This was damn cool. Watching and listening to it I wonder what is the hardest. Producing video with a sound chip or producing audio with a video chip. Fun stuff.
After reading the article it's clear that the former is much more difficult, because video needs much higher bandwidths than the sound chips are designed to produce, and the hardware even contains extra hurdles like a bandpass that filters out higher frequencies even if you manage to hack the chip into producing them.
That's why the video basically happens in only one dimension instead of two.
I like good pixel dithering. The C64 demo scene has become really good at it. Just look at the girl picture in the frozen start pic. That shows really good taste in picking colors from the weird palette too.
Either Rasmus Ledorf or Bjarne Stroustrup. Arguably, another Danish programmer contributed to the history of Pascal: Peter Naur (and also Jørn Jensen, but he was more into implementing ALGOL 60 compilers).
Honorable mention to DHH, although he didn't create a programming language. And also to Lars Bak for being the lead developer on V8.
Here's Jochen Hippel's(Mad Max in the Atari ST demoscene) use of the AY's on the Guryss hardware(x3 AY). It's a quite lovely tune. They use timers to make "buzzers" and "SID-sound".
Years ago I had iPhone 3GS and iPhone 5. I remember being amazed how fast I could type on it. Today I simply write "I'll write a better answer on the computer later".
I've heard Intel does use TLA+ extensively for specifying their designs and verifying their specs. But TLA+ specs are extremely high-level, so they don't capture implementation details that can lead to bugs. And model checking isn't a formal proof, only (tractably small) finite state spaces can be checked with TLC. And even there, you're only checking the invariants you specified.
That said, I'm sure there's some verification framework like SPARK for VHDL, and this feels like exactly the kind of thing it should catch.
Formal methods have been used in CPU design for nearly 40 years [1] but not yet for everything, and the methods tend to not have "round-trip-engineering" properties (e.g. TLA+ is not actually proving validity of the code you will run in production, just your description of its behavior and your idea of exhaustive test cases).
Here's a 60fps video of the same demo. The demo-sceners work really hard to make everything 60fps(1 vbl), so watching it in any other frame-rate feels wrong.
Nitpicky: for a lot of parts that would have actually been 70Hz (from the 320x200 VGA mode 13h), and having run the demo back in 1993 it definitely was not as smooth as in the video above on my 486/66MHz (and the Pentium had only been out for a few months at the time).
