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Robotic Liberation by PWP (VIC-20)

3 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this demo2 months2010–2015 score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN recommends it as a showcase of what skilled demoscene programmers can squeeze out of extremely limited hardware.

Robotic Liberation by PWP is a music video demo performed entirely by an unexpanded Commodore VIC-20 and a 1541 disk drive, using only a few kilobytes of RAM and a 16 KB disk. It uses demoscene effects to tell a story.

“I like that the demo effects are used here to tell a story in addition to being a pure display of coding prowess.” (HN, 2010)

2 recommendations · 1 jokes · Demos

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@Leynos Dec 2010 Recommends
on HN thread Incredible demos on the Commodore Vic-20
Videos of some of the demos described here: Robotic Warrior [link] Robotic Liberation [this video] Impossiblator [link] I like that the demo effects are used here to tell a story in addition to being a pure display of coding prowess.
VIC-20 demo using effects to tell a story.

Citations, criticism and jokes

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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