Amiga Plus 2003 #12/Amiga Plus CD - 2003 - No. 12.iso/AmigaPlus/Scene/Magazine/Saxonia2/articles/025

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The Year 2002 on the CPC
THE CPC IN THE YEAR 2002
THE TRADITIONAL REVIEW
by optimus/dirty minds
[l

  PROLOGUE

I was walking yesterday with Antitec/Dirty Minds outside in Thessaloniki in
the night, discussing various things having to do with our boring lives.
The ball took the CPC scene. (WTF?!? At the beginning my mind was stuck
desperatelly to find the appropriate phrase, but it failed, and so I made
a free translation of a greek quote =) Except from our worthless lifes,
we wondered if anything is running in the CPC (It's a part of our lifes
afterall!). At that time I realised that I had to start writing
(traditionally anymore) my article for the first 2003 PAiN issue.
(Codename XX03 or something ;)  So, what happened in the CPC scene in 2002?
I was mainly waiting for megademos like DemoIzArt, writing tons of text for
Ovation issue 6 which I don't know when da hell it will be released, got
fucked up with both my exams and my diet and then got inactive because of
real life. The scene was sleepy till then, most of the real surprises came
mainly after Summer though, as something had to be released before 2002 to
fill the gap in the scene and my article ;P. I can count around 15 releases
this year. The demos that left me good impressions were TAF, Fantasy,
232425 and Crocochannel. The biggest surprise for me was to see Antitec
producing and programming for his new CPC hardware called CPC Booster out
of nothing in a time he was inactive and bored. Generally the most good
CPC activity came at the second half of 2002, even if me and Peter were
feeling unmotivated and worried about the CPC scene (for some strange
reasons) at that night walk..


THE CPC PRODUCTIONS IN 2002

I guess I have to start from the 4 demos I mentioned above and the most
early of them. Tire au Flan (TAF), a small demo by Overlanders, one and
a half year after their masterpiece Ecole Buissoniere. It's a pitty that
non-CPC sceners won't be able to watch it, since there is no such a thing
like emufixx0r cracking group on the CPC ;P Only the intro screen runs from
an emulator, which consists of two nicely blended rasters upon a picture
and some credits. But it's not the bread! (Another lamely translated greek
quote :) There are two routines that change from each to each other. Some
weird fullscreen colorfull unidentified effects coming out from too many
blended vertical hardware bars, coded by Shap. And the most dots on CPC
routine by Madram. It's a pitty I can't use an emulator, to get some
snapshots of Madram's effect in order to count the number of dots, one by
one. (I know I am very technically crazy! :) The demo shows endlessly both
of these routines in various shapes and colors. An impressive technically
demo. But why do people hate emulators so much?

The next one is Fantasy. Semilanceata is a new CPC group, coming from the
ashes of Da Boxon Team. It is a CPC+ demo, you know,. the one with the
amazing pallete (for an 8bit), hardware sprites and raster IRQs (Hmm, it's
exactly the capabilities that the plain CPC lacked in comparison to the
C64, except from the pallete of course ;). Many CPC coders were coding
demos for the plus lately. Anyway, what I liked in this demo is that it
was very diferrent than the usual demos we have seen on CPC. It's more like
a story full of gfx and text, without any complex effects (but the raster
animated background, spotlight and big sprite were still kinda nice to
watch, especially with these great colors!). Nice work, I am happily
expecting new demos from this new group..

The last ones came out at surprisingly the same time, in a sleepy and
unmotivating period for me. 232425 is coded by various people, like Eliot,
Romain and Iron. It contains four parts. Nice to see one more of the few
CPC software plasma routines in the first part. It looks kinda slow in
comparison with the "to be released one day in one demo" sources I have in
my HD. I had the same idea for the cool fade out transitions but didn't put
down my ass to code it. The next part is a very nice hardware part by
Eliot. The big Mode1 scrolling photo of CPC sceners and a skeleton monster
is superb! The third part made me wondering. A supposly bump mapping(?)
routine in a very small and blocky area (10*10 chars). It's a shame. I am
not sure why this thing was released. And the last part has first a nice
picture of a girl fasten in a pole and a writer/text displayer in French,
and after pressing space there comes a big fire effect upon the gfx. I am
not sure if it's real or animation, but it doesn't look that much like a
real fire/blur algorithm, though it still seems random to me, like there is
an algorithm inside. No matter it is nice combined with the gfx. At this
part, I hear for the first time, CPC conversions of Amiga classics like
Desert Dreams and Elysium. Wow! I converted them to YM and listening right
now!

And then Crocochannel. Another release by Madram  of Overlanders and other
CPC sceners (Eliot, Epsilon, Iron). It was supposed to be another long
delayed demo done to celebrate the Crocochannel meetings or something. The
demo starts with a superb designed menu, my favoritest screen! The gfx
rulez and there are 3 nice effects displayed. A big vertical scroller
deformed by a glass, some small wireframe 3d objects (precalculated?) at
the upper right corner and a nice writer, with a nice dithered effect
inside and similar fades too. It's really good, both graphically,
designwise and technically! In the menu, we get some news about Madram's
future plans too. This demo seems to be his last, till someone else decides
to code something better. Madram seems to be a coder that loves
competition, a thing that you can hardly get from the lazy CPC scene. Just
see his part for this demo! Surpassing an old small sized distortion
routine in The Demo. Now we can see a much larger in X area with a neat
distorted scroller (Software? Hmm.. preety fast if then!). This part is
accompianed by some nice gfx and animations too. It's a pitty this may be
the last effect I may see from Madram, but I have better to start producing
myself instead of waiting everything from an ubercoder :) The other parts
are nice hardware screens by Eliot and Iron (That olympic challenge joke
was a very wild idea! I was tipping on the keyboard like insane, just to
eat on more part!), usual things I may have seen before. Epsilon's part is
a small screen with a pong game played by the CPU vs again the CPU :)

I am only wondering if some keys referred in the background work. I thought
I could play too. Other than that, this part didn't left me any feelings.
Superb demo, especially because of Madram's part. Hehe,. I wish I wasn't so
lazy, to bring you some competition. It would be fun then but times are
not good for me, to be able to code masterpieces..

 Other than that, we have seen Plissken first demos (Plissken ASM demo and
demonoel), Atoz demo (Nice gfx and sine dots), an april joke demo called
Citron, a 10 years delayed demo, GPA2K2 (from 1992! It's never too late to
release that stuff ;) and Christmas 2001 by Catloc & JFMC, the Brothers
team (Brothers? How so? But I thought they were cousins! =).

Seems to be the only greek team except us that tries to stay alive. The
also released Tree issue 2, in Greek and English. Other diskmags realeased
btw are Quasar20 (A hasted release, featuring some alternative previews of
Overflow backtro code and an interview of himself in French. If someone
could translate that..) and FutureView for FutureOS. The latest is a nice
try for a new german/english mag, from the only active CPC scener in
Germany, TFM of FutureSoft. The bad thing is that it is coded for FutureOS
only, an interesting OS that he was working upon for years. I got lately
the 4 rom files from TFM himself and the dsk of the diskmag and tried to
run it. At the beginning I found the GUI of the OS a little complicated but
I succeeded. Today, I had problems again in latest WinAPE emulator, because
it always crashes and the mouse cursor of the OS was painting buggily the
screen. Anyways,. if I had time, I would love to find out some hardware
ROMs to put on my real CPC and use the OS from there. Seems preety good,
especially when having to do with disk operations..

I wouldn't like to forget mentioning some more random news which are a bit
of important. First the 8bit minigame competition, organized by raww arse.
The results of this years competition are here. We have got 3 CPC entries,
one of which got the 3rd place. Kiloroid by Brian Watson. This was really
good and impressive for 1kb! An addictive asteroid game with linevector
sprites. Other entries were Block Invasion 1k, again by Brain Watson (Seems
to be preety active in this and previous year compo), a playable space
invaders game with blocks instead of monsters. Both preety impressive for
1kb. The last entry is Island by Witek Burkiewicz (Hmm,. a Polish scener on
CPC) which has nice gfx/map drawing algorithm but not so playable. You have
to bet in luck to win. I guess I should find some time to code something
simple too, if there will be a new competition there..

Other news? First, the 3.50 version of the Caprice32 emulator has been
released. It was at least one year since I was waiting for the new windows
Cap32 emulator. Now it's more complete, has fullscreen, speed disaster and
nice speed for my current system. Though, it's not so compatible with many
special hardware demos like other emuls are, more compatible than it's
previous versions though. Other programms released, that I wanted to
mention, is Graphic Wizard, a cool PC utility for transfering gfx to the
CPC format and pallete. You can find that at ONE's site..

Minor news about what happens in the net. I am glad to see the online
webzine CPC Oxygen frequently released, having reached the 9th issue.
http://cpcscene.dyndds.org seems to be an alternative FTP featuring CPC
files. Btw. I have read lately that ftp.lip6.fr had lost it's files. Now,
some of the CPC scene files have been uploaded to the ftp again but many
are missing. I guess it's time to search of how can I upload my own DSK
formats demo collection in the ftp, to ask some permission from the ftp
owners or anything needed. I 'd like also to mention that www.odiesoft.de
CPC section has been updated. It features descriptions of never seen before
parts from Odiesoft. Many of them were secret parts in the Divine Megademo
and I didn't knew that. Others were never released. Odiesoft would released
the disks with his previews in his site but I am still waiting.

A new interesting French site is http://8bit.at/cpc. It's all in French but
the most interesting part for me are the various democoding sources from
ACPC and other sources too. Very important to forget, Semilanceata is
organizing a CPC democompo with deadline at 1st Mai. Their site is now
translated to English! And latest, my CPC Demoscene site, which is still
inactive and I won't bother with it, can currently be reached at
http://users.auth.gr/mkargas/cpcscene, since paraknowya servers were down
for ages. I am thinking to get some space for the CPC demosite at
planet-d.net, cause I will loose my university account in Summer. But
later, I don't have time now for my abandoned sites. At least I put them
in this mirror so that their old data will be viewable again..  I have left
the best for the end. It was November or December, when Antitec got crazy
and started working for the CPC again! He was obsessed with a brand new
idea he wanted to start with. To make his first hardware for CPC! The thing
that CPC was missing, was a serial interface port. It connects your machine
with the outside world. (other computers having a serial, modem, etc) That's
the main feature of the CPC Booster, except from others that are implemented
or are planned in a future update. Yes, the CPC Booster can be updated from
the CPC, with an update programm that uploads data into the EPROM. Antitec
has already posted one update in the Dirty Minds site and also a DSK with
the first version of a terminal programm which I have seen working with a
PC terminal. He also demonstrated other things to me, like connecting
through a modem, transfering files from the PC to the CPC and more. He
plans to do other things with this hardware in the future, like sound
digitizer, hardware sprites (Wow! If we could only find a way to make the
card output fast to the Videoram. Perhaps we could even do triangle
rasterizer routines and more for the CPC :) but the most usefull is the
serial connection now. I haven't got a CPC Booster myself yet, no time to
test it now but I have crazy dreams in my mind for the future :) Some users
already bought a CPC Booster from Peter (it costs 50 Euros, kinda expensive
for me, but the hardware and work needed to produce one card isn't much
lower than that), One wrote a programm which uses a linux box in a terminal
window on the CPC (Whatever the hell that means, cause I am not aware of
Linux, it definitelly sounds impressive =)) with the help of CPC Booster.
The capabilities of this thing are endless! How about an html browser, irc
or mail client, using CPC/IP by connecting a modem to the CPC Booster?
Would be crazy to see the CPC be connected to the net! Hehe, Peter does
miracles when he wakes up and get motivated for the CPC again :)


AND 2003?

Several productions were expected that weren't unfortunatelly released. The
most precious for me was a big demo called DemoIzArt, prepared by Arkos and
Mortel. (Some say on the CPC that megademos are killing the scene, but it
maybe worth the wait). Arkos members told me they wanted to release it
before 2003. It's at least 90% percent finished. Latest news from Targhan
were about his tracker that he wants to release at January of 2003. I got a
preview of it and it's interesting, though I didn't had the time to search
it more through and it was beta. Let's wait for the final and see. I
beleive their demo will be definitelly released in this year too.
Possibilities are high for that, higher than to release my own demo :)
Other than that, I don't know what happened with Prodatron, a great German
coder who returned back to the CPC and was already working on SymbOS, a
windows like GUI/OS for the CPC. I think Futurs have many unreleased long
awaited big projects to work upon (SoundtrackerDMA, Asic Inside, more..).
I am not hearing anything about Kev Thackers CPC+ demos. And who knows what
else. Not that I say that we should be pressing ourself to be more active
on the CPC (Afteralls we are doing it just for fun and (almost?) nothing
else!), but I am just explaining what the usual situation inside the CPC
scene is. A bit sad, but true, if there is not that much motivation in this
small scene to make up the mood of beeing creative again or if real life
matters kills some of us..

As for my plans, I am not sure if I am fully infected by the virus of our
little scene, but better don't beleive to what I say no matter if I will
start now :) My plans are first to start connecting my parts for my 1st CPC
demo which I plan to finish for ReAct2003 (happening inside 18-20 of April)
or Semilanceata's compo if anything prooves wrong with my 1st deadline. I
have few effects (plasma, fire and variations of them), can code few
additional transisions, writers and connection code and am willing to
release a trackmo style demo. Unfortunatelly I was too lazy to code more
effects and the ones that I will use, have already been seen in official
or unofficial previews. I have already coded some basic functions (sine
generation, vram precalculating, pallete functions, unrolled loops
generator and a bit more) and tried some more things necessary in order
to connect all the stuff in a such style of demo (Which is very rare on
the CPC) but there is still some work to do, cause it's harder to connect
effects at the same memory organised in memory, do transitions, some little
design and make them work all together. The remaining code might be not
that much but I am not sure how easy it will be for me. I already got some
nice interlaced pics and the main music from Sice, so it's my part now.
But it's going well and I am getting used more with Z80 assembly as I am
trying to do all the job myself..

It's my first CPC demo ever and my first hard work on assembly, so it will
be a step beyond for me. After that, I will be more fluent with Z80 asm, I
will have many ready old functions to use, coding will be easier and
funnier after I get over the first obstacles and see a work of mine
released. Can't wait the time and I hope real life won't put me down
inactive again during this period. After that, we have to take care of
regular things, like releasing Ovation 6 (For next Summer? Hehehe.. it will
be more than one year, since I last wrote an article for this mag ;P) and
perhaps taking care a bit of my websites and the CPC Outreach Project. And
who knows what else? I have crazy ideas to test in the CPC Booster, utils
for the CPC (Does anyone wants an |lace drawer? Uhm,. an idea I was just
thinking inside my exams, but forget it! ;), more demos, some games, a
wolfenstein engine,. but hey, hey, hey Optimus!!! Get finished with the
few ones that you have to do now and let your mind free of anything else!
You are tiring myself :(


EPILOGUE

I finished this article inside January, exams period, one of my lamest
times, doing not my thing, dreaming of my future scene projects without
beeing able to code anything. To start thinking of big crazy unrealistic
plans without sitting my ass down to create anything, is energy loss and
it tires me as it gets worse. It's called vainglory I think. Hmm,. reminds
me of the CPC scene with it's numerous "in the plans" projects we never
saw :P Let's hope that the current year will proove more productive for
myself and my CPC friends. Time will tell..