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This year, I visited Silly Venture for the first time in the summer. Getting there took me 25 hours due to plane delays, canceled bookings, and broken aircraft. The location and the party were quite different from Winter, and a lot of new, or for me yet unknown people were there. We had Jesse Burns from the US Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment with us. Due to my delayed arrival, I could only give half of the planned presentation on Programming the 2600 (VCS). The recording is available in the SV2k24SE - Friday stream. Unfortunately, the second part could not be done due to technical issues and the late starting time. But you can check the old recording from 2014 for that. The source code is not very well readable in that video, but it is available for download via slides & source code.
I had two releases at the party. The first, "Alex Murphy," is an Atari 8-bit demo for 64k Atari 8-bit machines. It was inspired by Buddy's cover of the C64 Robocop theme, released in May. The demo uses Taquart Interlace Picture (TIP) mode to display a 160x188 pixels picture in 256 colors. This mode takes up over 75% of the CPU, making it challenging to do anything else - let alone scrolling a 32k image. The image uses a vertical overscan to use the full height of the screen, and it scrolls at a single scanline resolution. On top of the image is a 40x32 pixel-per-letter high-resolution proportional scroller. The scroller uses horizontal overscan to use the entire screen width, too.
Additionally, the scroll can move vertically over the image. This combination of TIP, overscan modes, and varying screen positions was much more challenging than expected. At one point, I had to reach out to Phaeron for help because the demo ran fine in emulation but broke entirely on real hardware. It turned out that I had created a new, previously unseen case of abnormal playfield DMA by switching the screen widths at a cycle where ANTIC's internal safeguards didn't work. After the party, Krystone helped me improve some details of the visuals (vertical positions, font, text, eased sine for vertical movement). So, what you see in the video is the final version.
YouTube's encoding and framerate don't do justice to the demo. If you can, watch it on an actual CRT. The demo heavily relies on interlacing, frame blending, and 50 Hz. It was miserable that the beamer at the party place could not display 50 Hz, and frame blending didn't work either. The fluent visual appearance broke, and the presentation was messed up. Even the stream on YouTube was better quality than what was shown live, and that was very disappointing because the demo was designed to show the strengths of the Atari 8-bit hardware. It ranked 1st in the Atari 8-bit demo compo, which was too easy, as the only other entry was assigned to the intro compo.
For those who like the original 1987 movie, it will be back in Germany's cinemas for one day on Tuesday, 3 September 2024. Funny enough, I found that out only after I had completed my demo.
The second release was a small player I created for Glafouk's Atari VCS music competition entry, "As it comes...". It ranked 2nd in the compo. Regardless of my contribution, it was my favorite tune in that compo because it has a lot of melody and a great mood.
The party place was unusual, with two rooms and two different levels. This didn't work for me because, for presentations and competitions, it is essential to have the crowd in one room and feel their reactions. What was great was that many people who typically could not be there in winter were present. Hence, I now have many new faces and nice talks on my list. Here are some impressions from the party place.
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