Posted By
Csabo
on 2024-09-19
20:34:29
|  Digital System
Today's Demo of the Day is Banzay Digi. @Chronos made a funny observation about it: the author greeted their Russian teacher, along with the usual sceners (TCFS, Pigmy, etc). (BTW, at that time, many of us - including me - were learning Russian in elementary school, it was mandatory.)
The demo is signed as "WRITTEN BY DGS". I figured I would look into this since I've been in contact with DGS before. He quickly responded; but alas, he did not write this demo. The site had that wrong, oops!
I kept looking at this and found some other interesting stuff. When reset is pressed, there's a second signature: "DUGO". I concluded that this is another person, who just happened also to use the same handle (perhaps Dugo Software). I added all these findings to the demo's page, and I kept looking. One thing that I want to note: this (currently unknown) scener, let's call him Dugo for now, sends an unkind message to another dude. Their name is pretty unique, I found a LinkedIn and a FB profile with it. If anyone would be up for it, they could try to contact them on the latter platform, and ask if they perhaps remember a friend from elementary or high school nicknamed "Dugo". Might be worth a shot 
I found some fragments, with Callisto's name, and referencing something called "Digital System". I did NOT recall that name, but after a quick search, Tarzan's New Catalog 2 provided a hit: there, it is indeed listed as a utility. I disassembled the code, and saw that some code was clearly "readable" (it made sense), but it was at the wrong location. Shot in the dark: let's relocate it... It almost worked, as far as having a working IRQ.
More digging, and I realized that I was looking at packed code. Since it appeared to be RLE, I figured i was worth a try to see if I could manually unpack it. After a couple of tries, I had it! Two command bytes are used: $BF (length) packs that many $00 bytes, and $CF (length) (byte) packs the given bytes.
After unpacking and relocating the code... it miraculously started up 
I did have to fix a few bytes manually, but otherwise colors, font, and code, all fell into place. This has not been seen by anyone in 36 years
Unfortunately it doesn't fully work: the code is waiting for a keypress, but then it crashes. Still, I'm very happy with this outcome: a bunch of stuff got fixed, and we have one new entry (even though it's not fully complete) in the database.
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Posted By
Luca
on 2024-09-20
02:43:51
 | Re: Digital System
Wow @Csabo, this is a pretty awesome work! The ancient Hungarian scene of the Plus/4 is still far from being fully rebuilt, and this is a fundamental tile to the whole scenario's mosaic.
In this precise moment, I'm reading a precious book called "Crackers", a first of what seems to flood into a triad of publications overall, aiming expressly to the Atari ST scene, and this text finds its core generator from the memories of the French demoscene (does a French demoscene really exist? Wow!). Taking count of this, I'm sooo surprised about a certain lack of interest about OUR scene, despite of the fundamental role that it got – in larger or thinner rate depending by our personal stories each of us – into the lives of any of us. Others mutate these infos in pure gold like the book I cited above, possibly we might have a feeling of negligibleness about our story, which looks like a WRONG sensation to me!
Short note about the Russian language taught in Hungary at that time. Years ago, @KiCHY ignited a wonderful project about a C16 game with classy minimal graphics, hence I drew a hires title picture in order to make it very saving once packed. The global style of the graphics suggested me to give to the titlescreen – and as a consequence, to the game's plot – the look of an imaginary Soviet cartoon from the 60ies, also by adding a subtitle to the game written in Russian. I loved that idea so much to push it to the author (a mistake I didn't after, and I won't in the future, repeat again!), but KiCHY absolutely didn't like that, and didnt' like it in a way which can be described as "historically painful". In result, he dropped, me and the project, shame on me and my silly inappropriate insistence!
Service note: KiCHY let's step back to that game, we can still do that! ;)
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Posted By
MMS
on 2024-09-20
14:55:42
 | Re: Digital System
LOL, I learned for 8 years Russian, but no way I can speak or understand anything... Unfortunately.
We were the Hungarian Resistance!
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Posted By
Lavina
on 2024-09-21
06:55:18
 | Re: Digital System
I understand and can speak a bit of Russian... A learned it for 4 years in elementary and then life threw it at me again in adulthood.
Nice detective work btw Csabó!
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2024-09-23
16:38:59
| Re: Digital System
Indeed, that appears to be the author's earliest work. What's odd to me... that honestly, for 1988, this is excellent stuff. If one takes a closer look at what the utility is doing, the screen, the code, and even the font(!!!) is at $0800 (to leave room for the digi). That's honestly not that trivial to code, especially without modern cross-assemblers. So yeah, I'm geeking out a little.
To me, this shows a deep understanding of code and the machine. Therefore it's even more surprising that the author doesn't recall anything about these utilities (they mentioned that seeing this was news to them)
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Posted By
Lavina
on 2024-09-24
04:59:45
| Re: Digital System
Which brings us to the fact that how much time has passed which brings us to the fact that we are really getting old
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