Create background, levels.

Tiling was a design pattern often used in the beginning of the gamedesign.
Reason:

Till today. What is the right amount of buttons?

It started with 3 Buttons and than 1 for the macintosh, 2 For Amiga, 2 for MS-DOS (ContextMenu).

Often behind the discussion: "Profesionality" vs too simple.

Interesting questions: Were the 16-bit-Homecomputergames differeent on Atari ST/Amiga and on Mac? An how? 

(First Impression: No second button used in 16-Bit-Games.)

 

which designpattern where used? and why?

OLIVER Being a pixel guy – the tools were remarkable. We did not have devkit like the Katakis tools or something specified for creating game graphics. I used the editor that came with the Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit for sprites, which turned out extremely practical. The Ronny-sprite was created with an C64 editor called Mob-Profi, which provided overlayed hires and multicolour-sprites. The pictures in the intro and end sequence were pixeled in Koala Painter with a joystick, but everything else was more like hacking. I edited the charset with a font editor. The level backgrounds were tile-based maps, so a friend of mine coded one tool for combining 2×2 chars to tiles including the colour – and a second tool for assembling the levelmap like a puzzle game. As setup I had a C128 and Amiga 500 side by side. By the way – there was a TV and a monitor connected to the C128 at the same time, because of the the different video quality and I wanted to be sure that the graphics  looked right on both display types. With our modern mouse or stylus driven tools and those workflow-trimmed programs it is hard to believe that we got things done at all back in the day when we were even lacking fundamentals such as UNDO functionality. However, I have to say that you had full control over the technical specs of the graphics and as a graphic designer you started to think like a coder.

Otherwise, I hardly remember details of the project. At least for the first month, Mario and I were working alongside each other. The intro and the end sequence were finished first. Then it was very intense and determined by crunchtime, the process was sort of first-in-first-out. The progress in code was tied to incoming graphics. Markus composed the new tunes at home far away and we had some issues with the delivery. Nevertheless the whole soundtrack reached us in time and its implementation went smoothly. Still there was no free time at all. In the final weeks weeks it became a kind of competition – like, who needs the least sleep! I also remember that the editing of the levels was pretty chaotic. Three of us worked in shifts and it took much longer than planned.

Oh I almost forgot about the  communication with Virgin. That was the horror for me because I hardly spoke any English back then. David Bishop and I talked English and German mixed, which worked surprisingly well.

Tapes comes from the mainframe tapes and were popularised by music too. so often people used normal tapes-drives and for a zx81-games - there were even description how you had to connect the microphone-cable to the head-phone-jack and reverse. While loadibg a zx-81 game you hear the whole time the data coming in! so meta: sound was for people and maschines.analog digital. So there was no difference between an accoustic coppler and data from the tape. 

Cartridges were used in Consoles (Fairlight, Saba).
Cartridges were also used by Computers like MSX, Atari 400 etc.

It is a sad fact that the 6502 used in the Commodore64 and other home computers of the 80s is widely believed to have a poor code density when it comes to compiled or wider than eight bit code. The C standard requires computations to be made with ints which work best if they have the same size as a pointer.

The 6502 also has a very small stack of 256 bytes which cannot be easily addressed and thus cannot be used for local variables. Therefore a second stack for variables has to be maintained, resulting in costly indexing operations. The 6502 is also pretty poor when it comes to indexed operations, it has no index with constant offset addressing mode, and requires the y register to be used for indexing.

Subject:
'Re: VIC-II colors'
From: Robert 'Bob' Yannes
To: Philip
'Pepto' Timmermann
Date: 27.09.1999
I was involved with the development of the VIC-II, however the actual implementation of the design, including the Color
Palette, was done by someone else. I have forwarded your message to him, but it is up to him if he wants to respond.
I can tell you that the design was based on the principle that adding a sine wave of a particular frequency and amplitude
to an inverted version of the same sine wave at a different amplitude produces a phase-shifted sine wave of the same
frequency. The amount of phase shift is directly proportional to the amplitudes of the two sine waves.
The VIC-II used the 14.31818 MHz master clock input (4 times the NTSC color burst frequency of 3.579545 MHz) to produce
quadrature square-wave clocks. These clock signals were then integrated into triangle waves sing analog integrators. The
triangle waves were then integrated again into sine waves (actually rounded triangle waves, but good enough for this
application). This produced a 3.579545 MHz sine wave,
inverse sine wave, cosine wave and inverse cosine wave.
An analog summer was used to create the phase-shifts in the Chroma signal by adding together the appropiate two waveforms
at the appropiate amplitudes. The Color Palette data went to a look-up table that specified the amplitude of the waves by
selecting different resistors in the gain path of the summer. The end result was that we could create any hue we wanted by
looking at the NTSC color wheel to determine the phase-shift and then picking the appropiate resistor values to produce
that phase-shift.
Color Saturation was controlled by scaling the gain of the summer. When we picked the resistor values to determine the
output phase-shift, we also scaled them to produce the desired output amplitude. Luminance was controlled using a simple
voltage divider which switched different pull-down resistors into the open-drain output. We could create any Luminance we
wanted by choosing the desired resistor value.
I'm afraid that not nearly as much effort went into the color selection as you think. Since we had total control over hue,
saturation and luminance, we picked colors that we liked. In order to save space on the chip, though, many of the colors
were simply the opposite side of the color wheel from ones that we picked. This allowed us to reuse the existing resistor
values,
rather than having a completely unique set for each color
I believe that Commodore actually got a patent on this technique. It was certainly superior to the Apple or Atari approach
at the time, as they ended up with whatever colors that came out--ours allowed the designer to freely select Hue,
Saturation and Luminance.
Since all of this was based on selecting different resistor values and resistance varied from chip lot to chip lot, there
was variation from one Commodore 64 to another. It wasn't as bad as it could have been though, since all of the Chrominance
selection was based on resistor ratios, which could be kept constant even if the actual resistor values varied. Luminance
was more of a problem. A trimmer resistor should really have been used to pull up the output. This would have allowed the
Luminance to be adjusted for consistency from unit to unit, however Commodore didn't care enough about consistency to
bother with adjusting each unit
Robert
'Bob'
Yannes

The listing culture is a hybrid between gutenberg galaxis and software. Software was often distributed in the mainframe time as source code ( c ). each system had a different set of hardware, processor. c and co were the platform. You could compile it for your system. 

The listing culture brought source code to the magazines and could be published. first with basic and co for homecomputers, later with checksums, than basic with assembler inlines, than only shortcodes. 

of course by typing in you could learn how to code and solve problems.

The demoscene was first a spin-off the crackers and became an own culture with festivals, ‘jams’ and contests. Often there are old computers embeded. 

Often used - enter data from cover or description. 
With more and more photocopiers, often used bad copyable sujets (red etc) or complex systems like rotating discs (several lucas arts games  and were in the mood of the game).

Later the dialog to enter the number/code came in the middle of the game (manic mansion etc). 

Codes were also used to ‘store’ progression.

There was often no possibility to start the game after an infection. 

'dropfiles', small binary or text files dropped into known locations in the BBS'

A major use of doors is for door games: computer games played on the BBS.[3] These games included strategy games such as TradeWars 2002, Food Fight!, [4] Solar Realms Elite,[5] Space Dynasty, Usurper,[6] and Barren Realms Elite.[7] There were also role-playing games (RPG), often derived from earlier email-based games. One such game was Seth Robinson's Legend of the Red Dragon,[8] and another popular dystopian RPG: Operation: Overkill,[4] another was Mutants!. BBSes often published high scores, encouraging players to beat others.[9]

InterBBS leagues allowed users of different BBSes to compete against each other in the same game. A modern version of this known as BBSlink exists allowing sysops to offer door games on their BBS which are hosted on a remote server, thereby increasing the user base of the game.

What type of ‘art’-concept is used in the demoscene?

Tracker were software - used especially on the Amiga. The most of the music was created in this type of music software. And the people behind the swiss games of the 80ies/90ies even created a tracker and the possibility to use the same framework also in games. 

Collections can be public or private. So it is often good to contact them directly. 

a lot of pirated software was uploaded on bbs, afterwareds on ftp-servers in companies or universities. the most crackergroup had warez servers. often the name of the folders were appz / warez / gamez.

All in one. Democollection - show all possible things in one demo. also often wirh story telling aspects - visual narrative or a classic story.

What is possible on one disc. More longterm motivation, more content needed.

Own type/textsorte.

Often implemented add on in a crack: service to have endless lives, start at some point of the game etc. 

CODE > Graphics (Effects), Sound, SizeCoding > Effect, Synaesthesy  (Creativity Process)
Community > Concurrency > Metagame > Scene

With modems1987  and zterm you could enter to a bbs and download software. You needed the number and of course a computer on the other side. So this bullet boards system where dial in systems. from time to time the mother of a guy took the phone .-) 

You only used this in the ‘phone cheap time’ - >21.00. A game for Amiga or Atari ST was 900kb - the modem was about 3600-12200 bauds. you waited very long from time to time.

GESPAC SA was a Swiss company who designed the G-64/96 Bus in 1979. This interface bus concept provides a simple way to interface microprocessor modules with memory and peripheral modules on a parallel bus. The G-64/96 Bus uses a simple, yet modern and powerful interface scheme which allows a higher level of functionality from the single height Eurocard form factor. The low overhead of the G-64/96 Bus interface greatly eases the design of custom boards by the User. This is why, even many years after its invention, the G-64/96 Bus is still widely used in the industry. 
 

Often a comment about music, the classic music.

Floppy disc or magnetic disc are faster and mor flexible than tapes. you can load and store autonom (no start and stop) and not linear, you can store them here or there. but of course also expensiver (you cant anymore use a (music) tapedrive.

Often used, more tracks than normal. So the disk-copy-software couldn't handle it. 

not used so often, expensive to produce. 

tribute to?
exploting? 
> tribute - take the best … collage

I discovered Linel's SoundFX about a year before I saw Soundtracker (which I 
hated). The important difference between the two is that SoundFX let you use 
CIA timing so you could match breakbeats perfectly, where as Soundtracker had 
no concept of "BPM". I was trying to make house/dance tracks so I found SoundFX 
was better for that purpose. I later used Noisetracker for making more typical
demoscene tracks (Noisetracker's pattern FX were far far superior to SoundFX's).
Of course, when it came to implementing the playroutine into code - SoundFX 
sucked! (See Magnetic Fields Spaced Out 1 music disk to hear how my music 
DOESN'T work with the playroutine hack.) By the time ProTracker was released, 
you could choose CIA timing, so I started using that.

The king of trackers, as far as I'm concerned, was OctaMED for its synth sound 
editor. I spent so many happy hours making C64-sounding tunes using that (some 
are still available at Exotica's Special section.)
 

Console or Computer? 
Could be both:
- Consoles with Keyboards
- Computers with Cartdriges

some autostart games couldnt be used anymore afterwards. there was no exe to start the process. 

Coder.
Amicom joined SPREADPOINT in 1989 together with Depeche. He was active as coder of very different things from MMU tools to demos. What he liked best was to explore and develop new programming tricks that could be used in demos and other places.

Data
Born 1968, grown up and living in Switzerland.
Todays occupation: finishing studies (natural science), running an internet company togehter with other ex-amiga freaks.

Work
Demos: Lissa, Platin3D, Small.
Intros: Giana Sisters (trained by Depeche), Amegas (trained by Depeche).
Utilities: Blitter-Copy, List Manager, MMU expert, AFS File Scrambler, SPlay soundtracker player.
Other stuff: Atom Demo (unfinished), Platon's Polyhedra (unfinished), revival of HQC demos, GigaMem (a virtual memory extension to AmigaDOS), some work in TypeSmith (a outline font editor).

Music
Depeche Mode, Kraftwerk, Simple Minds, Billy Idol, Pink Floyd, Pet Shop Boys, OMD, ...

Mostly by announcing it on usenet. That had a tight-knit community of Amiga programmers that was easy to reach. Then on Fish disks and Aminet as well. At some point, print magazines started to cover it with courses etc, and I got invited to speak at conferences about it.

It got fairly popular, to the point where at some point a popularity poll was held somewhere on the internets, and E came in second after C/C , but before Pascal and Basic. Probably a biased sample, but still :)

A rework of the not used pico8-game for lovebyte. Added graphics and effects and sound.

My personal demo-problem: no restrictions for demo. so you could make everything. You would have to go for visual narration like the other prods in this category. 

Very emblematic use of technical possibilities

Culture towards technology changed massively in the last 50 years. 

Buenzli was a demoscene party 

Serial number collections were often databases as a program for serial numbers. 

Size (limitations)
Colors (Farbverläufe vgl.  limitations)
Texts with Effects (Sin, Cosinus etc) > Grafity
Effects 
Sprites
Rotating Objects (Like cube)
Parallax layers … 
Writing into the boarders
Music

Missing often: Creativity, technical driven 

Interesting piece, because. you have to move around with an avatar to get to the demos. so their is a gamemechanic (puzzle) to open the subdemos!

Question: When this demo was created?

It is the cathode ray. 
and it never goes up - only in the demos.

it is a technical visual thing about power and control! 

A puzzle game inspired by a puzzle game but i don't remember where and why i saw it. 
Specials: classic music. some users were irritated.  

Giger was an educated as an industrial designer. Afterwards he made art and after working with jodorowski on dune, he joined the aliens-team. He created the slick fast monster in ALIEN. he influenced with his style (developped before in paintings and sculptures) the whole scifi. And so he became also one of the most influencing artist for games like r-type and and and and and …

Who are the tracker-musicians in switzerland?