My first 8K intro – Marcin Juszkiewicz
I am on demoscene since 1997 when I attended "Intel Outside 4" party in<br>Włocławek, Poland. But I have never released anything. Until Xenium 2019 party<br>where I presented my first 8K intro. Written for Atari 2600 game console. In<br>some kind of BASIC language…
The idea
The idea for it came about year ago during Riverwash demoscene party. Most of PC<br>64KB intros started with some kind of progress bar as code was generating<br>textures, instruments and other stuff requiring calculations. I joked that it<br>would be great to make something similar for Atari 2600 VCS.
The fun is that Atari 2600 lacks any usable memory. It has 128 bytes (bytes, not<br>kilobytes) of RAM. The only storage is cartridge with 4KB of ROM space<br>(expandable by bankswitching to 32KB). So there is no point in any generating at<br>other phase than development.
batari Basic
During July I took a look at available options and found ‘batari<br>Basic’. It is BASIC-like language developed in<br>2005-2007 by Fred X. Quimby.
My main source of help was a forum on Atari Age. Detailed language info<br>came from useful page called ‘Random Terrain’.<br>There is also "Visual BB"<br>which is IDE with some tools speeding up development.
At party
At start of "oldchool intro" competition I told to friend sitting next to me<br>that I hope for at least four entries. He asked "why?" so I pointed him to the<br>screen saying "because of it":
My first 8K intro announcement screen
There were six entries so I though that I am safe and will have 5th entry maximum.
Intro
Thanks to Xenium organizers I have my intro recorded as video:
As you can see it has two parts. First one is playfield with one line changing<br>every 30 frames (first version was for NTSC). Result is simple progress bar.
Second part uses "titlescreen<br>kernel" to<br>display dino graphics. I used one provided by Xenium organizers (rescaled<br>to 96x91 pixels). I used rainbow colours to have some colours on screen.
Results
Imagine my surprise during voting results announcement next day. My intro took<br>3rd place!
Award for 3rd place
Amazing for production without any effects, without any audio. And written in<br>BASIC-like language without using any knowledge of 6502 assembly.
Source code
If someone wants to see how simple it was then source code is in "my<br>first 8k" git repo on github. Enjoy!
What next?
During Xenium I got lot of technical information for VCS programming. And there<br>were questions about my next production.
Nothing to promise here. And not for Atari VCS. It is sick platform to program<br>due to lack of any framebuffer memory so ‘race the beam’ is in use…
I have some ideas for Atari XL/XE…
atari<br>demoscene<br>vcs
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I work at Red Hat.<br>Mostly on AArch64 support in several projects.
I am also known as 'hrw' (/hʌ eə vʊ/).
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