact

The following landmark demos have no public source release. An Ant64 version of any of them would require reaching the original creators before commercial release. The demoscene community has good memories and tends to respond warmly to serious, respectful approaches from new hardware projects — but permission must be sought, not assumed.

Hardwired — Crionics & The Silents (Amiga, 1991)

One of the most celebrated Amiga demos ever made. Released at The Party 1991, where it placed second behind Second Reality's predecessor. Known for its "box to logo" transformation sequence — a textured cube whose faces peel away and reshape into the Hardwired group logo — its vector object morph sections, and David Whittaker's soundtrack cover arrangement.

What an Ant64 version would do: The box-to-logo transformation is directly analogous to the Ant64's vector tween system — the textured cube faces are polygon geometry, the logo is another polygon arrangement, and the morph between them is a control-point interpolation. On the Ant64 it runs at 60fps with per-pixel lighting on every face throughout the transformation. The vector object sections gain the full BSP and DDA hardware acceleration.

Contact: The Spy (main coder) and other Crionics members have been active in the Amiga scene through to the present day. The Silents members similarly. Both groups are traceable through Demozoo and the active Amiga community.

Status: Contact required before any commercial release.

State of the Art — Spaceballs (Amiga, 1992)

The rotoscoped dancer demo that directly inspired the Ant64's own rotoscope system. Already extensively covered in this document as the creative lineage of Work 1.

Status: Contact required. See Work 1 notes.

Crystal Dream — Triton (PC, 1992)

A landmark early PC demo featuring vector object rendering and ray-traced art. Won first place at Hackerence 1992. Triton later became the game development studio Starbreeze.

What an Ant64 version would do: Crystal Dream's core achievement was bringing high-quality 3D rendering to the PC demo scene. The Ant64 version would do the same scenes using the FireStorm ray-triangle intersection hardware and SVO traversal engine — the ray-traced art that was static in the original becomes a live scene.

Contact: Triton / Starbreeze members are traceable. Given the studio is a commercial games company the licensing question is more complex than for a hobbyist group — legal advice recommended before approach.

Status: Contact required, possibly complex.

RSI Megademo — Red Sector Inc. (Amiga, 1989)

One of the first true megademos — a compilation of effects that established the vocabulary of Amiga demo scene aesthetics. Copper bars, scrollers, vector objects, music — the founding document of the form.

What an Ant64 version would do: This is the closest to the "old skool transition" concept already in the boot intro system. An Ant64 RSI Megademo would be an explicit period-accurate reconstruction of every effect, followed by its modern equivalent side by side, or as a transition. Educational and historical as much as technical.

Contact: RSI members are documented on Demozoo. Some have remained active in the Amiga scene.

Status: Contact required.

Kefrens Megademo VIII (Amiga, 1991)

Widely cited alongside Hardwired as one of the definitive Amiga megademos. Known for its unusual visual style, unconventional effects, and strong music.

Status: Contact required. Kefrens members traceable through the Amiga community.

A Note on Approach

Any contact with original demo authors should be framed correctly. These are not licensing negotiations — they are conversations between people who share a heritage. The Ant64 is a machine that takes the lineage of those works seriously enough to build specific hardware capabilities around the techniques they pioneered. That is a genuine compliment, and it is the right framing.

The ask is simple: permission to release an Ant64 version commercially and as CC0. The creators' names remain on the original attribution. The Ant64 version credits them explicitly. Their work gets extended and preserved on new hardware rather than becoming a historical footnote. Most people who spent months of their lives building something that still inspires new hardware designs thirty years later will find that a reasonable proposition.

Ant64 Doom

Doom is documented in Ant64 Open Source Games as the first and most detailed game entry.

The Doom section in Ant64 Open Source Games covers the full implementation: architecture, hardware mapping, display enhancements, particle and visual effects, audio system with OPL2 emulation and full synthesis options, multiplayer via Colony Connection, TPU enemy AI, jog dial controls, and WAD compatibility table. FreeDoom ships as the default playable content.

The Public Domain Strategy

Why CC0

Releasing these works as open data rather than simply open source has a specific benefit: the works become portable while the hardware remains the best way to experience them natively. Someone who ports "State of the Art — Extended" to a Raspberry Pi gets a reasonable approximation. Someone who runs it on an Ant64 gets the piece as it was designed — the HAM24 background at full 4K colour depth, the 128-voice audio DSP, the hardware DDA ray cast, the Copper driving per-scanline volumetric effects, the three-way vector morph at 60fps.

The port is advertising.

Every CC0 release ships with a TECHNICAL.md that is honest about what the originating hardware does that other platforms will approximate. Not marketing copy — a technical record. Written for people who will either understand it or be curious enough to find out. The display system, the blitter, and the audio system are documented on the Ant64 website in sufficient depth that a technically literate porter understands exactly what they are trading away.

The Attribution Loop

Ant64 creates original work → releases CC0 with full source
    │
    ├──→ Demo scene ports to other hardware
    │       Credits Ant64 as originating platform
    │       Exposes Ant64 capabilities to new audiences
    │
    ├──→ TECHNICAL.md companion docs circulate independently
    │       Establish Ant64 hardware reputation
    │       Read by people who will never see a port
    │
    ├──→ Community extends the works
    │       New arrangements of the music
    │       New figures using the same vector pipeline
    │       New Copper sequences using the same framework
    │
    └──→ Extensions reference the Ant64 source
            Attribution accumulates over time
            The machine's name becomes part of a lineage

The demo scene has always operated this way with hardware it respects. The Amiga lives on in emulators and new demos four decades later because the community decided the hardware was worth preserving. The C64 SID sound is reproduced on hardware that never existed in the 1980s because musicians decided the timbre was worth keeping. Original works released under CC0 give that process a head start.

The Ant64 becomes the machine that gave something to the scene. That distinction, once established, does not go away.

Storage

The demo works live in a dedicated region of the Ant64's FPGA flash, separate from the boot intro partition. They share the audio system's patch and sample library via the audio partition — no duplication of instrument data.

State of the Art — Extended:
  Vector data (3 figures + logo):               ~180 KB
  MOD file (original composition):              ~280 KB
  EE bytecode (fully commented):                 ~35 KB
  Augmentation + sequence tables:                ~5 KB
  ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Subtotal:                                     ~500 KB

Silhouette:
  Vector data + audio sequences:                 ~85 KB

Copper:
  MOD file + Copper sequence data:              ~320 KB

Weight:
  Vector data + granular sequences:              ~70 KB

Heritage (if included):
  Audio sequences:                               ~40 KB

Shared reusable modules (tween, MOD player etc): ~25 KB
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
TOTAL DEMO WORKS PARTITION:                    ~1,040 KB

Instrument sample data, synthesis patches, and wavetables are not charged to this budget — they live in the audio system's own partition, shared across all Ant64 applications.

Hardware References

• FireStorm FPGA — EE, blitter, DSP pipeline, Copper, layer compositor
• Display System — HAM24, CRT simulation, DDA ray cast units, Mode 7, native resolution system, Copper per-scanline register control
• Blitter — particle lists, bloom lines, SDF rendering, affine transforms, clip table system, texture source hierarchy
• Audio System — VA, FM, 303, granular engines; BBD chorus M-86 authentic; FDN reverb; environmental DSP presets; 128-voice pipeline
• DeMon — supervisor RP2350
• Pulse — audio/MIDI RP2350; jog dial RGB feedback during demo playback
• Mod Archive — reference library for ProTracker era and format
• Demozoo — Passionately — original 1984 release
• Gary Gilbertson interview — composer background and history of "Passionately"
• Spaceballs — State of the Art — the 1992 Amiga demo that this work pays homage to and extends
• Second Reality — Future Crew source code — the complete 1993 PC demo source and data, released public domain under the Unlicense
• Hardwired — Crionics & The Silents — pouet entry
• Demozoo — Demoscene Source Archive — collected released demoscene source code