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A Mind Is Born (256 bytes)

lftkryo · 1.2M views · 2017-04-19 · 2:22

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Overview

A Commodore 64 demo by Linus Akesson that fits video and music into 256 bytes, winning the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at Revision 2017. A technical write-up accompanies it.

On Hacker News

It is HN's favorite example of extreme code compression, a compelling song and visuals from a program smaller than a tweet.

Recommended by 8 HN people across 9 months · HN mentions 2017–2025

Topics

Demoscene & retrocomputing
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demoscenecommodore 64256 byteschiptunelinus akesson

What people said

TacticalCoder · 2023-06 · Strong recommendation

By now when I see "linusakesson.net" I upvote without reading, then I read TFA and watch the vid (or listen to the music in this case). I'm never disappointed. Speaking of which I plan to do something really cool: I've got a "time capsule" C64 (well C128 but close enough) and it still works. It's never been "polluted" by anything modern: no "gotek" SD reader, no nothing: just a real time capsule from the early to mid eighties. And I plan to encode, manually, the 256 bytes (yes, bytes) of linusakesson's "A mind is born" C64 demo. I'll then run it (with the C128 hooked to an old CRT, of course), thinking that technically I could have encoded and ran that in the eighties. Mind blowing stuff: [VIDEO]

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TacticalCoder · 2021-05 · Strong recommendation

> fwiw, this made me spend a few minutes in youtube looking at old c64 and apple and Atari demos. what people ended up doing with those devices - years after they were mainstream - is still crazy to me. The craziest ever, to me, is the following in 256... bytes. Bytes (including the music ofc, which is the whole point). [VIDEO]

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wgx · 2020-04 · Strong recommendation

Not MS-DOS, but my favourite 256 byte demo is for the C64: "A Mind Is Born", check it out: [VIDEO] that music is astonishing.

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Sources

Video by lftkryo, played through YouTube.

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