I had a 386/40DX that could run Second Reality, and I was blown away. When I upgraded to a 486/66DX2 the first thing I did was run Second Reality, and I was shocked at how much of the demo content I had missed before from parts being truncated.

Also it’s worth noting that a lot of Second Reality’s source code got released to GitHub several years back: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality and here’s an incredibly deep dive into the code: https://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/

Finally, here’s some rare footage of the creation of the legendary demo: https://youtu.be/LIIBRr31DIU (English subtitles available)

That one blew me away. Another one I remember fondly is Dope by Complex[1], from 1995.

My computer at the time could barely play the the soundtrack itself in the tracker, it had so many active channels. The demo itself was a slideshow. Fortunately my friend had a 486/DX4 100MHz, so I got to watch it there.

To put this in perspective, there's no graphical acceleration involved here at all, everything pixel to be done on the CPU. And the microcontroller in the coffee maker at work is about as fast[2] as my friends 486[3].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtXxM0pezAs

[2]: https://blog.stratifylabs.co/device/2019-05-20-Dhrystone-Ben...

[3]: http://www.netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.data.col0.h...

And once you've finished that, go to Real Reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1f6UE27KTo Second Reality without a computer :)

And then you check out Second Reality 64 by Smash Designs https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1216

Yes, it's Second Reality on the Commodore 64 <3