Didn't intend to be dismissive. I think they're awesome. It just seems incorrect to conflate one of these 64k demos with one that runs on, say, a Commodore 64. Context is needed. There's a lot more code actually running.
On the other hand, the C64 had standard hardware without a need for abstraction layers, and the hardware was trivial to use from assembly - just put numbers into various memory addresses. Plus the HW natively supported things like sprites and sound synthesis.
I guess one of the most difficult platforms for demo programming (in terms of having to write things from scratch) was PC in the DOS/Win16 era. You could get into 320x200x8bit graphics mode quite easily (the so called Mode 13h) but beyond that you were on your own.
Yeah, that's true. Still remember the hardware register on the Atari ST $ff8240.
Best think about standard hardware was that, if somebody wrote something faster/better than you did then their code was demonstrably better - you couldn't blame it on drivers or anything else.
I had this situation with somebody called Darek Mihocka who wrote an accelerated text function for the ST. I beat his code, he then came up with something nearly twice as fast as mine! I went crazy wondering how he did it until the 'move.p' instruction came to me, I shit you not, whilst I was asleep.
Good times, and a great way to learn how to code and more importantly what really happens on the machine underlying it.
Quite true. I personally don't have a problem that PC 64k intros today will leverage the GPU as much as possible, with all the help from the driver code that that implies. It's how they stay current and awesome. Of course anyone writing a 64k intro with no help at all from the GPU except perhaps context creation and teardown is just giving themselves more creative limitations that I would respect.
It's unclear what exactly you're agreeing is "true". If you're agreeing with the "incorrect to conflate", then it is true that it would be incorrect, but not true that this needs to be pointed out.
With only a little bit of investigation, or even participation, it quickly becomes entirely clear that compos divide entries by hardware, and people in the demoscene don't ask oldschool 64ks to measure up to PC 64ks.