AtariSTknowhow

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

Your host: Gunstick

Talk about this on the discussion section of this page

For the moment chip tunes are not covered in all this. They will be used but not explained in detail how it works. You need to be a musician and programmer to dive into that.

You don't need to follow all talks and workshops as some will have repeats.

The presentation method will be using the Gunstick-has-all-in-his-head technique. The workshops will be using real Atari hardware and emulators.

Talk 1

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

Talk 2

• Hacking the Atari ST
  • hardware modifications
  • software modifications
• overcoming hardware limitations with software
  • scrolling
  • digisound
  • sprites
  • colors
  • higher resolution
  • scrolling way too much

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
  • playfields are an Amiga thing
  • there are no sprites on the ST (not shown in this talk)
• but of course this demo shows all this, at the same time (which is also impossible)
  • how to integrate all the effects into one
  • showing off devpac and turboass
  • visually inspecting synchon code

Workshop 1

• programming the 68000 in assembler (using turboass)
• specificity of the Atari ST hardware
• smooth scrolling howto
• color cycling effects
• tricking the ST hardware in other ways

Workshop 2

• algorithms in theory
• and in practice
• and even faster
• faster than experts think
• the CLF technique (i.e. the impossible part)

Workshop 3

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

Workshop 4

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