Wintermute

I guess I'm a bit late to the party, but here goes -- I finally got around to doing this challenge at 35C3 last week. My approach is a little unorthodox in that the hardware initialisation happens in a single byte at the bottom of the screen loop. This comes at the cost of an up to approximately four seconds long "boot" period during which the VCS may (but rarely does, at least in randomly initialized Stella) show garbage in addition to the effect because only one zero byte is pushed per screen. I consider this acceptable given the space constraints, but YMMV. SvOlli calls this "precomputation," so I guess there's a VCS demo that does that now. Details are in the source code comments. It's possible more can be squeezed from this that I don't see; I'm afraid I'm nowhere near as experienced with the VCS as some (most? all?) people here. processor 6502 list off include vcs.h list on ; reset vector at OFFSET - 4 OFFSET = 31 seg code org $f3c1 ; upon reset expected: SP = $fd ; also expected: mirroring every 32 bytes ; Look, ma, no init routine! ; ; Except not really, of course. I'm doing HW init in one pha at the bottom of the screen loop. ; This is a trade-off: I get only one zero-byte per screen in exchange for four extra bytes ; of machine code that I (desperately) need, especially since I also need to cld in order to ; be able to use adc #1 (which takes one more byte than inx, iny). ; ; Depending on the initial state, the demo may show nonsense during the first ~4 seconds. This ; can be random garbage in PF0, a strange background color, a sprite or anything else. It's ; surprisingly rare at least in Stella with random initial state, though. screen: lda #$3b ; 0 -- Bit of luck: this pattern looks nice in PF1,2 and works well sta PF1 ; 2 -- in CTRLPF: reflect | score | unimportant stuff. Weirdly, even sta PF2 ; 4 -- the usually frustrating mirroring of PF1 that makes horizontal sta CTRLPF ; 6 -- scrolling such a pain works to my advantage. ; Feel free to try other patterns. It's only important that ; SCORE is set, PFP is not set, and possibly that three consecutive ; bits are set so that the sync block works, although I'm unsure ; of the exact semantics there. It works in Stella with #$0b, which ; kinda surprised me. sync: lsr ; 8 -- this part inspired by (lifted from) SvOlli sta WSYNC ; 9 sta VSYNC ; 11 bne sync ; 13 -- Reset vector no longer here, though; this points between ; instructions now. See below. tsx ; 15 -- S doubles as counter for the right topmost color. line: dex ; 16 -- Walk through the rainbow, one color every line. dey ; 17 -- Variation: iny instead of dey here. I like dey better. iny ; feels like inconsistent shadows to me. sta WSYNC ; 18 sty COLUP0 ; 20 -- set new colors stx COLUP1 ; 22 cld ; 24 -- Having cld close to the adc instruction keeps the invalid region ; for the reset vector small. Doesn't matter that it's execd often. adc #1 ; 25 -- A from 0 to 0, carry set at outset => 255 scanlines per screen. ; This means that Y increases by 1 each screen (dey 255 times) bne line ; 27 -- doubles as reset vector (f3d0), happens to point at 15: tsx. ; Any instruction except the adc would be fine, though. The reason ; adc is not fine is that the CPU could be in BCD mode after reset. ; On that note, whoever invented BCD ought to be clipped round the ear. pha ; 29 -- A is 0 here, so this will eventually init hw. beq screen ; 30 conveyors.bin conveyors_2k.bin