Nova·17 The UK Demoscene Party - June 2017 - Devon, UK

[kieranhj]

Hey all,

The only UK demoscene party is taking place in Budleigh Salterton, Devon across the weekend of 23 - 25 June. You can find more details on their Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/893595540780929.

Bitshifters will be there representing the BBC Micro in the Old School Demo category and we'd always appreciate your votes & support! Some you saw a sneak peak of our latest work-in-progress at ABUG last weekend. We'll post the final release to the forum of course.

You can register for the event here: https://goo.gl/2HLOCs. Hopefully see some of you there!

[kieranhj]

Morning folks,

Well, Simon & I managed to get our new demo for the BBC Master finished at the party yesterday. It is our tribute to the old school demo effects, particularly on the Amiga, from the late 1980's and early 1990's but rendered entirely in MODE 7 / Teletext.

Check it out and download the ssd here: https://bitshifters.github.io/posts/pro ... textr.html.

It was finished in a rush (!!) so is a little rough around the edges in a few places but we'll release an update soon enough. It does require a BBC Master I'm afraid as we're using all 64K sideways RAM and shadow RAM for double-buffering. If you have any compatibility issues let us know. DataCentre users will need to issue *DTRAP before booting, as ever.

Let us know what you think!

[lurkio]

Another stunning demo! Can't believe how you keep on cranking them out!



Was it all compressed video à la Bad Apple? Or were some of the graphics -- e.g. the 3D pyramid -- being calculated and plotted on the fly? (I obviously don't know the correct terminology for any of this!)

[Elminster]

Very good, brings back memories of years of wasting time watching demos on the Amiga. Superseded by random videos on you tube.

Pretty impressive anyway but considering the hardware you had to work with even more so. And didn't spot the rough edges you mentioned.

[oss003]

Nice job Kieranhj (and other members of BitShifters of course), keep up the good work ........

Greetings
Kees

[danielj]

Excellent work. Thanks for the greetz to the Stardot Crew too

d.

[RobC]

Awesome demo - I love the music and wouldn't have believed that the graphics effects were possible. Could watch it over and over again

Great work!

[jbnbeeb]

Absolutely stunning

Fantastic graphics - never thought I'd see such amazing stuff in Mode 7. And the music is so cool like the previous demo - sounding very un-Beeb-like and very arcade/console like.

And yes the style does remind me of some of the demos I saw on STs and Amigas back in the day. But on a Master!

Excellent work bitshifter guys !!

[pixelblip]

Amazing demo. Love the animations. Pushing the old tech into the new age.

[steve3000]

Awesome work again Kieran & bitshifters!

[sbadger]

Amazing - the particle system and bresenham blew me away!
Have you had it hooked up to a crt?

[tricky]

Nicely done, shame I had to watch without audio, I'll get that next time

[kieranhj]

Thanks for the kind words folks. The source is on GitHub if anyone is interested in how it was done. Everything is calculated in real-time, although some of the sprite FX rely on pre-shifting the data into 2x or 6x combinations for speed (depending on whether it is horizontal and/or vertical movement.)

The animated GIF player is a variation on the video player from Bad Apple. Plasma & noise type FX use hold graphics to achieve blocky pixels including the rotozoomer. The particle system is all running in real-time and pokes colour codes to the screen as necessary (there is colour clash but everything moves quickly so hard to spot.) The 3D code is built on the work of Nick Jameson so important to give him credit here.

There's nothing particularly unusual or revolutionary going on for the hardware / CRTC side, so should work on any monitor. It does have a lot of bank switching happening behind the scenes to enable double-buffering and the instant switching between FX, hence Master only.

Simon made an awesome scripting system to allow us to make rapid changes using data rather than code, which meant we could pull everything together from the assorted bits & pieces in the relatively short time we had to get it finished at the party.

The Teletext crowd (Simon Rawles & Steve Horsborough) kindly provided art and classic pages / frames to top everything off.

[FourthStone]

Superb, great effects and top music

I kept watching the screen after the last white dot half expecting an encore as the whole demo left me wanting more.