pouët.net

I'm glad to announce that Assembly Summer will be held at 2.-5.8.2016 at Messukeskus, Helsinki. We will again have lots of compos for you to participate and the scene lounge, introduced last year, will be there as well (bigger and better)!

.. and the competitions are:
Real-time category

• GameDev
  
• Demo
  
• 64k Intro
  
• 4k Intro
  
• 1k Intro
  
• Oldskool demo*
  
• Real Wild
  

Short film

Music category

• Fast music
  
• Listening music
  
• Dance music
  

Graphics category

• Fast graphics
  
• Freestyle
  
• Photo
  

* The platforms for oldskool demo are following:

PC:
-Pentium 133MHz
-Tseng Labs ET6000
-Gravis Ultrasound Extreme (SB Pro compatible)
-32MB RAM
-DOS

Amiga:
-AGA: 68060/66MHz, 2MB Chip RAM / 32MB Fast RAM, no RTG or AHI, 3.x
-OCS (8371 Agnus, 8362 Denise): 68000/7.09MHz, 512k Chip RAM / 512k Slow RAM, 1.3

Atari Falcon:
-68060/66MHz
-14MB ST RAM / 32MB Fast RAM

Atari ST/STe
-1MB

Atari 130XE

Vic 20 + 1541

C64 + 1541 + AR6

C16/+4 + 1541

Spectrum
-128k (+2)

Amstrad CPC 6128

MSX1/2
-128k max

(I hope I didn't typo anything this time! :D)

Compo rules will be online soon and some changes have been made like there is no size limit in Demo category anymore. Remote entries for all realtime compos as well as to short film competition are welcome! Unfortunately we are not able to have remote entries to graphics and music competitions at this point.

On top of this we will be organizing some compos at scene lounge as well like we did last year. We will have again the fun compos, animated gif and tuplain, for sure! We are considering also having there more serious stuff like tracked music and pixel graphics competitions. So stay tuned for the scene lounge program! Also if you have some suggestions of compos, seminar topics, or other program that you would like to have in scene lounge, we are open to ideas! :)

Rules, program, and other information will be available at our website soonish. So stay tuned!

Last but not least, people make the party so we wish to see you all at Assembly Summer 2018! <3

:)

Haha. 2018 it is. I don't have time machine and I don't expect you to have either. My excuse is not so much sleep during Revision. ;) (And no, it wasn't even copy-paste mistake)

i heard people should do 64ks for assembly or it risks getting plugged again! demo compo is over populated, go do a 64k instead!

Yes, go make 64ks! Also make demos and other productions as well! :)

Count me in! Hki, here I come! In peace.

I kind of want to give also this thread a bump now as the event is getting closer. We have also published new information such as specs of the compo PC as well as game development competition deadline (Fri 27th of July 16:00 Finnish time)!

We have again two compo PCs this year. The NVIDIA option will feature a GTX 1080 Ti GPU and Intel i7-8700K processor. The AMD option an Asus Radeon RX Vega 64 GPU and AMD Ryzen 7 2700X processor.

Some more information of Scene Lounge is finally out as well. We are still working on the program of the Scene Lounge so now is a good change to throw us some ideas of what you'd like to see/hear/watch there. More information of Scene Lounge is available here. We will update the pages once we know more about the program.

Oh, almost forgot that we also published photo compo theme some time ago! So the theme is round. More info from our website.

There's a special area reserved for demosceners at Assembly called scene lounge. A lot of programme on variety of topics in forms of talks and workshops.

More info here -> https://www.assembly.org/summer18/demoscene/scene-lounge

Quick (yet important) question, is this Pentium 133 CPU a model that supports the MMX instruction set?

clashes with datastorm :-(

definitely not as MMX-enabled p133 were mobile-only and quite rare :)

(or underclocked)

Nope, it's a bog standard Pentium CPU, no extensions.

Britelite, what is the maximum compressed(?) filesize officially now in the Oldschool Demo Compo, it doesn't say in the Asm site nor here. I think we discussed about allowing at least 24 Mb or more. Just making sure how far can we push the filesize.

From the Assembly site:

So that's 32MB uncompressed :)

Ah ok, I looked under "Oldschool Platform Rules" and not under "Compo Spesific". Thanks!

oh, seems it's worth making a prod this time :) so a couple of questions:
1) which drivers would be loaded on DOS compo machine? (clean boot/himem/emm386/univbe/other stuff)
2) in case of univbe is available, it is permitted to use custom vbe 3.0 display modes? (i.e. 640x360 with 720p timings :)
3) same about soundcard - I know that GUS Extreme is in fact GF1+ESS1688, so does using extended ESS features count as cheating? :D (i.e. using 16bit stereo/44khz for streaming audio instead of SB Pro compatible 8 bit stereo/22 or mono/44; of course with SB16 and earlier fallback support)

unfortualy can't visit party this time, so remote submission to the rescue :)

Jope will probably fill you in on 1)


You use tweaked modes at your own risk, as there's always the possibility that they can't be captured properly. And as you probably want people to be able to watch your prod, you might want to include some standard fallback mode.


Feel free to use the features of the GUS Extreme, but again, please include a fallback mode just in case.

You will get best results with the least amount of possible mode changes and having some down time between parts. Usually we're talking about 3 seconds worth of switch delay to be safer. We have ran through a bunch of DOS demos at simulaatio without many issues but there is always that one odd entry somewhere that requires more tricks, i.e. through something like OSSC first.

We have plenty of scalers around for less common video modes but any mode change will still result in a re-sync and anything that is not 59.94 / 60Hz (I'm not 100% on what they drive with, likely the common NTSC-like rate) will result in framerate conversion.

It's unfortunate that there is simply no bulletproof solution for capturing sync free & CRT-safe trickery without extensive splicing and punching in manual timings for each mode.

1) Please write the setup you need in your nfo file or the additional info field when you submit your entry. I'll boot it up with whatever is needed. Please stick with stuff that ships with MS-DOS 6.22 though. I'm not going to trawl abandonwarez sites for that extra special asm hand coded XMS driver no-one's heard of. ;-)

2) The card is an ET6000, it has a pretty ok VBE BIOS. There is one caveat about this board: one of the VGA horizontal scrolling methods sometimes seen in demos and games does not work with this card. If you're just using it as a framebuffer, you should be pretty safe.

In any case, I'll try to find a version of SDD/Univbe that is compatible with this board, but I'm not sure if one exists. The past compos at Asm and Simulaatio have been run with the card's own VBE BIOS, only one demo I remember of did something strange and wouldn't show at all on the ET6k. Branch might remember what he did that didn't work, but it was a few years ago already.

3) As Britelite said, you can do it if you like, but definitely consider supporting also SB16, if the GF1 is not suitable for your routine.

@Jope, britelite: thanks for info :)

about 2): AFAIK ET6000 works pretty fine with smooth horizontal scroll, but this requires setting horizontal pixel panning reqister during vertical blanking, since unlike other VGAs ET6K loads it every scanline (I had a Matrox card with exactly same issue, which would also allow pixel-perfect raster wobbles :), as opposed to lathcing value before start of display on other cards. On the other hand, using these tricks in SVGA modes is pretty risky, so it's not my case anyway.

About VESA support - I know (and I've tested because I have an ET6000-based card :) it provides reasonably good built-in VBE2.0 support with low resolutions such as 320x240 15/16/24bpp (no 32bpp though as it unsupported by hardware); also SDD 6.53 works flawless and UniVBE's VBE3.0 support is near prefect and bugless.

By participating the Assembly gamedev competition you can now take part also to Hatch party game competition!

To participate to the Hatch compo you need to make a game that helps to elevate the party mood for 2+ players. You automatically take part in the Hatch Party Game compo when participating to Assembly Summer 2018 Game development competition.

The game can work on any platform allowed to gamedev competition. This includes also oldskool platforms! :)

The winners are selected by Hatch appointed jury, which will look into the eligible games and judge the game by the fun factor. The best party / multiplayer game will win! Jury members are selected by Hatch and they cannot participate to the competition themselves.

Hatch jury can reject participation if the game is not really designed for multiplayer or if the production value shows the project is not done with a real purpose of making real games (read: two day joke productions are not eligible). So, if you really do a game and try to make it fun, it's in!

More info on our website and Hatch website!

Check the rules for the compos (including gamedev) from our website!

We finally have schedule online!

Compo deadlines:

• Friday 20:00 Finnish time: Photo, Graphics, Listening music, Dance music, Real wild, Short film, Oldskool demo
  
• Saturday 19:00 Finnish time:: 1k intro, 4k intro, 64k intro, Demo.
  

Extra compos hold in Scene Lounge:
Last year we had few relaxed fun compos at Scene Lounge. This year we are expanding this and we have 4 extra compos that are shown only in Scene Lounge.

The Lounge compos are:

• Tracked Music
  
• Pixel Graphics
  
• One Effect
  
• Tuplain
  

Other program in Scene Lounge:
In addition to having extra compos we are having variety of other program as well. There are seminars, workshops, demoshows and even a live set played by Alkama!

More detailed description of program as well as lounge compo rules can be found at Scene Lounge Program page!

I hope to see many of you at Assembly and especially in Scene Lounge this year! I hope that many of you consider also taking part of the lounge compos even though the announcement is bit late... <3

Ok, a tiny fix for the last post... :D

The compo deadlines are ofc at Thursday and Friday not at Friday and Saturday!