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If you're an old ATARI demo coder,
you probably know how nice it is to break a world record
! What's a world record ? Simple: take a very simple program
(Sprite display, 3d cube, rasters, or anything you like)
and try to put as more as possible in a vertical blank,
on a fixed hardware. (ATARI ST in our case). Some crew
or people were specialist in optimizing, with various
technics. I personnaly really enjoy that kind of contest,
and even today I search some new technics to break old
ATARI records. (It changes from DirectX stuff I code all
the day :-)).
Recently I find back on my hard disk
a new record I broke in may 2001 ! That record was one
of the oldest "official" one. So here is the story of
the record, and all people trying to beat it ! I hope
you'll enjoy ! Of course we beat many records, but I can't
do a page on each of them ! :-) So here is the story of
the 16*16 2 bitplans sprite record !
1989: The Beginning (134, Nick&AnCool/The
Carebears)
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 1989
is a very good year for ATARI demo. In the same
year came three of the best demos ever: The Union-Demo,
the Cuddly demos and the Sowatt demo. The picture
on the right show you the first 16*16 sprite record.
It was done by The Carebears. The record consist
of displaying 16*16, 2 bitplans, non masked sprites.
Please notice there is a grey background. (that's
important for the next).
Record was here: the world famous crew "TheCarebars"
saying "You can't beat this", a nice and very pure
screen, some energic MadMax music (the famous S.O.S
tune !). When I first saw that screen I don't know
anyhting in assembly programming but I was impressed
by the design of the screen. ("Nothing else than
technic"). No scroller, no gfx, only technical code
! They managed to display 131 sprites with a MadMax
tune. (134 without music)
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See
the sprite quality
1989: French people strike back!
(136, Ziggy Stardust/Overlanders)
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End of the year: The french crew Overlanders brings
a totally brainblasting demo called "The Delirious
Demo 2". This mega demo contains some of the best
screens written by one of the best ATARI french
coder: Ziggy Stardust. As he writes almost all the
demo, he try to beat the famous record too. As always,
Ziggy has another approach: his technic is totally
different from the others and he displays 136 balls
instead of 134 ! (132 with music and vu-meter).
For the first record breaking, things were a little
tricky. If you look at the Ziggy Sprite, you'll
see it's very nice, but 16*14 sprites ! You probably
say 2 pixels is not important, but YES it is for
a record ! This is not a "broken record", but nice
try anyway ! People know it's possible to beat TCB,
so let's see the big adventure !
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See
the sprite quality
1990: Swedish revenge (143, Alias
Sture/Phalanx)
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 1990:
Great demo from great swedish guy: The Overdrive
demo by Phalanx and Vector. This is the real "TCB
record break". Their sprite was a little more complex
(but not really nicer :-)). Please note they add
a scroll-text. A 16 pixels vertical scroller (for
speed). They managed to display 143 sprites without
music and scroller.
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See
the sprite quality
1991: Oxygene first attempt (206,
Leonard/Oxygene)
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 1991:
In our second megademo (The O-Demo), I decide to
beat the record when I find a new clearing technic,
first introduced by the famous french crew Equinox.
This technic really looks like some old PC mode-X
technic. It allow you to fastly clear a screen in
two bitplans using MOVEM. The only drawback is that
it uses all the bitplans, so you can't have a backgound
anymore. I put 206 sprites, with music ! Record
were really splashed ! (206 instead of 143 !).
Even if the record were explosed, I was not satisfied
because in a way, it was not the original record.
(there was no bitmap background).
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See
the sprite quality
2000: Back to roots! (165, Leonard/Oxygene)
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 2000:
We are planning to go to the ST-NICCC, ten years
later ! We had to prepare some nice stuff to bring
there: First, we made a 3d demo and we won the first
place of the demo competition ! Second, I made a
special version of the Nostalgic Demo. That version
contains a new screen: The classic 16*16 sprite
world record ! In my last attempt I had cheated
by removing the background. But this time, back
to roots !! Look at the screen on the right ! this
is *the* original TCB screen ! I choose the classical
MadMax SOS tune too ! So here is a real record break:
165 sprites WITH music, and WITH a nice one pixel
scroller !! Please note I use *exactly* the same
sprite as TCB, so I can't cheat on the bitmap. I
manage to obtain that speed by writing a new generated
code in C++ and optimize it to the max by hand !
:-)
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See
the sprite quality
2001: Optimize night and day...
(197, Leonard/Oxygene)
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 2001:
After writing some DirectX 3d stuff for my job,
and some sound synthesys at home, I like to write
some ATARI code when I have some spare time. I decide
to include ALL optimizing technics I know, and write
the fastest code of my life to defnitly break that
classical record ! I know there is no people trying
to beat it at that time but that's just for fun.
I take my last record back (165) and add a new clearing
technic I call the "Mosaic technic". I pre-compute
a 16*16 mosaic bit-field. That bit-field contains
spatial information about area to clear during a
frame. When I write that new technic (I think never
used in an ATARI demo), I saw the CPU time was really
moving, depending of the frame. Generally, when
you have a no-constant CPU load, you can use the
"multi-screen" technic. That technic was first used
by the great "Mega Tridi" screen by Ziggy Stardust.
I fastly add that technic and reach the incredible
number of... 197 sprites !!! I was really happy
to get that record !!
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See
the sprite quality
I hope you like this story ! If you
have new informations about that record, or maybe you
beat it (!!), please write me !!!
arnaud.carre@freesurf.fr
http://leonard.oxg.free.fr
Stąd
można pobrać screen obrazujący nową technikę Leonarda
[81 kB].
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