Posted By
Csabo
on 2016-07-31
08:20:18
|  Re: Crackers' Demo 5!
First of all, whew, it's done!  I figure I'd better write my retrospective NOW, before I forget it all.
In the beginning, before CD5 even started I wrote this: "I think it is a celebration of the machine, our love of coding, the joy of creating something out of nothing. To me inclusiveness is the biggest (if not the ONLY!) goal." This resonates in CD5 in a HUGE way. The amount of collaboration that happened here is definitely unprecedented on our scene.
What didn't go well, or what could have used some improvement?
1) More time. I guess 3 months was just too short.
2) More organizers. All of this for one person is... a lot.
3) More testing. This means having a test framework, which is available at the start of the collaboration. Plug in your part, see if it works. Then everyone can test themselves! (But, of course this is dependent on 1 and 2 - something like this needs more time and more people.)
4) Lesson learned: restore $FF0A and $FF13 and the end of each part, or face crashes This is what brought down CD5 between Spektro -> Lavina. I swear I fixed it last minute, why the fixed part didn't make it to the presentation - that's on me and Chronos. The crash was definitely an embarrassment. Oh well.
What went well?
Everything else! I think the way the parts are structured is great. I love it that they can be loaded and enjoyed individually, and they don't crash at the end. I love it that they run on NTSC machines. It's great that the loader allows the demo to start anywhere, and that it doesn't die if the disk is removed (error message is shown, and you get to continue). To me these were important, and so I made sure this happened. This... is kind of the same idea as the "inclusiveness" above: no coder is left behind, and no machine is left behind. (Hey, have you try starting CD5 on a C64, VIC20, or a C16?) Tape version would totally work too, I might do it when I have more time.
Why was it so hard?
Simply put, because I said "yes" to everything. Few rules, and even if you broke those, I said "fine, I'll make it work somehow". What this really means is just taking some burden from someone else, and saying I'll bear it. It's the only way I can operate though: this is what running the site taught me. Have some Plus/4 related stuff? Yes. Want to be a member? Yes. Can we host this program of questionable quality? Yes. Want to edit? Yes. (And I'll just clean up after, if you make a mistake. Cause otherwise, if I said, "You can edit ONLY if you learn X and do Y, even fewer people would do it.) If you want people to come, the doors should be wide open.
If I said "no" once in a while, things would have been definitely easier. But does that really matter? Life is hard For example, if we took the deadline seriously, there would have been *12* parts, not *20*.
But after it's all said and done, we can watch and listen to CD5, our mark in the world.
So... Thank you all once again We did it!
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