HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from Onslaught - Bad Apple 64 - C64 Demo Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Onslaught - Bad Apple 64 - C64 Demo

6 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this demo2 months2018–2026 score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Shared as an impressive example of squeezing video and compression onto a 1 MHz 8-bit machine in Bad Apple porting threads.

Onslaught's Bad Apple 64 is a Commodore 64 demo that streams over 2000 frames of the Bad Apple animation from a single disk side at 12fps, with each frame packed to around 70 bytes.

“C64 version using VQ compression” (HN, 2021)

2 recommendations · 1 citations · Demos

3 Hacker News comments

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

@iammyIP Mar 2018 Recommends
on HN thread A 48Khz digital music player for the Commodore 64
The remarkatble thing is less the compression of a 3:12 video with sound in 1MB, and more the c64 being able to decode it in realtime with a framerate > 10. I especially like the unique but still 64-flavoured compression artefacts of the video. Heres another Onslaught demo that fits on a Floppy disk: [this video]
Another Onslaught demo fitting on a floppy disk

Citations, criticism and jokes

@tombert Mar 2026 Cites it
on HN thread "This Is Not the Computer for You"
Read more
Oh no argument on that. I have a typical yuppie software job with decent pay, so generally I will buy the right tools for a job now instead of trying to make due with whatever I can scrap together. I'm not that busy of a person, but I certainly have more obligations than I did when I was sixteen, and now sometimes it really is worth it to spend an extra grand on something than it is to spend a week hacking together something from my existing stuff. Still, I look back at the hours I spent making terrible YouTube videos with my terrible computer really fondly. I was proud of myself for making things work, I was proud of the little workarounds I found. I think it's the same reason I love reading about classic computing (80's-90's era). Computers in the 80's were objectively terrible compared to anything we have now, and people still figured out how to squeeze every little bit of juice possible to make really awesome games and programs. The Commodore 64 and Amiga demos are fun to play around with because people will figure out the coolest tricks to make these computers do things that they have no business doing. I mean, the fact that Bad Apple has been "ported" to pretty much everything is something I cannot stop being fascinated by. [1] [2] [3] [4] [1] [link] [2] [link] [3] [this video] [4] [link]
Example of Bad Apple ported to the Commodore 64.

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.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close