AtariSTknowhow

Atari ST knowhow

This series of talks and workshops will introduce to the world of demo programming on the Atari ST platform.

Talk 1

• Introduction to the Atari ST
  • presentation of the hardware
  • the OS and available software
  • games, cracks and demos

Talk 2

• Hacking the Atari ST
  • hardware modifications
  • software modifications
• overcoming hardware limitations with software

Talk 3

• The impossible demo. People always thought that on the ST
  • you can't do 500 colors at once
  • you can't play digital samples
  • the video signal has always a border around
  • it's impossible to move the whole screen contents
  • bitwise shifting is taking too much CPU
• but of course this demo shows all this, at the same time (which is also impossible)

Workshop 1

• programming the 68000 in assembler
• smooth scrolling howto
• color cycling effects
• tricking the ST hardware

Workshop 2

• diving into the internals of the impossible demo
• source code
• change parameters and watch results

Workshop 3

• design your own demo
• can it be done
• program it