This demo was created for the Atari 8-bit demo competition at Silly Venture 2k22 SE in Gdansk. It is a 40k single file executable and works on all 64k PAL Atari 8-bit computers.
Story
Thalamus released the C64 game Hawkeye in 1988. Mario van Zeist and Paul Cooper coded it, and it was mindblowing for me. It features excellent visuals and sound - and lots of them! The loading screen, sound configuration tool, a whole animated game story, in-game parallax scrolling, animations, and music while the next level is loading, a raster bars high score table, and more.
All these things were immediately engraved in my memories forever, and I was always thinking about bringing at least a small portion of them to my beloved Atari 8-bit machine. I ripped from the graphics (heaven knows how I transferred them from the C64 to the Atari back then?) and planned to use them in my mega demo in 1989 - which was never finished as it was too ambitious. Then, in January 2020, I found this video by Buddy76CD in my YouTube proposals. He had done a POKEY cover of the original Hawkeye title tune using Raster Music Tracker. To make it more interesting for YouTube, he added the original C64 title picture and some "fake" 8-bit scroller via a PC video creation program. The POKEY cover was excellent, and it made me feel that it deserves to be an actual Atari program, not "just" a video.
My plan was not to do much but to create a Raster Converter version of the original title picture as a backdrop for the music. I started, but then nothing progressed for another two years. Until Grey asked me if I could create an entry for the Atari 8-bit competition at Silly Venture 2022 Summer Edition, it was already over three years since my last actual Atari 8-bit release. Another Silly Venture with no production - com' on - what kind of demo coder would I be?! So, I decided to change priorities and give it a go. First, I re-did the raster conversion and tweaked the original image for the best result.
Then I realized that nobody had ever faded a raster converter picture, and because I had plenty of RAM left, I added that. Grey came up with additional requirements when he saw the first preview because it is the "Atari 50 Years Aniversary" edition of the Silly Venture. And there was my teenage dream of having the Synthetic Life Form (SFL) running and shooting my Atari with all the blinking lights, controls, and flashing hawk eyes. After the groundwork, the project evolved quickly into half-a-game, with a small AI controlling the SLF to run around automatically, firing at text sections to trigger the display of the following text section. Following great demoscene traditions, the party version was finished at 03:03 AM the night before the compo, and I am delighted with the result. The code structure is probably the most complex yet best design I've done in a long time. Yes, 6502 assembly language is hardcore for large projects, but with MADS, you have great options using nested scopes. "MAIN.EFFECTS.FADE_MAIN_SCREEN.FADE_GAME.RECHARGE_WEAPONS_IF_NEEDED.NO_RECHARGE" - what's not to understand about this label name :-)
Credits
- Atari Code: Peter Dell aka JAC!
- Atari Music: Christian Düsterhöfft aka Buddy76CD
- Original C64 Music: Jeroen Tel
- Original C64 Graphics: Robin Levy aka RjL, Jacco Van 't Riet
Thanks
- All Atari Oldschoolers for testing on different real hardware.
- My family for keeping everything else off my back so I could finish this on time and quality.