Sine Scrollers?

Wibbly-Wobbly-Scrolling

I've always had a thing for sinus scrollers! I mean, just look at it. Gorgeous!! This screen is called The Two-Screens-Together Demo by Black Byte/Bytechangers and weighs in at 3.5Kb - less than JetPac!! But why so tiny? Well, it was programmed for the first-ever STNICCC in their "VIC Times Revisited" competition. I guess the rules were obvious with a Ram limit based on the Commodore VIC-20. Impressive results!!

Sadly, there's no music, but I guess there wasn't enough space left over, which is completely understandable. I would love to see this updated with music and freed from the shackles of that old competition because it's too good to remain as is. I'm sure something beautiful could be done with this piece of code.

I'm always on the lookout for demos with similar scrollers, but I fail to remember which disks I saw back in my youth. So it's been a painful process manually hunting them down. Of course, similar effects are used in many demos for waves, circle scrollers, distorting images, etc/etc... but I'm specifically referring to a sine wave used for a horizontal text scroller - like the one displayed above in all its wavey sexiness.

There must be a ton of cracktros and demo screens that I've forgotten about!! So, if you know of any using this sine scrolling technique, then please let me know in the comments below. Until then, here is a selection of text scrollers using the sinus effects, which are all utterly amazing and definitely worth downloading...

Nibble Scrapping Smooth Sine Scroller by XXX International

---

Possibly the best-known ST sine scroller I'd say? Okay, there's no sound but the visual effect is great and incredibly well coded. I wish more would have been done but there's no denying how cool this is.

Circle Dots by MJJ Prod

---

This is such a smooth screen and with gorgeous music by Dma-Sc. The scroller is sine-tastic and works well with the stark palette style which really appeals to me. Oh, and there are some dots too which ain't too bad!

Sinfull Sinuses by Chronicle

---

What a great demo this is with a bunch of cool visual fx and great music. The sinus parts are very good throughout but this is all about the sinus text so I loved their big blue sine scroller, which is just lovely.

Electrolytical Artificial Intelligence by ACF Design Team

---

Another fine sine example and taken from one of the best megademos there is - Just Buggin'

Disk #0052 by BITS

---

A slap-bang, in-your-face, no-frills sinus scroller and it's pretty darn excellent too!!

Flexiscroll by The Resistance

---

An awesome screen from the Decade Demo but it spends (most) of its time doing everything other than what I wanted to see! However, as a demo, it's pretty cool with some lovely fx and wonderful chip music.

Genesys by Aenigmatica

---

Yes, it's quite mild but the sine scrolling is there and I like it. This is a pretty great demo too.

Menu #3 by Electronic

---

I don't remember this group from back in the day but here's an intro with a nice sine-scroller. Sadly, there appear to be many of their disks that still need to be found and preserved. Can you help?

Module Compilation #09 - Plejades

---

An intro for a cool MOD disk that includes (possibly) the best player available for the Atari STe? Well, I was blown away by it! Anyhow, this intro has a dodgy image, cool music, and a neat sinewave to enjoy.

Arsch Screen by FOXX

---

This was released as part of Phaleon's GigaDemo and boy what a screen from an outstanding megademo. Nothing short of mind-blowing. Yes, both the sine scroller and the megademo. What a point in time this was!!

Alvin Puzzles Cracktro by Elite & STAX

---

This cracktro was used many times because it's fast, classy, and superb. I only wish the sine scroller had a splash (ahem) colour! One of my favourite intros for the ST. Erm, cracktro I meant to say.

Mr Heli Cracktro by The Replicants

---

The Replicants released what seemed like a zillion hacks and I've found a fantastic sine-scroller disk!!

The Greetings Screen by MJJ Prod

---

The Anomaly Megademo is an absolute cracker and this screen is simply divine. Outstanding. [link]

Phototro by Hemoroids

---

This is a superb demo with a great plasma screen but the sine scroller is also pretty darn cool.

Go Ahead Make My Bed

Happy Halloween!

I made a compilation video for Halloween and wondered what it might contain. Well, what's better than Chainsaw Massacre by The Lost Boys? It's an entertaining demo and a great example of the banter between ST groups. I ended my video recording with a beautifully scary image taken from Halloween, by The Black Twins.

If you’re too squeamish to watch a Swedish Carebear being mutilated, perhaps you’d prefer to play a game or two instead? But seriously, what's wrong with you? Anyhow, the Atari ST has many scary games in its library to choose from, and many I have yet to feature here on AtariCrypt. Yikes, I need to work harder!

Here are some nerve-racking ideas which are highly recommended by yours truly...

• Horror Zombies From The Crypt is the obvious choice - because it's fiendishly superb.
• Ooze is quirky, but there are lots of things going bump in the night to entertain.
• The Curse of Rabenstein, a brand new slice of horror that is jaw-droppingly awesome.
• Frankenstein takes us all on a humorous B-Movie adventure.
• What about gore? Nothing beats Death Chase for immense lust for blood!
• Finally, there is Nightbreed if you dare to try your luck within the disturbed mind of Clive Barker.

Now I'm in the mood for more horror: Brides of Dracula, Munsters, or Night Hunter. Has anyone played 'em?? Let me know what you think in the comments. Oh, and don't forget about ZombieCrypt, which is spine-chillingly cool. By that, I mean it's that lame slideshow I made. Watch it and let me know what you think!

Happy Halloween, folks, and remember, it'll soon be Christmas!! ;^)

Evil Ash, from Evil Dead II, and then featured in ZombieCrypt on the Atari ST.

How cool is that!

GEM Desktop Music

Music while you work!

Over the decades, I've seen many neat programs that play a piece of chip music in GEM as a background task. I always thought this was cool and wondered why there wasn't more. Well, it turns out there are a lot on several Budgie UK disks. (I don't think I ever saw these programs on any other floppy disks?)

I've spent some time going through my disks to gather a quick, no-frills compilation. Some of these tracks were made by Goth, but I'm not sure who else to credit for the rest - possibly Budgie UK? There's also an intro included, which is a scroller text by me using a utility coded by Dogue de Mauve of Overlanders.

I hope my floppy disk is of some interest to you, ST Nutters? Like it? Let me know in the comments!

(my download is updated to v1.1 -thanks to Tronic of Effect for his new addition!!) :-)

Evasion II

Ignore the looks - play it!

Evasion 2 was developed by Chris Skellern for Budgie UK and is a maze game where we run around collecting pills whilst being chased by the nasties. Yes, I know this sounds all too familiar, but the structure of the gameplay's mechanics is different for a frantic rush. Each level offers a chance to collect power-ups - to freeze the baddies, drop smart bombs, and gain extra lives. Heck, you can even drop mines in their path, which is a brilliant touch, I thought. The enemy's AI is really good and makes the game demanding.

There might only be 8 levels, but completing them grants the chance to do it again, with extra-zippy baddies!! You know, this is a perfect example of how cool Atari ST retro gaming is. Evasion is maddening, and I enjoyed the frenzied challenge. It's brilliant, and I'm sure you will love its adrenaline rush.

• Grab the download at AtariMania, and play Starburst (another corker by Chris Skellern).

Ignore how it looks. Yes, it isn't 1982, but since when did aesthetics matter?

These humble-looking tiny blighters are actually infuriatingly intelligent and fast!

I came so close to finally completing the game - and without cheating! :o)

Dave Semmens

It's now over three years since I featured a platformer called Spellfire The Sorceror, something that I hadn't previously heard about, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It's tons of fun and very easy to pick up & play. Plus, another glaring example is that the Atari ST can scroll - when in the hands of talent.

It was programmed by Dave Semmens, the same guy who gave us Kid Gloves II, but he also made a couple of older ST games which, ahem, left a lot to be desired. I began to wonder what could have changed for such an immense leap in quality compared to those earlier efforts. The difference is quite staggering!

So I tracked him down to find out, and then asked a few more questions too! :-) Dave was more than willing, and I thank him for being such a great guy, taking the time to chat with me. I hope you enjoy this little interview and don't forget to check out his incredible photography (and FaceBook group) which are both linked below.

- The Dave Semmens Interview -

Hello Dave, tell us all how you began...

I got interested in computers when I bought a C64 as a teenager. I soon started programming in basic and then looked at assembler. Within a short period, I realised that I wanted to try Z80 so sold the C64 (which was 6502) and bought a ZX Spectrum with microdrive. I bought an assembler and started coding simple games like TRON. One of my mates spotted an advert for programmers in Otley. I decided to give that a try and got the job.

The company was Source The Software House and they did many conversions from arcade/other home computer formats. I worked on a number of Spectrum titles and then added Amstrad (which is also Z80) to the list and then moved up to 16-bit with the Amiga and Atari ST. After a couple of years at Source, I went freelance and spent around 4 years working for Mirrorsoft, Probe and US Gold on various 8 and 16-bit projects.

What were you using back then?

We used a system called Programmers Development System (PDS) - it allowed a PC to be connected to the target machine and for all the assembly of code to be done on the PC then downloaded to the target. This meant that if the machine crashed (which it did often) then the code was still safe. Originally, I started with a basic Amstrad PC that didn't even have a hard drive - just huge floppy disks. We slowly moved over to faster and better-equipped PCs as time progressed and the codebases/graphics for each game got larger.

I still have my Atari ST in the loft along with copies of all the games I worked on and quite a lot of magazines with reviews of my games. But it's much easier these days to just boot up an emulator to play them :)

Dave, hard at work in 1986 in an office made in heaven!

What was it like working in the games industry?

This industry is not like any other I have worked in. The people (most of them) would put themselves through hell to get a game out. I have worked with teams that spent days in the office, with very little sleep, and that was on floors or couches in the meeting rooms. I remember rushing disks down to a waiting motorbike courier, who would speed off at high speed to deliver the latest build to our QA people. I always said that crunch time to get a game out (normally the last 2 months) was the best of times and the worst of times.

To see a team come together and work together in this period was fantastic - the late-night antics and comradery were brilliant. But the impact it had on people was huge 20-hour shifts; nothing but take-away food for days on end was a killer and I had one lead engineer end up in the hospital with heart problems after one game.

How did you find this development?

I was always pushing to speed up the code as I wanted it to be better than anything out there - I wanted to have a proper dual playfield parallax not just a wrapping background etc. So I was always looking to improve. I discovered that, on the Atari ST, if I had the sprites at a 0-pixel shift when they hit the scroll point, then I had more processor time to scroll the screen which compensated for the lack of hardware for screen/sprite manipulation.

Any inspirations?

The games by Ultimate always blew me away - such great games and so playable.

Rainbow Warrior, eh?

This was late in my time at Source and the project had been given to an engineer. He was new to the company (if I remember correctly) and, in the end, he didn't get it completed. I found that the programmers coming in, who had not worked on the 8-bit systems, did not have the same concerns for memory. They had 512k to play with and didn't have to worry about finding ways to compress the graphics and save as much memory as possible.

As this was based on several mini sub-games, it was decided to split them up across a few programmers. I picked up a couple of levels and (maybe) the front end. I think Rainbow Warrior was my first Atari ST/Amiga game.

And then SAS Combat Simulator?

SAS was a straight conversion from one of the 8-bit versions (C64 I think) so I was just asked to create a like for like version for the Atari ST. The problem with budget conversions was that you were limited to what was possible on the 8-bits. There wasn't much time to do the conversion if you wanted to make good money, so it was a case of doing the best you could in a short time. The game played ok as it followed the playable C64 version.

By the time you had finished any game, it was hard to judge how playable it really was as you had to spend so much time playing and replaying sections yourself to test it. That got very repetitive!

But then two fantastic games!

I think one main reason for both Spellfire and Kid Gloves 2 being better and more polished is because they were my games. They were not conversions - I designed and put in more time/effort as they would not have had the same time limitations as the other conversions. As I designed the games, I could also make the mechanics fit well with the limitations of the system I was working with. Time and polish = quality :)

I was also on a royalty deal for both so made sure everything was as perfect as possible. As a programmer, I had a set of routines that I would use for all games - the basics like sprite and scroll routines. I would improve these over time and the main time to put extra effort into improving these was for my own creations.

Looking back, would you do anything differently?

No - I loved my time in the industry and would do it all again. I wish I had been 3/4 years earlier as that is when the big money was flying around. I will always remember the teams and people I worked within the Games Industry. I have yet to find a more dedicated bunch of people and, as I am getting on a little, so I doubt I ever will.

So what are you up to these days?

I now work as a project manager/agile data specialist for the largest online betting companies in the world. I still code in VBA and Tableau. I have a wife (the same one who suffered the games industry :) ), three kids (all grown up), a grandson and a small yappy Yorkshire terrier. My passion is now photography - not writing code. You can find some of my images on Flickr and I have a Facebook Group :) His photography is outstanding!! -Steve