THE scene_{, even if ZX Spectrum seems to be more coded today, if you dont count one hour gamejams and birthday cards, we suppose the original scene was THE scene and if they can find some who still feel bare code beats procedural levels it might even be the last one standing after ZX and Amiga falls}

_20241003 :
Woah hell, as we stated yesterday :" maybe tomorrow it will just bootup again" after it stopped booting. It kinda did today (which is tomorrow relative to yesterday when we said that) ... it still beckons a refurbished thing tho, the gtx970 just eats electricity and its only used for retrodevving and after some googles apparently a refurbished 8gb i7 box costs less than a pi 5 ...
Just 30 minutes before cycletime ... ofcourse another attempt to NU GAAT HET LUKKEN (but ofcourse it wont) ... pixelhart is kinda ard , maybe someone can lend us a Sarge , its only for 20 or 30 years until finished but just for the new years card .. well we did some last year, we're not SO old that we are afraid to try. Due to the shit, shyte and other shit ofcourse we are left with a lot of sorting and checking now ... this hole really finds every little bit to hold everything and all back at all times. Haunted, aliens and other things, there's no other explanations, triffids, even in large numbers couldnt be that devious. The main issue seems to be not the fact that we'll never pixar a sarge-level pic in the next 100 years but more like how to organize the colors so the sprites actually pass behind it WITHOUT using one of the 8 sprites in the zone as a filler ... still beats watching telly.

_20241003 :
A lot of staring into the candle light sometimes brings enlightenment. From 18 sprites with glitches i seem to have 48 now, perfectly there. Tho there was 56 since i forgot to turn off the bottom but they only showed like 2 scanlines heigh before the bottom closed. Since open borders is notthe point this year i think we'll leave it there, 48 is more than an Amiga, right ? They move fine left to right but the y-coordinate seems to be sensitive. Its like i need to leave 2 lines or so and then +8 or they might not show all 8 , only 6 sometimes 7 , in one case i saw 2 , but the way it is now there are 48 with no spilled colors from the previous or next zone,all plastered to over x to the left and right of $D010 (told you, another 40 years and we'll be pushing FLT off the stage ... ) and moving or sitting. Ofcourse looking into priority it seems that bitmaps arent quite just that (is anything on this thing ?) but only the most significant bit counts as background/foreground so you have 2, not just the background colour, which can lead to undesired holes. So its a bitmap, split to a textmode scroller, split back to the same bitmap (multicol) with 48 sprites over it and a sidtune playing (past 249 i assume theres most space there, i havent done the colourview to see how many cycles it takes out but i dont see anything flickering so it must be "no more than it has until the next split) ... the scroller back to bitmap however, i cant seem to get it exactly right, maybe VIC-weirdness flibbering 48 sprites over a bitmap and splitting it at 75% into textmode and two petlines later back. At any rate, this is gud progress which will CERTAINLY come in handy for the game . I mean, the worldmap can has fx like that and the tbs battlers which we still would like finalfantasy1 style can only benefit from having something like 6x6 sprites on the monster(left70%) side and 2x6 sprites on the right (party chibi) side with modified pet under them, preferably hi-res tho if we could only kidnap a gfx guy and lock him in the basement feed him scraps of pizza and cans of beer until he's done our bidding would be awfully nice at some point. Pixelling that ass is gonna take a lot of time. And you cant just render a blender, scale it to 320x160 and cut out 24px sprites out of that in a colour scheme that cant even use "true16"colours ...
now we started the demo i guess we need to finish it. New years greeting card style , always positive, like you would expect from a Janes OnderGrond with a Catham Joker on top. After allthe futures looking bright but we actually wanted to try GB-studio for this year , however its nigh impossible to notdoat least a card for the old machine that never died, 1stlove box and then the Atari's gonna be lurking but i dont think we have the energy to try and see "how many cards on diff machines can we do in 7 days before xmas" anymore, it really went downhill this year.
ah the SID, yea well good thing we have a few .sng files b/c just creating instruments for a quicky we dont really have time nor inclination to get a phD in sidology first ... its for now not exactly the sound we was looknig for but since as always we just do stuff im sure it will fall in place somewhere slightly above average of everything on pouet ... good thing so many fuckers post so much crap, and with lovebytes every year now its pretty safe to say ... well no offense but most of that shit is just glitch funk, especially shit that goes under 256b (xept the microw8 .... that seems to be a capable machine - - -o drifting again) ... its also VERY confusing really using goat the instruments act funny depending on how you place them and which one play together or in sequence, for instance i have here one where a bass kick and a hi hat turns into a bass and a dronesound but when the hat alone is played it sounds like hat ... then on top of that once you load it into vice it actually sounds different AGAIN, a lasting pulse gets bumped by filters when a drumkick hits but you dont hear that in goat and then ofcourse on the real machine its also still a little different AND ofc since we have an old one with a 6581 .. "the only original flavour" baby ... it doesnt play the other one too correct as well , ...
but i guess we'll get a new years card tho i still dont know what started it.

_20241002 :
messy ... things will fall in place ... with only a few hours a day of which 90% goes to cleaning and cooking , eating and excreting theres only so much that can be done...
Adding these via janesbirdie is not the priority as the updates arent very daily. It just happens when it happens. So the itch to do this kind of introdemo appeared last week, no idea why we dont see much reason to celebrate the birth of Jesus, even less so to look out for THE NEXT YEAR at the end of the world ... but if the itch is there it should be so we took the unfinished bit and try to plex it down further, making a simple intro like last year with a bitmap, a scroller, a sid and in this case (so far) 32 sprites (more than before) which we would like to get to 48 .. i think 48 should be fine for a tbs game, layered over/under hi-res or ECM that should work, open option on open borders for later.
Noticed some fine scene-mentality earlier this week on csdb again. Some guy who probably had to suck someones dick to get an account does the effort to try and learn some stuff and a little halloween demo. Gets the usual "nothing new, not good, blablabla" (after 40 years i mean they're doing games with datasette controllers as a concept just to get something new, no comment, a fine achievement, no practical use.) The guy says "i can do this but i cant do a scroller yet" ... BEM, silence , no one saying "here's some mighty fine docs explaining how to" or "use TRSE to begin" or anything like that, just silence after he says that. ... now THAT is why there's only 25 left in one circlejerk imo ... maybe its also the fear of being pushed from the throne or something. Im not interested enough to do a deep psychological analysis of scene-itis. But i do know this : its dying, slowly, if you're not a bit more accomodating it will eventually. That doesnt mean let chatGPT in, but what was awesome in the 80s and 90s when everyone was in on it now is just pushing away the few who still wanna give it a try despite the fact that you can probably just ask chatGPT to write you 40 rastersplits b/c someone onthe internet has done it. It feels often like it doesnt want anyone to do the same b/c it needs to learn so it can serve better ads for its masters so ITS NOT ABOUT WHAT YOU LIKE , its about what IT wants heh
anyway, i just noticed ... dont have a csdb account, dont care about being part of the scene. I just love the firstlove machine which died before Excess got born (and many others) and since the kid always have liked programming, i love demos (good ones, but everyone who puts a little of their soul in one is gud one really, fact remains every year only a select few can be of level awesome)
.. so ... i dont know whats been blocking my brain again, maybe pT-4.5 feels its "unnecessary" to do multiplexing on a c64. Yesterday i literally sat TWO HOURS wondering why i only had 6 sprites, now i KNOW how it works by now, and i certainly have done a few zonesplits by now, but for two hours i didnt see sprite 3 and 4 were not addressed in the chunk ... thats just sabotage.

_{202409?? :}

"the ropes" (unfinished) , using a permanent loader routine at $c000 that works with an sd2iec (no fastload but it seems to work with epyx) basically just trying to get a bit more of the map of the piano down before we laid down a line of the game. Since no one wanted to explain how to boot from an easyflash cartridge and 64studio didnt work either (back then) - meaning the easyflash compilation it took a while , a can of imHex, some images (mostly Briley and a disassembler but in the end it got up, by then it seemed silly to waste time on a collection of intro screens instead of just doing the game ...
The first one is pretty recognizable i suppose and maybe something everyone who wanted to do at least one intro might have tried, zonesplits, sprites over and under and a scroller, built after the one
The second is looking for a bigger are to display the game, having the screen itself for the map and possibly putting stuff above and below for stats and other stuff ... turns out its not just print A$ below $FF
The third one got done further with all the sprites moving in sinewaves but that seems to be timing hell combined with the open borders. Its probably whats considrered "simple" multiplexing, 16 sprites but adding the open borders and the sprites that sit past scanline $ff it once more turned out not to be that simple so in essence in the game itself we havent opened borders yet BUT YOU SEE WE COULD IF WE WANTED HAR HAR HAR ... anyway - i doub this will ever see "release" status on demozoo lol
The sids are "justhooks" that havent been worked out but own-brew yes ... music and gfx will be the later part of working on the game, first we want a game to hang the gfx and the sound on, ACTUALLY its kinda more like "how much space will be left for gfx and sound once the game is satisfactory, probably a strange way of thinking in a world where parallax scrolling seems to be a breaking point lol but you know, we can do parallax on the jag as much as we want .. this

_20241029 :
So in order that would be 1st1k, boundrless, lonelyraster (personal favourite really), another one that seems to have lost its .d64 and never got finished that was going to use sprites for scrolltext, which is probably still hanging around somewhere in the backups, then this "collection" loader to lear TRSE ropes, and a tune made with Eebens .a26 tracker, which for some reason didnt get listed for the one time in 40 years we actually mailed something just for lulz , i guess they had enough with the 9 entries to circlejerk.
The 1st 3 are "bare asm" written in i cant remember not 64 studio, but studio64 or something, wether thats acme or kickass or tass no clue. "the ropes" is all TRSE, the newyears card is all TRSE, and the game , when worked on is a mix of bare ASM /ACME syntax using a java application called relaunch, mainly for "the core" , the cartridge boot and switch, the C000 zone with persistent code et al, the what we refere to as gamestates are TRSE with some inline ASM here and there for now, optimization can happen after the game is gameable and has some gfx and noise. For instance the random routine uses partly TRSE routine but wed like to shove that up to C000 area too as its used in many if not all of the "gamestates", the stuff to switch cart banks and all kinds of reusable stuff that fits in that small area. We dont know of a way to open up E000-* using the EZF .crt so theres like what ? 4kb unusable b/c half the routines rely on basic which is NOT there as its taken by the rom area from the ezf cart , so the states mainly exist in the 32kb area and thats it. As we have never done this there might be a lot of heresy in it before its finished and after since we go with what works and then some. It shouldnt take more than 20-30 years to finish i think
dont get me wrong there, i dont feel insulted or bitten in my ass or something, im more like wtf came over me that i actually mailed something, looking at the youtube feed, you would see that there's plenty since the 1990s that has never seen the light of day outside the confinements of the room (GLORY TO THE ROOM ! ... faktum ...) - but its actually no surprise , i once asked for an account at csdb (you apparently had to apply ... it used to be on pouet too, you had to fill in some kind of job application form but they changed that ... so i got the answer from csdb-guy : "we dont see why you need an account" ... and i said "well i DONT need one, im just asking b/c i had64 before Excess and maney others even jerked off their first hello world apparently, the machine basically died before "the" scene rose from crackers to demos (and today its a bit sad, they even got these "commercial release SUPPORT THE DEVS!" and all that, i mean yea sure, Razor had that too in every .nfo but they still brought the goodies so you could at least testrun them) NOT THAT IT MATTERS ... but just to clarify ...
look at the time ...
anyway .. i never asked again, and i wont, last time i asked something was "how do i boot from EZF" and got no answer, didnt ask twice either ... i aksed on the Atari Forums "if i wanna do an SSI-like tbs or c/j RPG on the STE" as a first which one of GFA/STOS/Omikron would you suggest as i dont see motorola ASM happening for a first round ... no answer ... last time i aksed something on stack overlords i got a lecture by some wanker on "how to pose the question properly" ... so you see ?
humans are a bit shyte, i rarely waste time asking anymore, ill just figure it out
but make no mistake, i have great admiration for Eebens work, hes probably not the Fegolhuzz or similar but he might be the greatest sound-technichian on the 64 atm ... THAT SAID : they're a bunch of circlejerking weirdows, but thats fine, im a weirdow too, split in 50 different shards, but i jerk alone ... that probably makes us WEIRDER ????