...is super compatible: works on any disk drive (or SD2IEC), works on NTSC machines (making it the first and only NTSC megademo), and should gracefully stop on pretty much any Commodore computer.
...was made by 24 people (Ati, aNdy, Bubis, Chronos, Csabo, Degauss, gerliczer, Harry, Kichy, Lavina, Luca, Mad, MMS, Moldi, Murphy, Ninja, Nukem, PPCS, siz, Skoro, Spektro, 5tarbuck, TMR, Unreal), from 6 countries (Canada, England, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy)
...contains 20 parts (plus an intro and credits), making it the biggest demo in the CD series
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Congratulations for everyone who participated in the demo. I'm proud to be part of this project. And thanks to all the people who worked very hard to make CD5 happen.
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Wow, it was fantastic! So many colorful effects, shining out all the nice rich color palette of the Plussy! (Except mine, that was B&W, haha!)
Special thanks for Csabo for all his fantastic contribution and great support.
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! You guys are aces. Thanks for the chance of being part of the project. Wish I could have participated with a somewhat less substandard part.
@Spektro: Pity, that it is so hard to notice the scrollers on the sides of the screen. I didn't see it in the stream at all, and even when I watched it in an emulator, I could almost not perceive their presence. One shade lighter grey and/or bolder font would've done the trick, and it'd have been easier on the audience.
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Wow!! Congratulations! Awesome demo, every part is a gem. Thanks to all involved.. And Csabo for making it possible, too. It was fun watching it on the stream!! You guys are awesome!
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.
I have just wached the Crackers' Demo 5 and I enjoyed every bite of it!
I liked all the parts, it was a pleasure to watch them.
I always said to myself at the and of every parts: Wow! That was fantastic! What will be like the next part? I can hardly wait for it!
Every part was exceptional, but my favourite one was the Bud Spencer one, because I am attached to Bud spencer very much, because he was the movie hero of my childhood. Thank you for commemorating him.
Special thanks to Csabo for his difficult work, as I could see he participated nearly every part of this demo.
I wish I could have taken a part in this masterpiece, too.
I don't care about your place at the competition, for me you are the number one!
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! I'm honered to be part of this release. It's full of works of art. I wasn't planning to contribute but since Csabo asked, I couldn't say no. Unfortunately there was very little time left when I started to make my part.
@gerliczer: Yes, it's a shame that the scrollers are nearly invisible They are demonstrating variable width fonts. They looked ok on emulator (VICE) and on my Plus/4. I should have made them lighter and fixed the color blocks on the image.
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Fantastic prize! Woww...awesome! Btw I were added the most of the credits to the contributed parts, please ask if anyone is missing! Was Great guys!
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! I think this is by far the best in the series. After all i think its incredible to have 20 very strong parts done in only 3 months. And thanks again to csabo for all the work he did!
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Ah and i forget to mention: The Arkanoid starting part was super awesome. It's almost a 1 to 1 copy, and if it would have been released in the 80s it would have been a real killer port.
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! We started a trip to Croatia today but decided to stop at the Balaton for an afternoon and night to avoid Sunday frenzy on the Croatian Highways. So I’m lucky enough to see the release, sitting here now with a beer and my laptop on the balcony looking at the lake. And guess what, yesterday was my 40th birthday. So it's a really cool present. Great Stuff, thanks to all who participated and made this possible to happen. Especially Csabo the Superman.
From the technical point of view, I would vote for Murphy’s part. Black magic aspect, as usual, throphy goes to Bubis. If I consider the solid effect tsunami, it’s Luca in da house with his great and sophisticated part. For popular culture presentation, it’s Sin City. : I am a big fan, too. If I’m sentimental (hell yeah, who is not, who codes on 8bit?) it’s the Bud part. If it’s some gaming urge then who else, Kichy is here to satisfy the needs. What a perfect gem! Classy happyness and joy, Csabo makes the world square. Great presentation. Ahh that twised scroll, thanks Ati n Chronos!!! Btw all those girls in the parts.. Brings back teenage memories... Not to forget all those cool oldschool parts… It was sooo good to see new stuff from all the guys, Ninja, Skoro, Moldi, Nukem, Everyone puts a little bit of himself to this, from their other interests, etc. It’s an honor to watch. Bauknecht, Cosine, Absence rocked again with those effects I don’ even know the names of. LOL The intro and outro make a decent frame for the demo. Thanks for that, too!! Mine, I guess my part was for the longest time in the making and had the most man hours total spent on. It was a really slow process with big breaks, spanning for something like a decade. I hope that the next release will be not so far away as this one was.
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! I have to tell you guys I'm really impressed. Great graphics, musics and demo effects. Congratulations for everyone who was part of this megademo.
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Thanks for letting me play for the first time in the Plus/4 world. Next time I hope to compose something better, given more time T.M.R
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Ah aNdy! I liked your tune so much! I'll ask TMR for the music file in orde to include it into HVTC. The same messages goes to Degauss and 5tarbuck ;)
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Cd5 rulez foreva! How many great parts! Thank you Csabo the support and your hard work! Bubis, i dont know what is your effect, but it looks fuckin' good! The party was good, thanx to organizers. I'm a lucky man, because i met with siz too on Friday evening, and i saw his old-new game, his plus4 with Jiffydos and Sizmon, with serial port indicator leds, with sd card readers, etc...He is a professional party people. Saturday morning i saw castle of Somló too. Thank you Széna szálló for very nice apartment in Magyarpolány and thank you my family for 2days freetime! It was a very nice weekend.
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! i've just pushed my part's code to Github - https://github.com/magic-roundabout/cd5-part-264 - Luca, aNdy's music is in the data directory and will need a PRG header added to load it at $8000
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! I enjoyed the full show, Bud Spencer's anims warmed my heart, but for me Arkanoid was shocking, how good it was. Congrats to all!
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! This has been quite a heroic effort by Csabo, who composed almost 10 tunes, organized the whole thing, managed changes of mind of all kinds, coded his part, opening and ending parts, and fixed several of the incoming entries once he has checked'em all one by one. And I would add Chronos too into this hall of fame, due to his total willingness to draw graphics for anyone.
Moreover, as someone has pointed out, this is the biggest Crackers' Demo chapter ever, merging altogether both glories from the past and brand new entries. Honestly, I've been very busy at work in the former two useful months, then I had my first slice of holidays, and 15 days of sun sea drinks and gigs have kept me quite distant from anything scene-related. Back the 11th of July, it has been a crazy run to put up a decent part into the strict deadline, but our common luck is, I bet, to have somewhere a folder with unused code where to start from, instead of coding it from scratch totally. Of course, signs of hurry-driven goofs here and there are quite evident (e.g., see how bad the first screen got deleted from the right by charcolumns, I really didn't noticed it until it was too late to fix ), and I've also been hit by my procrastination about learning to use TEDzakker! My contribution makes deep usage of autocode, speedcode and sometimes unexomizes bitmaps onthefly. Due to the speedcode, the last double buffered 9colors HUE-rotational ECM plasma steals all the memory till $ED80, and that means there's $0F80 left for the global music ($0FC0 once I used free slices of $0200 page). TEDzakker would have been the perfect choice to cover it due to its versatility, but I hadn't previously found the time to test it, because when I tried, that was the time Mad asked to me Knaecketracker's tunes for his game. I promise that the first in the to-do list after this coopdemo will be learn and train about TEDzakker. Anyway, in the very end, the experience saved from using Ingo's tracker helped me a lot to achieve a somewhat decent tune in that tiny memory area...
My part has been delivered the 27th, after having faced some of the toughest bugs ever to me (thanks Ingo, you also originally suggested the HUE rotation in that plasma!), meanwhile Csabo was managing lotta other things, I really dunno how he did all that work... The final result is absolutely massive, and I really hope that a bit of the anarcodemocractic spirit of the series has leaked out even for the outer ppl attending the show! I've been quite surprised by the GOTU's part, which probably should have been fantastic to see on the big screen, an absolutely mesmerizing experience! Too many features to cite them all, from the heartbreaking part by Degauss to the Bauknecht's marvel and the great Moldi's comeback! One note apart for KiCHY: we must WE DAMN MUST HAVE a proper release for that Arkanoid from-scratch conversion: I saw there are all the levels into that, not releasing a proper game would be PURE HERESY!
If something like that has been put together in three months, then (with more organizers would be better anyway) anything can be done even in the future, and I expect to do that and more, though family job life whatever. Thank you guys, for all this.
CD5 is absolutely awesome! Just a few highlights: - My fav is Csabo's "squares" flip disk part. What you did for the whole CD5 prod is huge! Thank you for bothering me for creating a part. - Lavina, you are a hardcore masochist if you really put this together in monitor. One of the best parts. - Murphy, very good TED trick idea and execution - All musicians: You gave me faith in TED music.
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Wonderful and very entertaining demo! It has a little bit of everything in it and the best thing for me is, that many people of the plus-4 scene participated in it.
I feel a little sorry, that i didn't contribute even something small. It would have gone into the direction of Bud Spencer or Sin City, because i love the connection between homecomputers and Film. Brings a lot of memories back. Maybe next time, if its desired from the initiators.
There should be more of this kind of cooperation and resulting demos..
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! yup, pure Monitor. Csabo knows.
I've never used anything else for assembler.
These effects I make (lense part in CD4 and this one in CD5) require lots of planning and manual coding. But this is changing now, I've been working on an application that would do the speedcode generation. I actually started planning it on paper the last time we were here in Lopar on Rab Island in Croatia in 2002. And now I'm working on it again. The last time we went home, I started programming it in Basic but got stuck really quick. Now it's in VBA and it's already working well, but does not output such an optimized code that I do manually. So if I would use this tool to generate the speedcode for the circle scroll engine it would probably output a working code but it would be longer and slower than what I did manually for CD5 (most of it years ago, Luca got a small screenshot preview back then, I recall).
I will probably try to generate this code and see what's the difference compared to my manual work.
So all is left is optimizing the VBA code that optimizes the speedcode generation. This is needed to push the boundaries further out to see what else is possible with this technique for effects.
This is a great mental challenge for me, I've always wanted to do this and once ready I'll release this tool for public use. It needs MS Excel.
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Lavina, it's better to store the parameters of the speedcode as data and write a small routine that uses that data to generate the speedcode. This is how I managed to fit Heartfixer into 16K for instance.
Btw, I lost the source code of Heartfixer 95% (HD crash) but I have managed to recover most of it recently. I am working on the full reconstuction of the demo and planning to release a 100% version with source code.
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Yes, speedcode+autocode rule, the final plasma from my part that unrolls till $ED80 originally is a ~$0D00 code... Wow, a reboot of Heartfixer 95%, can't wait to run it!
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! That's exactly what did you describe before to recursively build up the speedcode, a speedcode runtime generator. That's the way I've built up the six effects of my part's main stuff. Actually, autocode is the common nick I've assigned to that
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Kichy, to tell you the truth, my all time favourite C16 game was Arthur Noid, but your version seems to be better. So, I am really waiting the release :-) (heh, we already have a lot of great games from you and from Assassins (ASN)! thanks!)
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Some mixed considerations while adding the effects indexes: - Murphy's part looks like FPP but it should be graphics calculations, no TED tricks; - Csabo's fantastic part's title looks like written by splitting the raster in the right points in order to take advantage of the "snow" bug to build up the vertical borders for the single letters, am I right?
Murphy did a very interesting thing: He did scatter the rows of the four graphics along charsets. To pick individual rows of a graphic he's using the charset-address $ff13. he actually does four raster-splits per line to have four individual rows.
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Quite a smart code indeed! Anyway, the fight to recognize FPP from graphics manipulation continues Kiddin' of course, those are the jokes when you're tagging a release by its effects.
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Wow guys - You Rock! What a nice demo. some really kool demoparts. I like Luka's one and Baukneht's one a lot but as graphican I think the Cosine part look the best - like an Amiga demo - good job. Good to se Murphy back to coding Hoping for more from you.
Re: Crackers' Demo 5! Better late than never Aaah so the music has been composed on Knaecketracker, it would be nice to have the .kps source in order to enrich the collection...
Crackers' Demo 5!
