Cutting-edge retro

In 1988, I was in Year 11 and less interested in studying for the HSC or celebrating the Oz bicentenary than upgrading my Commodore 64 to an Amiga 500. By selling the former via classified ad for $700 (I had oodles of games and accessories) and scraping together another $149*, I graduated to what appeared a supermachine, with a windows-based, mouse-driven interface (don’t even joke about GEOS), 512K of memory and an 8MHz processor.

The 16-bit games looked and sounded fantastic, though they tended to lack the balance and replayability of the top 8-bit titles. Nevertheless, I got my money's worth from the A500. I spent hundreds of hours processing words (essays, letters, an ill-fated fanzine, RPG material, reams of teen-angst poetry long since binned), bought a proper monitor and memory expansion and external drive, faffed about with the simpler utilities, discovered bulletin boards, MUDed remotely...and didn't for a nanosecond feel the same connection as I had with my C64.

Even now, I associate more fond memories with the beige box than all other consoles/computers I've owned combined - and we're talking early handhelds, Atari 2600, Amiga 500, Sega Master System, NES, Game Boy, SNES, Lynx, Sega Saturn, PSX, GameCube, Amstrad 6128, Xbox, DS and various PCs.

Which is why I was so chuffed when PG latterly snailed me a DVD with recordings of Commodore 64 demos from the late 90s up to 2003! For those blissfully ignorant of the demo scene, such programs aren't games or utilities; as the name suggests, they're demonstrations of a machine's technical capabilities.

In the mid-80s, this translated to a pretty fantasy/sci-fi picture, Jean Michel Jarre-inspired melody (or blatant rip-off), animated heading (the name of the crew) and scrolling message (hellos to their mates). Sometimes you'd get multiple piccies or a choice of choons or a bit of primitive 3D animation (bouncing balls were popular), but generally that was it. And we loved it.

The demos on PG's disc are - to this self-styled C64 expert - beyond believing. Multicoloured epics of plasma effects (!), licking flames, liquid flows, Mandelbrot Set-type patterns, unfamiliar fades and wipes, real-time light sourcing (!), high-res animation, 2D artworks surpassing any title screen from back in the day, 3D that's rungs up the evolutionary ladder, morphing (!), scrollies with a sense of po-mo irony, extended samples, and the SID chip singing its heart out.

There are anti-war messages, jiggling anime girls, full-screen faux dance clips fusing slogans and icons. For Tramiel's sake, one demo even recreates the entire opening credits to the film "[Pi]"!

How mistaken I'd been to think the Commodore 64 was dead in 1988.


*With help from what my erstwhile colleague RB calls "M & D Finance".