viznut / demos

[startup screenshot of an unexpanded vic-20]

After some years of MS-DOS democoding I decided to try out some true hard-core programming. The rules of the first Alternative Party in 1998 encouraged the use of unusual platforms, so I decided to dig up my old trusty Commodore VIC-20 and write a real demo for it. I chose to stick on the unexpanded machine (with 5120 bytes and 1024 nybbles of RAM) in order to increase the challenge.

Since then, I've released several demos for the unexpanded VIC-20 (some of them requiring a disk drive). Altho many of my demos have been technical show-offs, I've always attempted to keep the presentation entertaining. A lot of the distinctive "PWP style" can also be found in my VIC-20 work.

[a picture from robotic liberation]

On the new-born VIC-20 demoscene of the early 2000's there was a lot of competition for "world-firsts" - that is, writing routines and other things that had never been done before with the unexpanded VIC-20. There was a lot to do, since there had never been an active demoscene on the VIC-20 before the turn of the millennium. I was also the first to implement some routines, including:

[the doom engine from impossiblator 2

Due to the memory restrictions I needed to represent the music and graphics in as few bytes as possible. Music is quite essential for a demo, and sometimes I needed to squeeze a self-contained player in just over a hundred bytes.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that I have participated in the main demo compo of the Alternative Party a total of three times (1998, 2002 and 2003), always with the trustworthy VIC-20, ending up first every single time. I've also participated in the "oldskool demo compo" at the Assembly in 2001, 2002 and 2003, and ended up 2nd, 1st and 1st respectively.

[a cube from robotic liberation]

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