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This really blows things away...


emkay

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In the "Far Away" Demo one part fully hit my attention.

It's the Jetpack part. That thing is so far beyond everything. The 360 degree "Y" rotation, fluent and using a light source. The Jetpack Guy is very cool animated, and then the music is playing without stopping anything for the sound FX of the Jetpack .

Sorry, but this so is fucking cool.

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1 hour ago, VladR said:

That's certainly quite a mega demo.

 

But, looks like 12 people worked on it...

That's ok.  Bigger productions are nice to experience.

 

These demos are pretty great.  Always nice to see A8 productions.

 

Killer art in all of these.  I actually liked the unsolved one more than I thought I would.

 

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5 hours ago, Turbo Laser Lynx said:

I really loved this one too:


I watched the Silly Venture stream last night and I was hypnotised by all the Atari 8-bit demos! I never really goot excited  about demos before, so I'm super happy to have found them now. I think perhaps Pokey and Mikey might have opened my mind! :grin:

That is how it starts.  You can go back and watch older ones and see progress and how the art changes over time too.

 

IMHO, the demo scene is something more people might enjoy given some intro and context.  We have a fledgling one in the US now, but the real scene has always been EU centric.

 

I like to watch every party.  I manage a lot of them and then catch up as time permits.

 

It is fun to see the various effects, occasional new hardware exploit, and clever ways of presenting the art.

 

Even the clunky old CGA PC saw some NTSC artifact action recently.  (8088 MPH)  

 

Another favorite is the wild category.  People get various gear to do cool stuff, like driving vector displays off a VGA port, or thrashing little micros well beyond expected performance.

 

Check out TITAN and their recent work on the Mega Drive.  Nuts good.

 

The cool thing is all the old machines have seen some love.  Rivalries are ever present, but not too big of a deal. It can be all about doing that thing not doable (until it is) on "that other computer" as much as it can be pushing it on a favorite one.

 

Have fun!  You have decades of killer productions to enjoy.  Pace yourself.

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Far Away is just nuts, I love the planet and the the sky on the planet look, really special...

 

The little rocket guy jet packing around looked like a great game idea BUT this is why demo's make me a bit sad. You see all these wonderful effects and you sort of know the old Atari is being pushed like hell to do them so in the context of a demo they work great but you just know that in real time with an actual game engine that 99% simply can't happen..

 

Sort of a bit of beauty and the beast...The beautiful and amazing fx but the beast that they won't be in a game any time soon :(

 

BUT(2) those demo's are stunning, my little old Atari doing all that, really...Just shows the power that is in there in the many right hands..

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3 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

Far Away is just nuts, I love the planet and the the sky on the planet look, really special...

 

The little rocket guy jet packing around looked like a great game idea BUT this is why demo's make me a bit sad. You see all these wonderful effects and you sort of know the old Atari is being pushed like hell to do them so in the context of a demo they work great but you just know that in real time with an actual game engine that 99% simply can't happen..

 

Sort of a bit of beauty and the beast...The beautiful and amazing fx but the beast that they won't be in a game any time soon :(

 

BUT(2) those demo's are stunning, my little old Atari doing all that, really...Just shows the power that is in there in the many right hands..

That’s most of the deal... demo coding is another art form like game coding but can share common stuff...

 

eg what Gorgh has written or Numen’s interactive Duke engine etc

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For the curious planet lovers above, a bit behind the scenes - how it developed. The core of it was implemented during a business trip (these help in demomaking!, especially long distance flights, PL <->US this time, with 2x9h time for uninterrupted coding), when waking up on a jetlag early mornings in Chicago downtown hotel.... :P And then significantly enhanced...

 

It's pretty simple effect, leveraging DLI (and changing GTIA colors every 2nd line), PMGs (as 'curtains' giving this nice pixel perfect round shape, again changing hpos and colors every 2nd line). Below the PMG is a 'bare bones' LMS on display list combined with a hscroll (so the central, equator parts are moving faster, but still smoothly, than the others). No rocket science, I'm afraid, but looks good. Smoke and mirrors in A8 style, but leveraging to the most the capabilities of these chips. 

 

On the contrary - the jetpack fx coded by Gorgh is a fully fledged engine. No shortcuts, no smoke and mirrors. And that is why it is 'enabled' for expanding into a game. 

 

farplanet_evolution_Oct_2019.png

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The thing you start to wonder after a while, is that the designers of the machine were pure geniuses in the way they have designed it, the interactions between different components, etc. Of course there are some limitations, but still, looking at how much of new stuff one may still invent 30+ years later you wonder - it was a pure genius back then. It's still a stock original 6502+POKEY+ANTIC+GTIA after all, just blessed with some memory expansion.

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11 hours ago, tomaswoj said:

For the curious planet lovers above, a bit behind the scenes - how it developed. The core of it was implemented during a business trip (these help in demomaking!, especially long distance flights, PL <->US this time, with 2x9h time for uninterrupted coding), when waking up on a jetlag early mornings in Chicago downtown hotel.... :P And then significantly enhanced...

 

It's pretty simple effect, leveraging DLI (and changing GTIA colors every 2nd line), PMGs (as 'curtains' giving this nice pixel perfect round shape, again changing hpos and colors every 2nd line). Below the PMG is a 'bare bones' LMS on display list combined with a hscroll (so the central, equator parts are moving faster, but still smoothly, than the others). No rocket science, I'm afraid, but looks good. Smoke and mirrors in A8 style, but leveraging to the most the capabilities of these chips. 

 

On the contrary - the jetpack fx coded by Gorgh is a fully fledged engine. No shortcuts, no smoke and mirrors. And that is why it is 'enabled' for expanding into a game. 

 

farplanet_evolution_Oct_2019.png

Our job as demo coders is smoke & mirror ;)

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10 hours ago, tomaswoj said:

The thing you start to wonder after a while, is that the designers of the machine were pure geniuses in the way they have designed it, the interactions between different components, etc. Of course there are some limitations, but still, looking at how much of new stuff one may still invent 30+ years later you wonder - it was a pure genius back then. It's still a stock original 6502+POKEY+ANTIC+GTIA after all, just blessed with some memory expansion.

Nah... Not all is good but good

for 70s tech... ;)

 

how often we hit that damned 128 char limit (still why is it there???) or those 2600 PMs... ;) and color ram would have been nice but that’s all 80s tech... Centipede etc arcade are all 4 colors.

Edited by Heaven/TQA
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