Emulation Camp - Reviews - Second Reality

The Introduction Scrolling

The Party 97 was held in Denmark between Christmas and the New Year. As you know, it's the greatest demo party in the world. There is a lot of competitions for several machines: PC, Amiga and... C64! Huhu! That interests us, doesn't it? The demo-scene was born with this machine and the crackers :) Since those days (15 years ago!) the demo spirit on C64 has evolved alot. There isn't any new game to crack, there is only the technicnal barrier to break! How to show colorful screens on this old Commodore? How to get some great music, not only a chip tune? Yet, only a few groups are still coding on C64.

The C64 demo which won the TP97 competitions is called "Second Reality" from "Smash Design". Hmm.. I've already heard this name somewhere. Yeah! It was an 'old' PC demo from Future Crew (the mythic group) that was called Second Reality, and Smash design has... recoded this demo on a C64!

When you type 'run'.. a PC is booting up, just as it was an Award BIOS! But the BIOS only counts 64 kilobytes of RAM and detects a 6502 at 0.987 Mhz. After the displaying the table of the characteristics of your machine (HD: Virtual!), you're asked if you want to run the demo immediatly or if you want to launch the SDS mode... If you do so, you're in front of a black screen with 'C:\>' written... DOS? Yes! The 'dir' and 'cd' commands are working! So you can start the 4 kilobyte intro included on the disk, read the informations for the Mekka 98 demo party (displayed with a C64 version of edit.exe) or launch second.exe. Take note that all files in the C:\DEMOS\2NDREAL directory have the same size as in the PC version of Second Reality :)

Now your C64 takes more time to boot than my PC !

Where's my 4 GB hard disk ?

Ah! DOS rules ! :-)

You've just launched Second.Exe. The same menu as PC is displayed except that you have to choose SID instead of GUS 512 kb for sound :) You press enter and... wow! The Graphics aren't 256 colour VGA but that is just like in the PC version! The music (in all the demo) is very good and the S3M version isn't much more detailed. There is digitized voice (the 'get down', etc...) and the source musics were very good.. so even adapted (but what an adaptation) to the SID chip (three voices) that is GREAT MUSIC!

The translucent 3D objects..

..amazing!

But back to the effects... while hearing the music you see... a scrolling (not very amazing) 3D star chip followed by zoomed sprite TIE-fighters. Then there is a big explosion. Very impressive on a C64! After that and a nice graphics effect (256 coulors would be better) you enter the 3D glenz objects part! They are deforming! All the effects are the same as in the Future Crew demo, just bigger pixels and fewer colours, but the same effects! And about the 3D city: I'm wondering how they manage to get so many 3d faces on screen! That's impressive!

Realtime!

The only cons I see to this C64 demo is the creativity... where is it? They just ripped a PC demo! Yes, but can you do so? That's quite a hard challenge. Just think that new machines are better to express creativity and that oldies like C64 are very good for coders to fight with the hardware limits. So demo making on the C64 isn't a problem of creativity but of wonderful code... and what wonderful code Second Reality! Future Crew must be proud of Smash Design...

The cube is mapped with plasmas! Whoo!

Rotating faces.

A nice effect.

Since Second Reality is a free demo (it was released on Christmas 1997), you are allowed to download the ROM images even if you don't have an original, because there is NO original :-)