This started out as some mode7 graphics routines I made for my
Talbot Fantasy game and it quickly got out of hand.
"Mode7" is a scaled tiling mode on the Super Nintendo (SNES) that allows
easily creating pseudo-3D effects. The SNES does this in hardware.
My code does this fully in software. This is difficult, as there are
a lot of multiplies and divides involved, which are *extremely*
slow on the 6502 chip found in the Apple II.
The original demo I had was pretty boring, so I threw in some other
things to make it more like a demoscene-type spectacle:
Raster Bars
Bouncing 3D-objects
Picture of a lady with a sword riding a large animal
Scrolling Text
Starfields
Callouts to all my 1337 associates.
Except for the sound, you can run this demo on an Apple II from 1977
(assuming you were rich and could afford 48kB of RAM).
There are many other, better, demos for the Apple II. I particularly
recommend the ones from
French Touch.
Older video discussing the optimization of the Mode7 routines:
Screenshots
Checkeboard scene:
Credits:
Showing the filesize. Each disk block in DOS3.3 is 256 bytes, so 32*256=8KB.
The extra disk block is the Track/Sector list (part of the filesystem, not the
binary, but CATALOG accounts things in unusual ways).
Did you spot the hidden VMW logo on the decompression screen?
You can't see it in the video because (I assume) the MP4 compression
couldn't handle all the random values.
It's coded up in 6502 assembly. It fits in one 8k binary (it's on a 140k
disk image but that's mostly empty space).
The sound is a YM5 sound file that has the envelope stripped off and
otherwise fit into 11 (rather than 14) registers. It also runs at only
25Hz so all the audio can fit in the roughly 32k of free RAM we have to
work with.
Uncompressed in RAM the demo is 22k or so, but it compresses down to 7.5k
or so with LZ4 and is decompressed at startup via qkumba's LZ4 code.
4 September 2018
Released v1.1. Fixes a bug with the interrupt handler than meant
the demo would crash on older (pre IIe enhanced) Apple II machines.
June 2018
Description of DEMO published in PoC||GTFO 0x18
20 March 2018
Worldwide launch of v1.0 of the demo.
March 2018
Spent a lot of time finishing things up. Getting a decent sound
file to fit in the 8k limit was difficult. Some sound quality
was sacrificed.
Optimizing for size is one thing, optimizing for size of something
that's LZ4 compressed is quite another.
3 February 2018
After a year of waiting my Mockingboard finally arrived! Time
to start working on the sound code.
31 January 2018
Added in the credits at the end.
30 January 2018
Optimized the rasterbars and added them into the demo.
28 January 2018
Some improvements to the sphere graphics. Looks less horrible.
Also added some shadows.
27 January 2018
Have the bouncing-sphere checkerboard scene more or less working.
26 January 2018
Finally have the prototypes for the credits scene more or less working.
31 December 2017
Finally got the starfield code working.
21 December 2017
Start adding the self-flying code in.
19 December 2017
Got the background scrolling working.
