Amazing Smiley Face animation

[Mr SQL]

I was writing an instructional thread on the programming forum on programming music and graphics on the VCS without writing any code, like programming Big Trek, and saw this amazing smiley face animation not intended to be part of the code.

 

It appears to be ideosyncratic artifacting of a type never encountered before. The Atari VCS is still full of surprises:

 

 

You can watch the video with the detailed animation on the instructional thread and download the ROM

 

Explanations for the effect and discussion welcome, also would like to know if anyone is interested in the original topic, Programming Music and Graphics on the Atari with no code.

 

 

It's currently possible to program the Atari like Big Trek for the Music Tracker, and to draw the background image and the sprites with ASCII art, if there is interest I could add another Big Trek section for the sprites so that they could be programmed to move about like Big Trek too. Right now you would have to program that with BASIC code.