Tuesday, July 18, 2017

Things Not To Do


Electronic Images released one of the most hilarious Atari ST demos I have ever seen. I did try and record a video but my emulator missed some graphics and also the sine scroller (which is beautiful) was jerking like it had a nervous twitch. So I burned the image to a floppy disk and it was perfect - because nothing beats the real hardware!!

Download this utterly stupid demo from AtariMania then turn up the volume and enjoy the show.

3 comments:

  1. Somewhat legendary and even got an ST Format review... Don't let people shoot you in the crotch and then piss on you! XD

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  2. I wonder if the scroller jitter may be a screen refresh rate thing? I decided I may as well boot it up in STeEm to see how much of it I properly rememebered, and it was a bit jumpy at the rather odd 40Hz my laptop screen keeps defaulting back to (no matter how often I reset it). However, against my expectations, when reset to the normal 60Hz, it was silky smooth. I had expected it to need a 50Hz (which I don't have) in order to run properly, but maybe either the demo defaults to 60Hz screen mode, or my emulator's set to force it / boot in NTSC mode and I forgot about it? It didn't seem to have quite as tall an image (including borders) as I might otherwise have expected, either...

    It wasn't fully trouble free though. When it got to the credits and end screen there was a bizarre jumpiness / vertical jitter where the text continually (but randomly) bounced up and down by what appears to be 28 ST pixels. No idea what that was all about. Couldn't be a page/buffer flipping bug because it was still going on even with the static end screen. Also the colour palette seemed to be a bit off on some of the sprites (spurious white pixels that were probably supposed to be black / transparent), but that may well be true to the original demo and just be lazy porting from the Amiga where they might have been coded as sprites or part of a dual playfield (both of which provide hardware, palette-entry based transparency)...

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    Replies
    1. Hello mate, sometimes it's just emulation on my (old) iMac which i think has a screen refresh of something like 70+Hz, so getting a smooth horizontal scroller (for example) is difficult to catch. Nigh on impossible. The demo of course looked great on real hardware.
      I've got an old MacMini here which is connected to an LCD TV - so I can set it to 50Hz. Looks great!! But it's slow and the hdd is sooooo slow, so ironically I cannot capture from that machine.
      One day I'll afford a new computer... one day...

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