" porno on ihan jees "
.____
_____ | /. _____ ____ ____ _____
\ \ | |_\_. \_ ____ / _ \_ ____ / _ \__\_. \_
\ \/\ : \| /.\ \\// /.\ \\// \| /.
\______________| :_____\/_____|_____\/________| : g6
--------------------|____|----------------------------|____|-------
wAMMA oldskool section 2007
presents
[ L A S E R T I M E ]
a 4k trackmo for the Atari 2600
The Atari 2600 has had the occasional intro screen made for it before now.
Particularly memorable was Ultra's effort 'Stella'. But this is something
different. 'Lasertime' can be seen either as a full sized demo, or dentro,
or trackmo, according to taste, or even a rather good 4ktro, bearing the
actual size of the ROM image in mind. The Finnish team 'WAMMA', with
sometime Dildo Fatwa fan, Visy, are responsible for breaking this new/old
frontier for Atari demo coding.
So what do we get then?
I fire up Stella, which generally does a fair to good job of emulating the
2600. Upon selecting the ROM, it kicks you into darkness at first, as an
excellent, if short and looping zik made by Ilmarque starts up.
(As Visy^WAMMA pointed out @pouet: "I'm sorry, but Stella sucks. Big time.
All our vcs demos run incorrectly on it. Use real hw or Z26. Many effects are
bugged because of Stella's incorrect emulation."
Alive: We will make sure CiH has to wear his domination mask and receives a
good spanking at the next team meeting...)
Aha, an effect at last, as a small screen-centred colony of raster bars
walks upscreen with lots of colours on show. Of course the demo has to be
identified with a slightly greyish and functional title picture, which
emphasises the low-res nature of this hardware, with a blocky face pictured
on the right hand side.
Something more scenic is next, with a sunrise on the far horizon, and a
rolling landscape constantly changing colour heading towards the viewer.
This is yet another application of the rasters on the 2600. This screen
looks like an incomplete game screen, as if you expect to see a crosshair
onscreen and hordes of enemy space-ships or killer penguins to defeat. They
do not come.
The next screen seems to have had some really serious effort put into it, in
an Amiga oldschool coding fashion. You get something looking like tiles and
bars, but the entire screen bends in a sineous distorting way. This screen
is the most technically interesting of this demo thus far.
But it is bettered by the following screen, which is an elaborate stretch of
the 2600's limited resources. There is a double vertical scrolltext with
different colours for each, and one of these constantly changing. This is
overlaid with a water ripple effect. For maximum points, there is also a
partial reflection in a nicely faked water layer at the screen bottom. I
guess we have hit the climax of this demo, and we're gently winding down
from here.
This process starts with a fairly fugly double scrolltext crossing over each
other, we are next into the credits screen, which consists of some
upscrolling raster bars for the background, some hard-to describe
downscrolling patterns in the middle of the screen which I think are there
to emphasise movement, and the credits themselves are displayed at the sides
of the screen.
There is another chunky ugly multi-patterned or Kaleidoscope screen, which
features changing patterns all in black, sort of like a dynamic blocky
constantly changing Rorschach inkblot test.
And then it's all just about over, apart from the fat lady singing, or a
Chunky Fuji logo in this case, with more vertically scrolling rasters to
finish it.
For the purposes of this review, I'd have to say that the emulator
performance on Stella was not perfect, but it was good enough. It is best
seen on the original hardware, and a homebrew cartridge apparently exists.
The info text is quite informative, and includes some ironic greetings to
Nosfe, "for his continuing love and support towards Atari computers." Yes,
well we know about that!
The tone of this demo is very much oldschool, with a heavy emphasis on the
kind of effects that the VCS is good at, namely raster bars and lots of
colours generated within them. At the same time, there are a couple of
screens which seem to be pushing things a bit harder still, so I would say
this is a major achievement with the limitedness of this ancient hardware.
So will we see more VCS demos pushing the limits of that elderly hardware?
We would hope so. Nice one Visy and company!
Pro's..
The first full demo on the Atari 2600.
Lots to see.
A couple of impressive limit-stretching screens.
A kick-ass tune.
A good all-round effort.
Con's..
Fugly in places. (Even allowing for hardware limitations.)
The tune is short.
A tendency to over-rely on raster based effects?
CiH, For Alive Mag, Feb 07
|
