2018 Nordlicht 512-byte competition entry

[JeremiahK]

If any of you missed SvOlli's post, there is a 512 byte demo competition at the Nordlicht DemoParty this year. I have been working on an entry for the past couple weeks, and it is very close to being finished.

The original plan was to have colorful dots slowly raining down the screen with some peaceful sounding music, but I needed something a little more interesting, so I added text as well. As of now, there is no music, but I have 45 bytes of ROM left to work with, plus plenty of unused bits from another table. I will do my best to add a 2-voice soundtrack, and if I have a few bytes leftover, I will try to fix the "R" character. (That might give you a hint to how I am doing the character graphics).

 

I am posting the current .bin here, but I won't be posting any source code until after the contest is over. Any feedback is appreciated! If you have a PAL system and a Harmony cart, please test it out for me, since I don't have a PAL setup. I specifically am curious about whether or not the top of the kernel is aligned properly.

demo2018.bin

Edited July 7, 2018 by JeremiahK

[JeremiahK]

All right, I have my near-final entry. Call it a teaser. The demo runs for 2m 17s, and then ends.

demo2018.bin

Edited July 12, 2018 by JeremiahK

[Jinroh]

Cool tile text effect! That beat is catchy too!

[JeremiahK]

Thank you! I am doing all the finishing touches now. I will release the final .bin and the source code after the contest is over. There's a lot of cool stuff going on, and I'm looking forward to discussing that!

Edited July 13, 2018 by JeremiahK

[JeremiahK]

Now that the demo has officially been released at Nordlicht Demoparty in Bremen, Germany, I am posting the final version here, along with the source code.

 

I noticed that the music sounds slightly different on Stella vs on hardware, since I am writing random data to the bass frequency. On hardware, it has high-pitched note drops mixed in with the bass, which sounds pretty cool.

acidrain_vcs.zip

Edited July 23, 2018 by JeremiahK

[Thomas Jentzsch]

This will be addressed with the next release of Stella. Meanwhile you can use Stellerator to test in an emulator, it already uses the new sound engine.

[JeremiahK]

I was thinking of making a short video going over the code of this little demo and how it works. Is this something anybody would want to see?

Edited July 29, 2018 by JeremiahK

[TheHoboInYourRoom]

I was thinking of making a short video going over the code of this little demo and how it works. Is this something anybody would want to see?

That sounds really cool.

[JeremiahK]

Here's the video! Sorry, I am uploading this much later than I hoped. I'd thought of adding some graphics to try to visualize the character data manipulations, but after re-watching I realized that it's not necessary.

 

The video is pretty fast-paced, you might have to pause and re-watch every now and then to really follow along. My first attempt was about 40 minutes long...

 

Also, for some reason YouTube no longer allows users to use custom thumbnails for their videos unless they are "verified" users. Remember MySpace?

 

Edited September 10, 2018 by JeremiahK

[Tjoppen]

Putting values at the end of RAM so they can be initialized by pushing values on the stack is a nifty idea. Might steal that for future sizeprods

[JeremiahK]

Thank you, that was one of those last-minute ideas I had to save a couple bytes so I could add the music.

 

In case anybody didn't understand how both the forward and reverse versions of characters are encoded into the same table, here is an example of how I would encode the character 'R':

DATA:
 X X _ X X X _ _
 X _ X _ X _ X _
 X X _ X X X _ _
 X _ X _ X _ X _
 X _ X _ X _ X _

FORWARD COPIES:
|X X _|~|X X _|_
|X _ X|_|X _ X|_
|X X _|~|X X _|_
|X _ X|_|X _ X|_
|X _ X|_|X _ X|_

REVERSE COPY (MUST BE SHIFTED INTO POSITION):
 ~ ~|_ X X|~ _ _
 ~ _|X _ X|_ ~ _
 ~ ~|_ X X|~ _ _
 ~ _|X _ X|_ ~ _
 ~ _|X _ X|_ ~ _

[AkashicRecord]

Now that the demo has officially been released at Nordlicht Demoparty in Bremen, Germany, I am posting the final version here, along with the source code.

 

I noticed that the music sounds slightly different on Stella vs on hardware, since I am writing random data to the bass frequency. On hardware, it has high-pitched note drops mixed in with the bass, which sounds pretty cool.

 

Absolutely love it.