WHAT THIS IS

In 1993 a group of Finnish teenagers wrote a program that made a 486 do things the PC was not supposed to be able to do. Second Reality won the demo competition at Assembly ’93 and is still routinely named the best PC demo made.

For its twentieth anniversary Future Crew released the complete source and data into the public domain. This project rebuilds the demo to run in a browser from that release — not as a video, not in an emulator, but as a re-implementation from the original sources: the C, the x86 assembly, the Turbo Pascal, the linked object files and the shipped executables.

NOT AN EMULATOR

There is no DOS here and no x86 interpreter. The original is nineteen separate DOS executables chain-loaded by a custom loader. The port is one page with a phase machine, each part a module ported from that part’s own source directory. VGA’s planar modes, CRTC panning and palette animation are reproduced as logic and drawn through a palette-lookup shader — because in this demo the palette is the animation.