Breaking Baud

[tastefulmrship]

Sadly Breaking Baud is nice but clearly not a Batman killer...

Sorry, I must have missed that part... where does it say that BREAKING BAUD was ever meant as a BATMAN killer?

On that note, though, I think I've watached BREAKING BAUD more times than BATMAN FOREVER; so in terms of pesonal watched-times, I guess it's beaten it.

[TotO]

I think I've watached BREAKING BAUD more times than BATMAN FOREVER; so in terms of pesonal watched-times, I guess it's beaten it.

Sure, with a 464... 

[ralferoo]

Sadly Breaking Baud is nice but clearly not a Batman killer...

Why does everything have to be compared to Batman Forever? For starters, even if a more technically accomplished demo is released, nothing can ever really "kill" it. It will always be the demo that made people on other platforms recognise the potential of the CPC.


Sure, I could have spent 3 years working in secret on an epic demo, and some people do and fair play to them. But I know that personally, I'd get bored of that and probably move on to something else before it was finished. For me, releasing more frequent smaller demos is much more satisfying.


In any case, with the 8 minute time limit at Revision, the demo was already very close to the maximum length, so it couldn't have been much longer even if I'd wanted it to be...

[mr_lou]

I just watched the live video. (4 pages of CPCwiki forum discussion behind I see... I need to turn down the real-life stuff and visit here more often).

I'm very impressed! Absolutely awesome! Very impressive demo and simply brilliant music! McKlain you rule! I want the music from that demo! Gimme!
Or better yet: Make a music-disk soon. 
Everytime I've listened to one of your CPC tunes, I've always felt you've created somewhat of a new sound for the CPC, and it's just awesome.

Awesome pictures in the demo too. I especially liked the rose where water drops appeared. Art when it's the awesomenest. 

Really great work Doz!!!


(How about changing your nick in here to Doz, since that is the nick you're using?)


EDIT: Oh, and thanks for the greeting! 

[MacDeath]

Both demos (Br Ba and Batman) are on opposite spectrum of the CPC range...

one rely heavily on the Disk + 128K RAM, the other on Tape + 64K...

I know we can't kill the batman and don't need to... this goddamn batman had so much preptime he's now beyound god-tier level.

Also know Br-Ba wasn't supposed to be that sort of demo...

Also I wasn't implying anything with this remark so no need to focus on it, lol...

[TMR]

can't argue the fact the Atari2600 managed a huge thing despite its hardware... still a bit curious... what physical support did they use...
Weren't cartridges greatly limited on those ?

Not really, the only thing that stopped people going mental was cost - Atari's own commercial cartridge at the start of the 2600's life were 2K or 4K but it didn't take long for the bank switching schemes to start appearing.

Why does everything have to be compared to Batman Forever? For starters, even if a more technically accomplished demo is released, nothing can ever really "kill" it. It will always be the demo that made people on other platforms recognise the potential of the CPC.

Batman Forever has become a benchmark so even if it wasn't your intention to take it on there will always be people who hold new releases up against it for comparison now, both inside and outside the CPC community. And ultimately the CPC demo scene really wants something to come along and take that crown because it means someone else has thrown a metric bucketload of work into going toe to toe with the current monarch. But in the meantime there's loads of room for smaller, more "quirky" (for want of a better word) releases and that should be embraced and encouraged too, stuff like Breaking Baud or Safe VSP on the C64 that prod around an interesting feature to see what can be done with it.

TL;DR version: people will always compare so don't worry, have fun making it and then release and be damned. =-)

[Gryzor]

TL;DR version: people will always compare so don't worry, have fun making it and then release and be damned. =-)

Amen to that.

[MaV]

Jesus, people! Comparing every little demo to Batman Forever is turning out to be equal to the second coming of Christ. 

Right now, Vanity and Rhino are competing for the best (full) demo only.

I don't think anybody besides them is even willing to be compared to Batman Forever. Also, Overlander and ralferoo have voiced their preference for smaller demos, and the rest of our community is probably also too occupied with real life to consider a multiple years project.

@TMR: Has there ever been a similar situation in the C64 community?

[BSC]

Right now, Vanity and Rhino are competing for the best (full) demo only.

I think you forgot BSCDEMO4! How come peoples always seem to misconstrue it's monumentality? 

On a more serious side note: I think that "KKB First" was one of the most impressive and ground breaking demos of its time (IIRC it was done in 1989) and was unreasonably neglected in the media coverage of things CPC.

[Overflow]

Right now, Vanity and Rhino are competing for the best (full) demo only.
I don't think anybody besides them is even willing to be compared to Batman Forever. Also, Overlander and ralferoo have voiced their preference for smaller démos (...)

You meant Overflow and not Overlander?
It would be so nice if you had got some secret news about a possible Overlander comeback, Madram working (with Shap) in his cave to release a massive demo.
I also miss some simple but cute demos for Christmas. But I should not:
do what you want (and not what people expect you to do), feel free (to release or not), don't mind (negative comments).
Oops! sorry to write down my opinion.

On a more serious side note: I think that "KKB First" was one of the most impressive and ground breaking demos of its time (IIRC it was done in 1989) and was unreasonably neglected in the media coverage of things CPC.

[Off topic] I agree.

[MaV]

You meant Overflow and not Overlander?
It would be so nice if you had got some secret news about a possible Overlander comeback, Madram working (with Shap) in his cave to release a massive demo.

Sorry! Overflow, of course! 
_{No, I have no news about that. I guess it was also wishful thinking that made me write the wrong name. Sorry again for that.}

[Carnivius]

[Hicks]

You meant Overflow and not Overlander?
It would be so nice if you had got some secret news about a possible Overlander comeback, Madram working (with Shap) in his cave to release a massive demo.

Overlanders (especially Madram) currently work on a new assembler for CPC (Orgams) which is very promising. Another little production is planed (maybe with Shap), but it does not seems to be a demo. But no informations about a massive demo. Madram seems to be the last active member of the group and seems to be much more interested in tools development (assembler, cruncher, player, etc.)... Shame, the battle would have been hard and interesting

[Bryce]

If it's an assembler shouldn't it be called Orgasm?

Bryce.

[MacDeath]

Well, for an AMStrad both are accurate...

[tastefulmrship]

If it's an assembler shouldn't it be called Orgasm?

Wow! That must be a VERY intense assembler! ^_^

[redbox]

If it's an assembler shouldn't it be called Orgasm?

I would agree if I hadn't spend the last week writing a tilemap routine in Z80.

Therefore, the nearest approximation for a name I would suggest is "Married".

[TMR]

@TMR: Has there ever been a similar situation in the C64 community?

Yes, on a few occasions; ever since the C64 scene switched from lots of small demos to the larger production numbers around the end of the 1980s there's always been a 500 pound gorilla looming over subsequent releases; one of the first that springs to mind is Dutch Breeze by Black Mail in 1991 (although there were big demos before it the sheer level of presentation was unique at the time) and Booze's X'2008 entry Edge Of Disgrace is still probably the current top dog with the recent comebacks from Censor Design and Oxyron nipping at it's heels.

It doesn't usually stop the smaller productions coming out, but i do remember some fairly fallow periods around the late 1990s where coders were less inclined to release something that wasn't at least fairly substantial.

[ZbyniuR]

Any chance to DSK version of Breaking Baud ?

[McKlain]

Any chance to DSK version of Breaking Baud ?

That's a good one 

[tastefulmrship]

Any chance to DSK version of Breaking Baud ?

Now that's a challenge! Tape streaming from a disc!
That could result in some pretty spectacular demos!

[Gryzor]

Better yet... a 464 emulator for the 6128!

[CraigsBar]

Better yet... a 464 emulator for the 6128!

Surely that already exists. It's a hardware emulator in the form of a set of audio leads and a cheap and nasty mono voice recorder.

[Sykobee (Briggsy)]

Any chance to DSK version of Breaking Baud ?

Haha! But seriously, I think the issue here is that the tape demo works because the bit rate of loading from tape is so low that you have spare CPU power to implement a LZ77 decompressor and audio player. I don't think there is much spare CPU time when loading from disc, even with a custom trackloader, to do realtime LZ77 decompression that doesn't actually mean you're loading from disc slower than normal to allow the CPU time to do its thing.


But it wouldn't be useless - I don't know how well graphics compress with LZ77, but you can fit a lot more graphics and game levels on a disc with compression than not, which is really useful.

[ralferoo]

But seriously, I think the issue here is that the tape demo works because the bit rate of loading from tape is so low that you have spare CPU power to implement a LZ77 decompressor and audio player. I don't think there is much spare CPU time when loading from disc, even with a custom trackloader, to do realtime LZ77 decompression that doesn't actually mean you're loading from disc slower than normal to allow the CPU time to do its thing.

That's somewhat true, but it's not totally accurate. There isn't really a lot of CPU idle time when reading from the tape - I sample the tape every 31us and the code to do that is 12us long, which if you compare to a disk is quite similar (with a disk you might need about 16us every 32us), and in fact people have interleaved the disk IO code with other operations already.

Actually, in the tape system, the 12us is just to sample to tape data if there are no pulses. Whenever there is a pulse, the CPU is fully busy for maybe another 100us.

With a disk system, there's some dead time between sectors when the CPU is idle even if you interleave your sectors on the disk to try to minimise it, and so it's probably just as easy to do realtime decompression from disk. Also, whenever you step the disk head, there's a reasonably long period when you won't get any data.

But, one of the real reasons why the compression works well on tape is because it's almost "free". With a normal compression system, you might have a single bit that tells you if the next byte is a literal byte or decompressed, so straight away your compressed data is 12% bigger in the worst case and you hope to make back that loss through good compression results on the rest of the data. With my tape loader, the coded stream coming from the tape produces slightly higher than 8-bit (it ranges 0-276) and so there's nothing added to literals and there are 21 control sequences to indicate the next bytes form part of a compressed sequence.

There's a technical write up and source code here: https://github.com/ralferoo/breaking-baud/blob/master/docs/technical.txt (which hasn't been particularly well proofread yet and might contain some mistakes!)