psychedelia syndrome | pixels and code
psychedelia syndrome
Psychedelia was the first ever interactive 'light synthesizer'. It was written for the Commodore 64 by Jeff Minter and<br>published by Llamasoft in 1984.
psychedelia syndrome<br>is a book-length exploration of the assembly code behind the game and an<br>atlas of the pixels and effects it generated. It should appeal to anyone<br>with an interest in computers, old or new, and provide interesting<br>insights into how 40-year old software produced appealing graphical<br>displays. The book consists of many pretty pictures and a complete,<br>academic-style commentary on the code for all editions of Psychedelia on<br>the Commodore 64 plus a bonus section covering Colourspace on the Atari<br>400/800.
You can download and read the book here.
A high-quality version (230MB) is available here.
A dual-page view in your PDF reader is recommended to aid viewing code and commentary side-by-side.
If you'd like to read a hard copy instead you can get the current version from Amazon at a very reasonable price.
The electronic edition is free, but if you like it you can gift what you want.
a peek inside
unauthorized sequel
I had a bit of fun and made a kind of variation on<br>Psychedelia<br>. It's called<br>ΨII .
It has a simple objective: reach every part of the screen<br>with the assigned pattern. You receive points for every tile you fill and lose points every<br>time you fill the same tile more than once. If you click on the video below, you should be able<br>to give it a quick go, using CTRL to fire and the arrow keys for moving around. It's quite soothing.
more peeking
source & more
Find out more about the making of this book at its github repository.
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IRIDIS ALPHA THEORY
, a book length treatment of<br>Iridis Alpha<br>that goes into the game's mechanics in just about the same insane level of detail as this one.