Indeed. The level of dedication, time and skill it required for this guy to analyze and fix the dozen+ incredibly arcane and minuscule differences between the emulator and actual hardware just so he could remove the small mod that detected this one demo is simply unbelievable. All just for this one demo which does truly insane, deeply unnatural things no other demo (or game) ever attempted. Plus the existing mod already allowed the emulator to play the demo perfectly down to the pixel and millisecond. It just bothered him that a special case mod was needed, so he spent well over a year on research, debugging and analysis - including writing several quite sophisticated visualization tools to specifically identify these incredibly minor divergences.
It's double amazing because the demo is incredible for identifying these insanely challenging tricks and getting them to run on primitive hardware no one thought could display this level of colors or animation AND then a software emulation of the vintage IBM 5150 PC (and monitor) being so precise it's able to recreate this one-off insanity in cycle-accurate real-time with NO case-specific hacks. It blows my mind that either one of these actually exists. Both together is the stuff of heroic retro legends. I'm confident none of the 1970s designers of the 6845 chip would have ever believed their chip was capable of generating these graphics.
It's double amazing because the demo is incredible for identifying these insanely challenging tricks and getting them to run on primitive hardware no one thought could display this level of colors or animation AND then a software emulation of the vintage IBM 5150 PC (and monitor) being so precise it's able to recreate this one-off insanity in cycle-accurate real-time with NO case-specific hacks. It blows my mind that either one of these actually exists. Both together is the stuff of heroic retro legends. I'm confident none of the 1970s designers of the 6845 chip would have ever believed their chip was capable of generating these graphics.