Yesterday I checked out a video of an awesome hardware demo. The project was called Craft by a hacker called lft. He put together a custom hardware board. This board connected to a standard VGA monitor. A chip on the board had been programmed with 8500 lines of assembly language code. This demo won first place in the Breakpoint 2008 contest. I did not see any of the other entries. However I am sure that Craft blew the competition away.A funny piece of the demo that continues throughout the whole thing is a bunch of kooky music that plays in the background. There are some non-trivial graphics produced such as reflections of some flames in what looks like some water. I saw a bunch of dots moving in what I assumed to be a stellar voyage of some sorts. The demo had a bunch of complex 3-D spinning as well. The graphics themselves appeared to be a rather low resolution (since at times I could see the actual pixels). This did not distract from the greatness of the demo though. And regardless of the resolution, the graphics seemed to match the music that was being played.
Some of the things that impressed me were the moving camera angles for the scenes that were being displayed by the graphics. There were a lot of amusing messages placed in the demo. For example, there were a bunch of shout outs to lft’s friends. The text often had different effects applied, like some dancing characters at times.
I have seen some other demos before. This one ranks up with many of the better ones I have seen. In the past, I have seen demos written for a PC with minimal resources. For example, I saw demos of apps that ran in as little as 64k of code, or even 8k of code. The unique part of Craft was that it was all done on custom hardware developed by lft. My hat is off to the superhero known as lft. Good work man.
