alt Hacker NewsI don't really understand how or why Bad Apple is becoming the de-facto graphics rendering "hello world" but it's fun to see in real time. I came across this demo which uses Bad Apple for demonstrating high FPS hypermedia:
Replies
The DOOM standard is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/1c0g0mi/i_made_doom_i...
built on a fully programmable cpu in redstone
IRIS Computer Specs:
- Custom 16 bit CPU
- 8 kB of RAM
- 64 kB of ROM
- 1 kB texture ROM
- 96x64 pixel screen - 16 colours
- Floating point unit (add sub mult div sqrt)
- 173 redstone tick clock
- No 3D graphics hardware acceleration (entirely done in software)
- Runs programs written in URCL
- Runs at 1 million ticks per second thanks to MCHPRS server - which is 5.8 kHz clock speed
One of less often mentioned characteristic trait of Touhou songs including original Bad Apple!![1] is that, at least to me, it more resembles a data bus status display than music; it makes a lot more sense to imagine it as listening to even bits of a 16-bit bus tied to instruments as MS-DOS boots, than music with regular tempo and musical measures. That's to be expected as these songs were created for hardcore PC-88/PC-98 shooter games by the developer of Touhou games all by himself without formal education in musical theory. I think that makes it rather familiar to embedded hardware engineers than most other music.
Another factor is nicovideo.jp / nico-tech community developed from 2ch/futaba culture. Lots of users with way more domain expertise than pay or financial ambitions threw in their skills into remixes for fun(many were STEM students back then). Unidentified FPGA wizards, motor driver experts, video editors, would just come by and drop psychedelic videos. It was absurd. So absurd that Maker Faire Tokyo once put suspected nico-tech dress-shirts into a quarantine zone in a separate venue to save face for ambitious t-shirt webdevs(that was naughty, and lead to creation of nico-tech meetups, and also was never repeated). That absurd content quality-quantity density sure had created inertia for Bad Apple!! PVs.
Undoubtedly one last key element was that the PV was monochromatic(okay, grayscale). That's probably why it wasn't one of other ones from the golden age of nicovideo.jp.
That the video is entirely monochrome while also extremely fluid and intricate makes for an interesting duality when applying it to a technical problem, and that it's also a very pleasing and impressive work of art in of itself, I would think gives it many of the qualities that demosceners in particular appreciate.
There are other options. Early work with circuits controlling lights in Factorio :https://youtu.be/Kry8lbrHjeY and with doing sound https://youtu.be/b_FumvuFRXA
A different video clip with color https://youtu.be/mgfwwqwxdxY
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63591
8088 Domination used an awful lot of technical tricks to show Bad Apple, Full frame rate, Full screen on a real 8088 Intel Processor, back in 2014. As far as I know, that was the first, most recognized use of Bad Apple as a "demo benchmark" along side Doom as attempting to display it on as much hardware as possible.
I think it's simply that it's (mostly) black and white.
2 reasons:
1. The creator is extremely cool about remixes and fanuse. In many ways touhou is the OG modern internet fandom in a way that previous ones weren't. Your bad apple video will not be taken down even though it has the same audio as all the others.
2. The shadow puppet format is recognizable at seemingly any resolution. I have seen examples in a 3x3 grid even. On top of that, it only has two colors (black/white, 1/0) so its dead simple to convert the video frames into any other format you can imagine with only a 'hello world' understanding of what you're doing.