Re: Games written to be speedy and fluid, like demoscene demos appear to be?

* J.B. Nicholson <[email protected]>:
> Are there any C64 games that really take advantage of the C64 hardware
> as well as demos do?

One impressive work that comes to mind is Sam's Journey:
<https://www.protovision.games/games/sams_journey.php?language=en>

>                                                 But there are C64
> demos which scale, shear, and rotate graphics impressively quickly.
> So I wondered if there are games that play as fluidly or come closer
> to what the arcade games could do because these games do a better job
> of using the C64 hardware akin to what a C64 demoscene demo does?

It's true that many old games didn't push the C64's hardware to its
limits. But you shouldn't compare the results directly to demos, cause
there are two key differences:

- Interactivity. Demos have close to none, so the code can be optimized
  to exactly the desired output.
- RAM usage: A demo part can typically use most of the available RAM at
  once, no need to keep things like maps, game state, controlling logic
  etc, you only need a tiny bit of resident code that will load the next
  part.

This means no game can apply some of the tricks that are typical in
demos, like huge amounts of "speed-code" (to avoid costly branches and
jumps in looping constructs), pre-calculated data for movements (as they
can't be foreseen in a game), several tricks with the VIC that only make
sense if you know exactly in advance what should be displayed, and so
on.

-- 
 Dipl.-Inform. Felix Palmen  <[email protected]>   ,.//..........
 {web}  http://palmen-it.de  {jabber} [see email]   ,//palmen-it.de
 {pgp public key}     http://palmen-it.de/pub.txt   //   """""""""""
 {pgp fingerprint} A891 3D55 5F2E 3A74 3965 B997 3EF2 8B0A BC02 DA2A