Posted By
Luca
on 2014-11-28
05:31:10
 |  Re: New Demo
Yeah, the Master Organizer has come back in town!  Thanks to all the ppl that joined into the scrolltro, I got massive and fast feedback!
Our little scene sometimes misses several attitudes and habits other bigger ones have, for example the usage of the International Standards I tried to put in and assumed for the trained games. But that's not the case of birthday intros, as ye olde Plus/4 scene has shown they're not unaccustomed to this habit in particular, both for intros made by the honoured himself or by friends of him (HB Mega, 17 Years, Happy Birthday Bionic, To Be Fifteen...). Time comes to refresh this tradition, and in a month there was exactly the birthday of THE man, beg your pardon for the preference, who really deserves to be celebrated  In the hope that we'll see more of these easy releases in the future, and in this vision The Way It Is by nukem has been a valid example: releasers are always right!
The demo itself: well, nothing recordbreaking, you see, and such an oldschool feeling all around, especially about the screen disposal. And there's no linking touch in the very beginning, only the black screen then run, and no rasters or other colour stuff, very plain. Said that, the devil hides in the tiny details. The 5x5 set comes from C64, it's a famous one I ever liked though the hard limitations (no digits!), as I credited in the text has been drawn by Morpheus/FHI, and ìf you look at those scrolltext chars you can see lighter coloring at the red and blue bottom borders. The scroller itself can run in 7 speeds and stop for x time, but speeds 2 4 and 6 are best fitting because of the multicolour sprites (roughly, odd values for an "8 positions" scrolling would occur in an excessive wobbling for a "4 positions" sprite!).
Coding those sprites has been big fun! Their movement is affected by the variable scrolling speed, and there's a no scrolling area to be taken in count tho. The code I'm most proud of, is that one for the sprite hiding under the scrolling, where I have to calculate on the fly, store and then restore all the AND and XOR it would need.
Bouncing the swinging logo above the scrolling has teached me that there's one single moment, in a couple of cycles, where to trick the first badline in order to put a new value of $FF06 (vertical scroll stuff, for non-coders) and then adjust $FF1F too.
The Csabo logo, courtesy of Unreal, thank you mate! I decided to let the lower part works like water. If you look closer at it, you will see that I did not simply directly use a sin table for those 9-10 one-pixel rows: the highest line moves in the range of 2 only, the lower by 4, the two lower by 6, the six that are left in the whole 8. Hope this little particular pays in terms of prospective 
Aaah the TED tune! Not bad, and theme bearing, but rough here and there, and shorter and with few variations than I wanted to. I had to finish it in a hurry, unfortunately, at 4 am just before the day Hell, I did it in time, anyway And I've finally come back to TEDplay after so many years!
Ah! Try watching the demo on a real machine, you will notice a couple of particulars to keep in mind for anyone's next releases:
- because of the famous video frequency mismatching, no way: reading scrolltexts on real iron beats EVERY emulation attempt;
- YAPE plays the audio with a very little delay, frustrating all the time I've spent in synchronize the big C S B O gfx with the music; not a big deal, but just to be warned for future stuff: DO THE SYNC ON REAL IRON!
In the very end, hope you enjoyed the grossy idea about the "A" in CSABO
Ah, and happy birthday+1 Csabo! 
PS: the whole demotime, from the first black screen to the conditional wrapon, takes something less than 29 minutes! What the heck, do I really did it? :v
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