2wice knightly by Maggie Team
.-. .--. ___ ___ ___ ( __) .--. .--. ; _ \ ( )( )( )(''") / \ / \ (___)` | | | | | | | | | | .-. ; | .-. ; ' ' | | | | | | | | | |(___) | | | | / / | | | | | | | | | | ___ | ' _.' / / | | ; ' | | | | | '( ) | .'.-. / '____ ' `-' `-' ' | | ' `-' | ' `-' / (_______) '.__.'.__.' (___) `.__,' `.__.' ___ ___ ___ ___ ( ) .-. ( ) ( ) ( ) | | ___ ___ .-. ( __) .--. | | .-. | |_ | | ___ ___ | | ( ) ( ) \ (''") / \ | |/ \ ( __) | | ( )( ) | | ' / | .-. . | | ; ,-. ' | .-. . | | | | | | | | | |,' / | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ___ | | | | | | | . '. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |( ) | | | ' | | | | `. \ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ' `--' | | | \ . | | | | | | ' `-' | | | | | ' `-' ; | | ___ | | (___ ) (___) (___)(___) (___) `.__. | (___)(___) `.__. (___) ( )' | ( `-' ; ; `-' ' `.__. .__.' -+*%$%*+-+*%$%*+-+*%$-+ Da legendary read me first! +*%$-+*%$%*+-+*%$%*+- "Do you see the hand behind the strings? If not, then don't ask stupid questions!" Remember this phrase, it may be significant later on.. W e' r e b a c k ! ,.-=~'`^`'~=-.,__,.-=~'`^`'~=-.,__,.-=~'`^`'~=-., After our stellar debut (Don't you mean sunk without trace debut?) 'Freak in the Window Cameo', we Wee Knights have returned for a second bash at this ascii demo making mayhem. This time around, we've opted for a more ambitious and hopefully crowd- pleasing approach with our new release, '2wice Knightly'. This features a number of sights and sounds to appeal to the audience. If everything goes to plan, and as the demo is pretty much finished now, I don't see why not, then we should be showing this at the forthcoming 'Sundown' party on the 16th July 2016. I guess this is a good venue for a new Wee Knights production. As the population of Budleigh Salterton like looking closely at elderly things, including themselves in a mirror, no doubt! Anyway, this time around, I'd like to talk a little bit more about the making of this thing... U s e d t o o l s ! ,.-=~'`^`'~=-.,__,.-=~'`^`'~=-.,__,.-=~'`^`'~=-., After a little casual experimentation, and working out where some vital but well hidden ascii characters were hidden on the Mac keyboard, it turns out that the Mac's own default 'TextEdit' program was up to the job of initial creation of the ascii goodness. Once that was up and running, we were away Which leads nicely to the next stage, which is getting them into an Atari friendly format. Hatari, the friendly Atari emulator is extremely convenient for all sorts of reasons. Including creative stuff like this. Pretty much all further tools needed were to be found here. Hatari also does a decent impersonation of a Falcon these days, which is nice. The Everest text editor is the final destination for my previously created ascii text files. It converts the raw plain text into something that an Atari ST series is at home with. Also, the overwrite mode for final editing is very very handy indeed. The chip tune side of the audio was composed on 'Music Mon', and not just any old Music Mon, but only the original and crusty V1.0 itself! This has a nice tracker style interface and is very easy to work with. You can get lost for hours playing with the sound editor on its own. I'll have to have a play with the latest version sometime. A number of samples were converted and edited by the 'Audacity' Audio editor back on the Mac. It was able to save out to an STE friendly sample format, so these can slot straight into the rest of the demo. A few websites played a part in the creation of this demo, but specific mention flies out to patorjk.com/ This is where all the kickass fonts used here and in the earlier demo came from. They have a neat text to ascii font converter. This also helped in the creation of some additional non-text graphics as well. Anyway, that lot kept us going nicely. We now look at the tricky issue of *cough!* not entirely original material used in the demo. A n o t e o n n o n - o r i g i n a l m a t e r i a l s _,.-=~'`^`'~=-.,__,.-=~'`^`'~=-.,__,.-=~'`^`'~=-.,.-=~'`^`'~=-.,_ As well as drawing a lot of stuff found here, I also searched around a lot of ascii-art collections for inspiration. I found lots! We firstly have to mention various animals, which were drawn by 'Ness', apart from Ted, we're not quite sure where he originally came from? I might mention in passing that I did a few changes to make these more at home in the Atari character set. The floppy disk pseudo loading screen was adapted from something originally made by Philip Kaulfuss. The attractive 'lady in a bandana' still picture was done by 'bug', albeit added to a little bit by myself. The tiling patterns were pre-made by someone, but there does not seem to be any author name? The cubes in the 'Cubism' screen definitely came from somewhere too, but the author eludes me yet again. The rather excellent 'Four Candles' original still drawing was by 'apx' With reference to the boat in 'Boaty McBoatface', I'm not even sure where I found this any more? It resembles a gif to ascii conversion, but manages to carry this off decently at quite a low resolution, ascii-speaking. I will point out that all animations were painstakingly assembled from disparate parts and brought to life, in an agonised hand built manner, by me! Most of the sound samples used were fairly 'generic' in nature, including the speech synth extracts. However, mention will be made of audio recognisable from 'Captain Pugwash', Monty Python's Holy Grail, and the Two Ronnies. Needless to say, all copyrights for third party materials appearing in here remain with their respective owners. H a r d w a r e r e q u i r e m e n t s _,.-=~'`^`'~=-.,__,.-=~'`^`'~=-.,__,.-=~'`^`'~=-.,.-=~'`^`'~=-.,_ The demo engine we are currently using, was authored in 2003 and is not the quickest. I had hopes of getting this to run reasonably on a bog- standard Atari STE. It turns out you will need a 16 MHz machine, so the Atari Falcon will be the starting point for most people. If you drop a bit of extra speed in on your Hatari settings, that will also do nicely. C o m i n g u p n e x t t i m e ? ,.-=~'`^`'~=-.,__,.-=~'`^`'~=-.,__,.-=~'`^`'~=-., No funny stories about Knights of Old to finish off with? - Nope! There is another "demo" planned. This will feature more in the way of actual effects, or cunning emulations of same. This production is due for November 2016, at the forthcoming 'Sillyventure' party in Gdansk. In fact, this was planned to be the follow up to 'Cameo', until I decided that some of the material drawn or collected could be diverted and made into a third production, this one! Which has actually become the second release. Erm, confused? I sure am! Anyway, if there is going to be a final word, I'll leave it to Ted. Take it away Ted! .---_____------_____----____---. ,___ ___, | Voyez-vous la mai | ( i )""""( i ) : derriere les cordes? : ----- - ",; `-- ;;" - ,_____' Si non, alors ne posez | ) >'~'< ( \______ pas des questions stupides! ; ,,,,,, ~ <_O_> ~,,,,,,, '.___--_____----________--___--' ( O ) ( ) ( O ) --- |;:: |::. " | ''' ( ] [ ) ''' \\ |;::-..|::: |-..- ',,, \,,,,/ ,,, |\\ |;:: |-..-' (oo )'""""' ( oo) ||\\ '-::-'' ''' ''' || \\ CiH - June 2016... Very very last minute add-on note... 14.7.16 Well this demo has been ready to go for more than a month now, and has been sitting quietly, ignored for the last few weeks. In view of the convulsive political change of direction that has been decided upon, I thought of adding a 'Brexit tribute' as a last minute thing, made out of pictures of Boris Johnson looking gobsmacked, as if he were saying "Who me?!" However, a real world event has coldly taken precedence over this, with the sudden death of a long term Atari Scener, Steve Jones, also known as 'Bod'. Bod was a member of Effect, and promised great things for them. He was best known for his ongoing project to revamp and improve the classic arcade shooter, R-Type for the Atari STE. Judging by the build released last Christmas, he was well on the way to getting this one done almost to an arcade faithful version. When he was at STNICCC last year, it was apparent that he was not in a good place, health and lifestyle-wise. It seemed that he had learnt lessons from that trip and was starting to turn things around, but unfortunately, this was not to happen. The only lesson for the rest of us is that we've all got less time than we'd like, and we should not waste it on pointless quarrels, emnity and bitterness, within the scene or elsewhere. So I have changed the ending a little bit, to reflect a while on Bod's passing on. All the best - C!H
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