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2017-12-05

Second news item in one year - wooo, we're on fire! So, news: Showaddywaddy and GGN attended Outline again and it was a blast! Not many Atari people or Atari activity in there but those who were there made it worthwhile. And while we were there we thought "Why don't we win the Atari demo compo?" ;). And so we did: HipSid, Grazey's brainchild that combined Mad Max tunes with SID voices, ranked first in the compo! You can read a very brief note about it on the SNDH blog. With about 10 hours of non-stop music action it is well worth a download! GGN also attended Sommarhack, but with less one month to prepare something for the compo more complex endeavours weren't feasible. With about a week or two left for the party, GGN got a request from Lotek Style of tSCc. Specifically, an old music disk by EKO called Epidemic has never behaved properly - the intro would run but the music selector would crash violently. A quick fix was made for it, yet many issues still remain: there is a lot of screen tearing on the 3D objects in the background which (given the short time frame) weren't apparent to fix. Also a tune was missing, and that's because this music disk appears to be a port of a PC music disk of the same name - the tune in question is an 8 channel .mod file, something that the player was not capable of playing. Fortunately Lotek managed to source a 4 channel version so cheers to him and the person that did the conversion (details are a bit sketchy, either the tune was converted using a tool or was hand fixed). So with the music disk in a state of "works, not that great but at least it gets the job done" it was time to let it out for the world to yawn at (sorry!). However, since Sommarhack was just around the corner it looked silly not to release it during the party. And a release there without an intro looked quite poor, so something had to be done :). The initial design was to use an old and unfinished intro (from 2004 no less!) and just use an old tune. So I set out to debug the code, convert some old logos to monochrome, use an unreleased tune from Dubmood and just be done with it. But then something unexpected happened: after describing my idea to people, they sending me assets! XiA sent a 3 minutes and 30 seconds tune, TiNKer drew some tiled backgrounds. Now I actually had to put some effort in it - oh noes! The whole ordeal took about 3 days, and it was finished 2 days before the party. Nothing exciting to say about these 2 days apart from having to join everything into something that wouldn't make people fall asleep. Somehow I suspect it was not too successful at that ;). One thing worth mentioning is that it works on both RGB and VGA and maintains proper sync with the music - not that many Falcon productions do that :). In any case it ranked 4th at the compo, and you can download it here and check it out for yourselves, or watch it on YouTube. In other news, GGN and DML of TPT teamed up to bring new versions of the gcc compiler to the ST! Each had their own reasons to do this which is another story, but you can read more about the work and getting the files from an experimental blog/soapbox/call-it-what-you-will, Beyond Brown where a few people just dump their thoughts and texts in no particular order or discipline. The year is not over yet so there might be something from us still, so stay tuned! As for CJ? Well, he's quite happy in Jaguar land. Head over to the Atari Age forums if you want to say "hi" to him!

GGN