KingTut
Account closed
Registered: Mar 2020
Posts: 1 |
Release id #177607 : Rocky Kid 4th
Hi All, my first post here:
Rocky Kid 4th
I found this because an old school buddy spotted it and posted a link to it as they knew I coded it over 30 years ago!
Wow, cool to see this was preserved as part of the C-64 scene.
I was part of a small swap group in Manchester UK, we had three members, Starfighter, Elf and King Tut (me) we had a few contacts over the world for swapping games and demos, Rocky Kid from Queensland Australia was one of those swap pals. I made this demo for him in return for some game discs I think :-)
I was the coder of this demo in 1987, I think I was 15 years old at the time, it's now 2020 :-) It was the second demo I ever made.
Demo was coded on a C64 bread-bin model, coded in 6502 machine code of course. I didn’t have an assembler app so I used the built in disassembler / monitor on an Action Replay cartridge, which I loved!
I created graphics and code, the main Atari graphic was created in a paint app on the c64 (can’t recall the name) it was made as a single bitmap graphic including the black around it to act as a mask for the colour bars in the logo.
The colour bars were created using vertical raster scan lines via IRQ interrupt by changing the background colour ref on each vertical line, reading the colour data from an array and cycling through it on loop.
The scroller at the bottom was using built in hardware sprite size doubling and exploiting the VIC chip overscan bug by rapidly switching modes and timing it carefully using NOP operations to make it stable, that way all sprites could be placed in the overscan border area as static blocks and treated as a bitplane by writing the typeface bitmap data to them.
I think I created the typeface too, the scanline effect in the typeface was achieved by skipping every other vertical line to give the lines in the typeface to make it look less blocky (from the sprite doubling effect) which was common with demo coders at the time. It was 30+ years ago and those are my distant memories of it, not the best demo but of it’s time, don’t come after me :-)
Although we had decided on a name for our copy group: Electric Copy Crew, I was unsure whether the demos I made should be under another name, something else like Illusion or Proton hence the mixups on names in scroller and credits.
Just wanted to say how amazed I was that people are keeping the scene alive and archiving even crappy demos like mine. It's inspired me to dig out my C64 and 1541 and perhaps start coding again :-)
cheers,
Martin (King Tut) |
