What’s this? A new release and not a demo party in sight? I wanted to maintain some momentum this year with the goal of entering another demo into the next Syntax scene party. To make that possible, I figure it’s wise to keep active on the C64 and do a few smaller releases over the year. So with that, I present to you a small intro – 3172 – which is heavily influenced by old skool intros and cracktros.
assembly
All posts tagged assembly
Recently I wanted to use a set of sprites from one of my most loved demos of all time – Camel Park / Camelot. Released about 20 years ago, I watched it a lot over the years and still return to it for some nice classic effects and some great tracks. One of the parts has a nice plasma with a cool font used for the sprite scroller. I wanted to use this font in a few things I’m trying out (saves me having to design up a large font set for a sprite scroller (plus I love the font. How can I use it I wondered.. I decided to look at how to extract the font from the demo and get it into a format I could use.
Amica paint is a C64 tool designed to create bitmap images. I’ve never used it myself, but I know of people that do. One person in particular who has helped me out with some graphics (JSL) uses this a lot. The bitmaps he has sent me have been in this format. To get them into my productions, I have to jump through a few hoops, so I decided to create a script which could export them into a format ready to go into my .asm files. This post will go into those hoops a little bit, along with the script to make my life easier when extracting the bitmap data.
A very important component of any demo is having a kick arse SID chip track backing it. That means, we need to be able to play a track while performing some mastery of the raster bar. It was something I was dreading looking at, but turned out to be a very straight forward thing and only ended up taking about 10 minutes to get working.
It feels like a long time since my last code post (and I’d say it has been). After being incredibly motivated last year after attending my first Syntax demo party, I got stuck into creating a few simple effects. Other interesting projects came up and my C64 demo coding took a back seat. Five weeks ago I got the email reminder about Syntax and decided there would be enough time to get something together. That did happen and I achieved my goal of entering a production into the Syntax#14 old skool demo category.
The last 5 weeks have been incredibly motivating, so while the energy is strong, I’m going to get back into posting up some details on things I learn once again. I’ve put a few things into the Syntro demo I’d like to cover in separate posts over the coming week or so.
To start with though, an effect (if you could call it that) which I’ve been interested in learning about for awhile is removing the top and bottom borders on the C64 display.
