 Description | [ PDF presentation ]
This festival was to show the different self-exression arts, including the computer music, graphics, demo.
The retro 8 bit machines had a separate part (there was an Amiga presenation in a pub too :-) ).
I was invited to the Ha!wangarda! 2016 festival in Poland, Krakow by YERZMYEY.
It was a "last minute" idea to involve some other computers and maybe Hungarians too (as of V4, and it is an EU sponsored festival)
In Poland the Commodore Plus/4 is a really unkown machine.
The ZX Spectrum, the ATARI and the C64 have very strong scene there, but lot of them never heard any details about Plus/4.
So the idea was to give some new information about the machine for the Polish sceners, and to show some of the artistic potential of the machine.
(actually I do not define myself as an artist, but a graphic designer who uses up availabvle elements to create something new, or a collagist)
Because I am a graphician, and because of the ... average (khm, khm...) sound capabilities, I focused on the big palette and colorful pictures can be made with Plus/4.
Certainly YERZMYEY has his own separate block on ZX Spectrum music, and it was fantastic to see, how much work put into one music, just to fit the next snare into the pattern.
He showed the FM and AY music, also the latest MOD like approach, just to understand from where the ZX music came from.
There were a lot of visitors, who had no clue about the 8bit stuff, just were interested (so it was not a 100% geek festival, like Arok, where everone is a programmer, graphician, etc), so I quickly put together a D64 file with HFLI pictures, presenting famous or nice buildings/architects. So the visiors had to find out the city the picture represents. Maybe the pictures were not so great, but only 50-60% of them was found out :-)
The "264 series" presentations was not perfect, just want to give in a few minutes an impression about the history of the machine, the capabilities, where was the scene, where is it now. I had to keep in my the "less geek" visitors, but frankly speaking the last pages were less interesting for them... Also, there were some misleading information, eg. I did not mention the CPU benchmark, that Plus/4 can do this only with switched off screen.
And sure there could be some other mistakes too. Sorry for that, I tried to do my best.
So, all in all, it was a quick 10 minutes presentation about our machine, may generate some extra interest in the otherwise huge Polish scene.
(we already have some representative of them, as some of the best graphics on +4 were made by Polish artists )
Fun facts:
-Krakow is a FANTASTIC place to visit. I enjoyed every little minute of the town tour (organized by the festival), the personal trips I made inside and outside the old town.
Very nice town, the atmosphere is very close to Prague, but here the modern and ancient lives together in symbiosis.
So I highly suggest anyone to visit once in a lifetime KRAKOW. You will not regret that visit.
-The people I met were all very helpful and friendly. I did not have a SINGLE negative experience in three days, even the Polish police who stopped me was very polite and patient (and spoke English) [I cannot tell about the local ones, choose one, hehe ]
-Polish beer is fantastic :-) I like them more, then the German ones. The historical ones were close in taste to the old Belgoan ones, or Trappist, Leffe beers.
-I met some fantastic sceners, namely NITRO (C64), HELLBOJ (Spectrum), and certainly it was great to meet personally YERZMYEY
-It was kind of hilarious to see a extreme modded ATARI 800XL. It has SD card, Dual Pokey sound card, 1MB SRAM memory, 65816 Turbo Card, and the latest development, VBXE video card (has fantastic new features, like 320x200x1024 cols even 640x480x16), all all of these inside the 800XL housing! Certainly the demos were up to this standard. |
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