The article branches out to Glen Fisher and Dave Dixon, who were the first to develop a demo using this effect in 1980.
While modern demos easily outperform the early usages of retro tricks on any system, and this in itself is highly impressive and a feast of its own, I share the author's homage to the early discoverers.
My background is the C64, and I had my share of high-profile participation as a member of groups like Beastie Boys, X-Rated, for example.
To this day, I remember talking to first-time trickery explorers like Einstein of Upfront and Honey from 1001 Crew or Radwar back then and later on.
Especially Einstein was a nice chap. It seems so far away compared with today, but back then it was pretty normal to hang on a low-level computer like that with a TV CRC as a monitor, destroying your eyesight for 8 hours or longer with no interruption.
There was plenty of time, especially during the holidays. And the Scandinavians had an "unfair" advantage: hard winters with few sunny hours, so what else could you do than do stuff on a "breadbox"? ;)
We all had some schemes or sketches of effects on paper. It was pretty normal, what today is perceived as weird: having plenty of guilt-free and blame-free time, and utilizing pen and paper.
There wasn't any other option. Stuck? Well, no Google, etc. Calling someone else? Whom? And even then, at the time (80th), telephone calls were expensive, and especially calling someone in a different country was kind of novel and cost a fortune. So resort to - pen and paper. This was cheaper, but express delivery also costs you dearly.
Also, you had to come up with something in exchange for a bargain. And exactly this information sharing and this special mix of curiosity and need for discovery was a topic I remember fondly talking and marveling about with Einstein and some other coders.
Different times, easier times despite the Cold War, which loomed as background noise.
masswerk · 1h ago
> And the Scandinavians had an "unfair" advantage
:-)
> the Cold War, which loomed as background noise
A peculiar state between mid-term doom and business as usual, anyway.
Thank you for contributing a relevant framing to this.
michalpleban · 1h ago
This kind of resembles "racing the beam" that was required to program the Atari 2600 - timing your assembly code just right to modify the video display at a precise location as the screen is being drawn. Kudos to the authors!
masswerk · 36m ago
Very much so, with the small difference that the VCS features the `WSYNC` strobe to sync the CPU with the start of the scan-line, but here we don't have even this.
(Having said that, for something more complex, like an animated game display, you'd probably approach this very similarly: do the business/game logic in VBLANK, have a timer set for the start of the visible picture and run your display kernel. Now you can only hope that you wouldn't be off more than half a scan-line… That is, more realistically, you might do this only every 2nd or 3rd frame.)
michalpleban · 10m ago
Thanks, good point about the WSYNC. Being a Commodore guy, I was not aware of it.
While modern demos easily outperform the early usages of retro tricks on any system, and this in itself is highly impressive and a feast of its own, I share the author's homage to the early discoverers.
My background is the C64, and I had my share of high-profile participation as a member of groups like Beastie Boys, X-Rated, for example.
To this day, I remember talking to first-time trickery explorers like Einstein of Upfront and Honey from 1001 Crew or Radwar back then and later on.
Especially Einstein was a nice chap. It seems so far away compared with today, but back then it was pretty normal to hang on a low-level computer like that with a TV CRC as a monitor, destroying your eyesight for 8 hours or longer with no interruption.
There was plenty of time, especially during the holidays. And the Scandinavians had an "unfair" advantage: hard winters with few sunny hours, so what else could you do than do stuff on a "breadbox"? ;)
We all had some schemes or sketches of effects on paper. It was pretty normal, what today is perceived as weird: having plenty of guilt-free and blame-free time, and utilizing pen and paper.
There wasn't any other option. Stuck? Well, no Google, etc. Calling someone else? Whom? And even then, at the time (80th), telephone calls were expensive, and especially calling someone in a different country was kind of novel and cost a fortune. So resort to - pen and paper. This was cheaper, but express delivery also costs you dearly.
Also, you had to come up with something in exchange for a bargain. And exactly this information sharing and this special mix of curiosity and need for discovery was a topic I remember fondly talking and marveling about with Einstein and some other coders.
Different times, easier times despite the Cold War, which loomed as background noise.
:-)
> the Cold War, which loomed as background noise
A peculiar state between mid-term doom and business as usual, anyway.
Thank you for contributing a relevant framing to this.
(Having said that, for something more complex, like an animated game display, you'd probably approach this very similarly: do the business/game logic in VBLANK, have a timer set for the start of the visible picture and run your display kernel. Now you can only hope that you wouldn't be off more than half a scan-line… That is, more realistically, you might do this only every 2nd or 3rd frame.)