VMW Christmas Demos

Starting in 1990 each December I would write a Christmas "Demo" to show off at the most awesome of demo scenes, by which of course I mean the computer room of my Grandmother's Christmas Party attended by various aunts/uncles/cousins.

I kept this up until 1996 when I got too busy with finals right before Christmas. In 2018 I went back and resumed the tradition.

You can watch my coding skills progress over the years:

1990 -- ANSI art tree with off-key PC speaker music (GW-BASIC)

A lot of PRINT and COLOR statements using the IBM extended ASCII table found in the back of a book. The music is off key; quite possibly the frequency table I had for music didn't differentiate for sharps/flats.

The code itself is remarkably obfuscated in retrospect.
1991 -- ANSI art santa scene with more off-key PC speaker music (GW-BASIC)

ASCII/ANSI art getting a bit better. Eventually I would make mediocre ANSI art for local BBSes.
1992 -- EGA manger scene with PC-speaker music (QBASIC)

By now I had moved onto QBASIC and graphics programming. I had some trouble with transparent sprites (note that they are walking on a black background). A lot of flickering as I didn't know about page flipping. There was also some levity at my expense because I was too lazy to make appropriately colored feet for the African wise man.

Looking at the code, I drew the whole things out of dots and lines, and generated the sprites on the fly, also out of dots and lines. Bizzarre.
1993 -- EGA flying santa with BGI graphics, no music (Turbo Pascal)

Now I was coding in Turbo Pascal 5. The book I had (no internet access then) only described the BGI graphics, so that's what I used. Mercifily I didn't bother with music this year.
1994 -- VGA shepherd with soundblaster effects (Turbo Pascal + x86 asm)

I think this one is my favorite. I had been an exchange student in Germany and while there picked up Turbo Pascal 6 as well as a copy of the PCGPE (PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia) which had all kinds of fun info on VGA mode 13h 320x200x256 graphics from assembly language. The nice graphics were made with Deluxe Paint. I then had a TSR I wrote that read the image out of VGA RAM into disk, which I compressed with my own custom "PaintPro" format using RLE compression (which I had independently invented, still didn't have easy access to the internet. The file format of mine was co-incidentally very similar to PCX). The music and sound were using assembly language calls into the CTVOICE and SBFM drivers. And yes, Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy is an odd choice of music, but it came with the sound card I had.
1995 -- no demo this year?
1996 -- VGA flying santa with soundblaster effects (Turbo Pascal + x86 asm)

This was only a half-hearted effort. It was a brief new demo combined with a mildly updated version of the 1994 demo. For sound I was now using Ethan Brodsky's sound libraries (re-using a lot of code I was using in my Tom Bombem game).
After this I went off to college and was too busy with finals in December to do much coding (in fact the party was often right in the middle of finals)
2018 -- Apple II demo
I restarted making Christmas demos after a long absence. Look at the 2018 version here
2019 -- Apple II demo I made another for 2019

2020 -- Apple II demo Nothing fancy this year, just a two-line (280-char) Applesoft BASIC demo.

0REM- G =( G>G(!) 4 "( )/"(,2!;G,> >G1>(@F;=/:G*+$/1 G$-3%G$,4/G$*67G'-0+,'13-.',/78'039:'46;<'*.DE'/2FG!./')!2313!+,?A!45BD-BD6:)CC8: BC66-BC66
1GR:?"MERRY XMAS":DEFFNP(X)=PEEK(2054+I*5+X)-32:FORI=0TO28:I=I-2*(I>27):COLOR=FNP(0):FORY=FNP(3)TOFNP(4):HLINFNP(1),FNP(2)ATY:NEXTY,I

2021 -- Apple II demo Another brief Applesoft BASIC demo at the twitter bot.

0Q=38:GR:FORI=0TO9:X(I)=RND(1)*Q:Y(I)=I:COLOR=1:VLIN33,QAT16+I:COLOR=4:HLIN9-I/2,9+I/2AT28+I:COLOR=8:VLIN29,33AT16+I:NEXT:VLIN36,QAT20:HLIN0,QAT39:PLOT9,Q
3FORI=0TO9:V=X(I):W=Y(I):COLOR=15:PLOTV,W:PLOTV,W+1:COLOR=0:IFSCRN(V,W+2)>0THENX(I)=RND(1)*Q:W=0
6PLOTV,W:Y(I)=W+1:NEXT:GOTO3

2022 -- Apple II demo This was a tough year and sadly with the demise of the Apple II bot I wasn't really inspired, but at the last minute I came up with this 280-byte triangle-based tree demo.

0HGR:C=140:HCOLOR=5:H=15:W=14:Y=0:GOSUB8:H=-15:Y=20:GOSUB8:H=100:W=10:Y=52:GOSUB8
2HCOLOR=1:H=50:W=50:Y=15:GOSUB8:W=70:Y=50:GOSUB8:W=85:Y=85:GOSUB8
3HCOLOR=2:H=10:W=10:Y=100:C=80:GOSUB8:C=200:GOSUB8:Y=66:C=95:GOSUB8:C=185:GOSUB8:END
8FORX=C-WTOC+W:HPLOTC,YTOX,Y+H:NEXT:RETURN

2023 -- Apple II demo I made another for 2023
2024 -- Apple II demo I made another for 2024

Watch the videos

You can watch the full playlist on Youtube here: VMW Christmas Demos

Download the Demos

Here is a zip file containing the files. You probably want to run this under DOSbox, I'm pretty sure they aren't all going to work on Windows. Also tried to include the source code. Also the time stamps on some of them are a bit more recent; I had to go back and "fix" some of the code that was using hard-coded path names and such.

VMWXMAS.ZIP (400kb) 18 December 2015

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