Have a Helping of 8-bit Holiday Cheer! (2017 Edition)

‘Tis the season, and that means it’s time to push out the seventh annual Byte Cellar vintage computer Holiday demo video roundup so everyone can feel that warm, fuzzy, pixellated holiday glow. With scanlines. Enjoy!

I’ve been a computer geek for a long time now, but I’ve been enjoying The Holidays even longer.

I got my first computer, a TI-99/4A, on Christmas morning in 1982. I was 10 years old and from that Christmas on, it was nothing but games and computer hardware that I wanted Santa to leave me under the tree. On through my teenage years, part of my ritual for getting into the Holiday spirit was downloading and watching Christmas demos on whatever system I had at the time (and every platform out there had a few of them).

Enjoying these demos is a personal tradition that I had, sadly, long left behind until 2010 (the year before I began writing these posts) when I was inspired to seek out the demo I remember best, Audio Light’s 1985 musical slideshow for the Atari ST. With the help of an emulator, I captured it to share online with readers.

A year later, I fired it up again and watched it run through it’s 16-color, pixellated images and 3-voice musical holiday greetings. As I watched, it occurred to me that it might be nice to gather a few of the other demos I remember from the good ole’ days and present them here, in order to try to share some of the holiday cheer that they used to inspire within me.

The following list of demos ranges across a variety of platforms of olde and is sure to bring the warmth of the season to the hearts of any and all retrocomputing enthusiasts who behold it. Happy holidays, and I hope you enjoy the shows!

Be sure to also have a look at the dozens of demos gathered through the years in the 2011 – 2016 edition of this post.

The 2017 collection:

DOS PC – GENESiS’ Christmas Demo (1999)

C64 – QuantumLink’s Commodore Christmas Album (1980s)

Atari 2600 – Chris Read’s Christmas Demo (2007)

Amstrad CPC – GPA Noel Christmas Demo

Tandy CoCo 3 – Mad Xmas Demo short

C64 – Compunet Chrsitmas Demo (1985)

Atari STe – Excellence in Art and Acca’s Xmas 2015 (2015)

ZX Spectrum – ZX Computing magazine’s Christmas demo (1983)

Atari 8-bit – A 130XE Digital Christmas Card

C64 – Lazer Merry Christmas Demo

Tandy CoCo – Speech System’s Christmas Fantasia demo (1984)
( Link to the follow-up Christmas Fantasia II demo (1986) video )
( These demos may be utilizing Speech Systems’ Symphony 12 audio board. )

Atari 7800 – Merry Christmas Demo (2012)

ЮТ 88 – Kakos’ Trigona Kalanda (2014)

Tandy 1000 – Tandy 1000 EX Holiday Demo (1986)

ColecoVision – Daniel Bienvenu’s Merry Christmas Joyeux Noel (2001)

May this holiday season bring you all faster modems and floppy disks galore!

Also check out:

• ByteCellar: Have a Helping of 8-bit Holiday Cheer! (2016 – 2011 Editions)
• The Vintage Computer & Gaming Christmas Collection (2014 Edition) by Benj Edwards