kwoffon Hacker News • Recommends
On “A dive into the making of a 64K Intro”
I still play link to this video over and over, just for the song, not only because it is 256 bytes, but because it is a compelling song too.
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#commodore64#demoscene#sizecoding
A Mind Is Born (256 bytes)
lftkryo
51K subscribers • 4 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 8 people: 8 on Hacker News.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2017 to 2025.
- Presented by Linus Akesson
Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.
1.1M views9 years ago8 recommendations
Graphics and audioSystems programmingRetro computingPerformance and optimization
A complete audiovisual demoscene production for the Commodore 64 that fits entirely within 256 bytes of machine code.
A tiny demo for the Commodore 64. 1st place in the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at Revision 2017. (Yep, what you hear and see is generated by a program that is no larger than 256 bytes.) Support my work: patreon.com/linusakesson Kudos to Lemming for the video capture! For an in-depth technical explanation, please head over to: linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/ Creative commons: BY-NC-SA 4.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/Why it's here
8 people recommend thisWhat people say. Highly celebrated in the demoscene community as an astonishing feat of extreme size coding and procedural music generation.
twicon Hacker News • Recommends
On “A Mysterious Song on the Internet (2019)”
There's an amazing demo called 'A Mind Is Born': link to this video Amazing principally because the whole thing is 256 bytes: link I never meet anyone who has even heard of the demoscene, let alone come seen this particular work. I was at a film festival watching a programme of short films, one of which was the well-made AI-box escape romp 'Watch Room': link And similarly found my interface with my seat disrupted by the closing credits using the music from 'A Mind Is Born'. This being a festival, the director was there, so i could tell him how much i appreciated the reference!
wgxon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020”
Not MS-DOS, but my favourite 256 byte demo is for the C64: "A Mind Is Born", check it out: link to this video that music is astonishing.
TacticalCoderon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Before the iPhone, I worked on a few games for what were called "feature phones"”
> 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). link to this video
TacticalCoderon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Platform Hopping”
…k" 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: link to this video…
baneon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Procedurally generated electronic music”
Here's a winning demoscene production, 256 bytes, on a Commodore 64. link to this video Technical discussion here: link
anitilon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Sonic 3D: Director's Cut (2019)”
I really like 'A Mind is Born' - link to this video The summary of it's development could be summarised with "It's LFSRs all the way down"
voiceblueon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Game of Life, simulating itself, infinitely zoomable”
You might enjoy watching the emergent behavior in the execution of this 256 byte program - a mind is born 0. 0 link to this video
yetiheheon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world”
For a demonstration of Kolmogorov complexity, it's good to watch "A mind is born"0 by lftkryo. It's only 256 bytes, but can generate over 2 minutes of complex music and video. Also, the name is appropriate for this topic :D 0 link to this video
yetiheheon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Mathematical Simplicity May Drive Evolution's Speed”
…that 256 bytes is still not enough to replicate behaviour, it must be run on hardware, which is like "environment" for DNA. Without several supporting chips which are easy to access, that code would mean nothing and would not generate such complexity. Moreover, those "patterns" in demo are patterns only because WE interpret them as meaningful. 1 link to this video…
tiborsaason Hacker News • Mentions
On “Apple M1 Assembly Language Hello World”
Besides understanding better what your language of choice is doing under the hood (vaguely) you can write cool demos like this: link to this video
verytrivialon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Dialog – domain-specific language for interactive fiction”
I am fascinated by these IF engines for some reason. What sets the Dialog apart is, IMHO, the performance it gets on 6502 in combination with the Å-machine VM by the same author. It's a domain specific language + optimized compiler + runtime for a platform (C64) that hasn't been made for decades. There are some excellent Z-machine impls for C64, but basically anything using the Inform7 runtime (a bunch of convenience parsing and world tricks) runs like a dog. Dialog + Å-machines gets a respectable and growing amount of the way there but cutting out the middle man. Linus has some extreme coding cred in my book! link link to this video
yetiheheon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Algorithmic symphonies from one line of code (2011)”
From article: > This would make it possible, for example, for a 256-byte demoscene production to have an interesting and varying audiovisual structure with a strong, inherent synchronization between the effects and the music. 6 years later: link to this video
yuchion Hacker News • Mentions
On “Monti on the ‘Bin – By Iftkryo”
Execution of Minto’s Csárdás on a breadbin Commodore 64 by Linus Ákesson of “A Mind Is Born”0 C64 Demo fame. 0: link to this video
pflanzeon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in the Browser”
> and it is extremely complex and does much more Who's to say? The interesting bit in this discussion is why the code size is large, and looking in detail what the programs do would be a start. Of course, one could suppose that using a high-level language makes it easier to write code, hence, more code is going to be written. Or you or I could really conclude anything we want, if we're willing to pretend to know. It would be interesting to know, but that takes work to find out. And I'm a lazy bastard. PS. not to argue any more :), but I have checked the size of rsync 3.2.3 now, it's 51 Kloc of C code (including the 6300 loc of the included copy of zlib). You'd need to add a cryptographic lib…
TacticalCoderon Hacker News • Mentions
On “An Afterlife User's Guide to the C64”
During the first covid lockdown, I was by "chance" stuck in the home I grew up in. And I did found my old C128 in attic (which I was only ever using in C64 mode, except to copy disks). It's a time capsule C128 that hasn't been "polluted" by anything made in the last 33 years so (I switched to the Amiga in 1989 or so). So one day I plan to manually input the 256 bytes making this insane C64 demo (posted here on HN already), keeping my time capsule C128 intact: link to this video