Lovebyte 2025 Atari VCS/2600 sizecoded Demos


Background

Lovebyte is a demoparty aimed directly at sizecoding! These are my 2025 Atari 2600 entries.

I also entered a Raspberry Pi/ARM/Linux demo which you can find here

I also had a few Apple II demos which you can find here

And finally, for good measure, see some minimal ANSI art here

Source Code

The full source code for all of these entries is available on my vcs github project under the demos/lb2025 directory.

The Entries

Oldschool 256B -- Parallax



This was my first attempt at a 256B entry with music. Too small to use something like TIA tracker, it's taking a tune by mA2E and trying to put together a mini-tracker of my own. This is based off of an effect from my previous "VCS Desire" demo, but took a huge amount of trouble to get it to fit. It's doing the parallax effect with playfield and sprite graphics. The zig-zags on the side suffered a bit when getting things to fit.

Finish: 6/24 256 Byte Oldschool Intro
Download:
parallax_pouet.zip
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bzEn2KlOKE
Sourcecode: parallax.s
Pouet: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=103570


Oldschool 128B -- Purple Beat





This was a last minute update, when I discovered existing code to do 6502 bytebeat music on Atari 2600. The music code is by Tjoppen (used by permission) which is based off of viznut's combination of xpansive's and varjohukka's work fro a pout thread which came up with the bytebeat pattern
(t>>7|t|t>>6)*10+4*(t&t>>13|t>>6)
. The original example was for PAL and didn't try at all to have valid timing signals. I reworked it with different visualization and have it generating a more or less correct NTSC signal. The visualization is relatively boring, with the background color being based on part of the count and the sprite pattern just being the current scanline.

Finish: 4/17 128 Byte Oldschool Intro
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QCV87e-ABc
Download: purple_beat_pouet.zip
Sourcecode: purple_beat.s
Pouet: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=103571


32B Intro -- Sideways



There are a lot of really nice 32-byte intros you can fine on the atariage forums, though not many have been released at demo parties. I wanted to make my own that is hopefully different than the previous ones. This is doing a simple sprite draw with HMOVE causing a sort of sideways effect with a rainbow background. This looks much better on the Stella emulator, the issue is I used to common shortcut of assuming the stack points starts up at $FD on boot. This is in theory true, but on real hardware it wasn't (probably due to the harmony cart). It would probably be better if I made an actual ROM cartridge of this.

The code itself is using tricks fro others to both init the registers in a compact way, and using shifting to generate VSYNC in 6 scanlines and then 256 scanlines to give a nice total of 262 which is the expected total. It does not, however, have enough cycles to clear VBLANK and at least my capture device was not excited about that.

Finish: 9/21 Oldschool 32-byte Intro
Download:
sideways_32_pouet.zip
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApQgZt2icN4
Sourcecode: sideways_32.s
Pouet: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=103572


16B Intro -- Cbars



32-byte intros have been done before. I wanted to see if I could manage 16-byte. I got at least color bars in this range. Not that exciting. Also the same problem as the 32-byte entry, where it looks fine on Stella but the Harmony cart does not end up starting with the stack pointer at $FD so not all of the registers are getting cleared properly.

Finish: 16-byte Showcase (no voting)
Download:
cbars16_pouet.zip
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAglkGJbmWA
Sourcecode: cbars16.s
Pouet:


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