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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure how he made this but my first idea would be to build all this as GIFs or render it into images/frames, then create a tool to generate Apple II compatible code to render arbitrary images in sequence.

I’m guessing sitting down and manually writing a bunch of Applesoft BASIC wasn’t the solution.

I still have an Apple IIc. Love it!

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Well, the page briefly explains each effect. Many are indeed just a couple prerendered frames page flipped in a loop.

As a general rule, old hardware (prior to the late 1990s or so) doesn't have nearly enough memory bandwidth to render full-screen video to the framebuffer at max frame rates. Some combination of partial updates, interlacing (i.e. staggered updates across multiple frames), lower-res/color depth/tiled graphics and hardware-specific tricks is essentially unavoidable if you want smooth video. You can see this very clearly in the plasma effect where they only render every other line.

you might find it a challenge to render arbitrary images in sequence at an acceptable resolution and framerate. 1Mhz is not a lot of hertz.

some more of the effects (or better attempts at them) should be possible. The tunnel, the bouncing dots, the bounce effect with the polar bear image. A lot got thrown together at the extreme last minute to hit the Demosplash deadline.

http://www.oldskool.org/pc/8088_Corruption

The C64 is also 1MHz. The real problem is, the Apple II has nothing. It's a CPU and a ROM, basically, as described in other comments here.

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