pouët.net

Hi! Extra power-up for all here and thanks for the feedback! Investigations
on noise and glitches must commence! This 'Ham7' was a new realm for me.
I had heard about it some 3-4 years ago, but it took for a while to get
some other projects out of the way.

Before the Therican, there was an experimental period of roughly half a year.
I tested out how to dither 12bit palette 'Ham7' colours so, that as many
colours could accessed with as few planes on the screen as possible. Therican
uses only 2 bitplanes (4+2 and 3+1). Instead of Revision-style 320x180 screen
size, I wanted to have the entire screen in use with size approximately
352x270. This also caused some issues. The hardware scrolling + sprites +
overscan ... Is not easy to get it right, especially if your daily driver is
(still) an outdated fs-uae or such.

Some of the experiments resulted into "dual-scanline-dithering" and into
a vague resolution of 2x2 with extra traits. The HAM artefacts increase the
resolution. All 352 pixels on each scanline are accessable. Blitting a bob
into odd or even X or Y coordinate causes a different colour variation of
the bob for free. This way the red component can be used as green and so on.

Currently three different import methods exist for this mode. The actual
amount of different colours on the screen never really exceeds 32. Still,
the human eye appears to blend colours into some other perceptive colour.
Not a new thing in demoscene, no, not at all, but still interesting to play
with. And we can always take a look at the 1800's impressionists and other
colour geniouses in further history.

The dithering can form about 128 different "colours" by using 2+2+2+2 bits
on 2 by 2 area. This resulted into a fixed palette which has 4 steps of
RED, 4 steps of GREEN and 8 steps of BLUE. After browsing through hundreds
of different ways to use BPL5DAT and BPL6DAT words by changing them on each
scanline, a few good values were found with my tired eyes.

The effects in this production were put together very quickly. I'm merely
scratching the unlocking system of the surface, so to speak. Personally, I
wish everyone a good and exciting journey with 'Ham7'. During the way I
already got some ideas for better effects.

And yes, the animations and logo were drawn by hand. First in GIMP and then
in my own pixel editing tool which has all the exporters for new formats. 9
frames for the Tin-can man and other 9 frames for the "cyborg therian" with
a fancy tail.

For 'Ham7' I could see some game-dev potential. Good issue is also
whether AGA machines could also display 'Ham7' or maybe even benefit
from similar solutions. Fun thing is that the 'mode' used can display
huge blitter-objects on the screen. Therican has 10 bobs in size of 64x74.
This could be even more, because your blitter feels very strong again,
even on an overscan screen!

About the sound. First part is obviously just some audio DMA-noise for Cinter
rendering samples on the background. This entry was my first actual use case
of Cinter. It is a very interesting player which feels like half of it is in
some invisible form! We first had a plan to make just 4K intro. After a week
I was sure I can fit everything into 8K. And ... well yeah. Then came 16K and
finally the size actually exceeded 32K with 84 bytes.

For the fun of artificial size limitations, on the Deadline party friday,
I posted a very hard question on Zymosis Boozing Society TG channel: "How
to get rid of 84 bytes?"

Thanks to Saviour, the same question was also seen on the CSDB forums.
Answer to such a broad question might get really puzzling. In my case the
final solution was to simplify the code without breaking it and removing
some shades from the logo. Earlier logo did look better.

Thanks to Slummy for some practical info about using Cinter.

Also for this production, I'm using my own home-brew basic-like language.
It has a compiler for 68000. This is all still unreleased, because a lot
of testing and patience is still needed. I will return to this subject
some day.

Blackwine commented at the party, that 32K intros don't exist and they
will fall into 40K intro category. This is true, but I simply didn't have
enough time to gather some 8Kb of Shrinklered party reports to be included
into the end of the production. Perhaps next time!

Thanks to Bifat for many test runs on the real harware. I'm now convinced
that I need to get a network card on my Amiga 500 as well. It's not
luxury, it's just a way to improve noise and glitches to the max!

Oh, only one complaint about the Deadline party place. The whole place is
really awesome, but the big screen was located too low. If you display
something on the lower border, this can't be seen from a distance. Well.
It was crowded this year, wasn't it?

On the ADF there's some ASCII goodies created by Allanon/Depth.
Greetings back for all! Party ON! (Alt-party starts in a few days. This time,
I live just around the corner...)

Greippi (8.10.2024 HKI)