There were some great demos, music and graphics released at Transmission64 2021 yesterday but one of my favourite demos was Mahna Mahna by Mahna Mahna. You can watch it above but if you have a C64 emulator or real hardware then grab it from CSDb and watch it there. So fun. I love it.
I loved the PETSCII King Tut too. An amazing piece of work when you realise it was made from the characters available on the C64 keyboard and not drawn pixel by pixel.
Find more of the releases on this page at the Transmission64 website but before I leave you here’s a selection of the stunning graphics entered in the competition this year.
Well, C64 demo coder Logiker created a C64 version and it’s awesome! It’s a one part #PETSCII production and a funny addition to the #demoscene. You can find it in the usual places but if you just want to watch it look here.
This one’s for the C64 fans out there. The Commodore 64 had a huge piracy problem but the groups that distributed games often put small intros at the start to show off. The same thing happened on all platforms and I presume still does, but with the advent of Steam and Humble Bundle it’s easier to buy games than pirate them.
Fairlight was one such group and used the same intro and music for a number of games.
LukHash has created a great remix of the Fairlight intro music that will leave you wanting more. It starts off simple but then the remix kicks in and I love it! He has a Bandcamp page too where you can download an album of his work.
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have been added to a C64 demo called Berniemania by the talented Pretzel Logic. Even includes the knitted mittens!
Older readers may recognise the setting for the demo looks very like the classic Batmania by the same group. Nice bit of work reworking an instantly recognisable demo!
Memento Mori is a stunning Commodore 64 demo released by Genesis Project that won first place at the Function 2020 demo party recently. The picture above was shared by Raistlin/G*P on Twitter saying:
Razorback delivered this stunning piece for Memento Mori. This is a 408 pixel wide multicolour bitmap that we scrolled, right through the side borders, at 25fps, streaming from disk as we went. A world first on C64 🙂
This tweet reminded me that Retrograde had great loading music.
I don’t think I’ve ever listened to the whole tune and the odd stops are jarring, but it’s worth it. Steve Rowlands was a master on the C64.
Andy Roberts left two interesting comments on that video.
Some of the tunes that Steve did were certainly very inspired by music they were listening to at the time (the Creatures Shop music is based on Izit/Stories.They also did a version of The 45 King/The 900 Number for one of their demos.
Generally speaking, Steve was usually inspired by a riff or beat or bassline; when we went clubbing, you would occasionally see him staring off into space trying to pick apart a tune and memorize it.
The disk version was the original version of this tune. While mastering the game, the cassette loader would always hang at the “pause” in the music (the point where everything stops for a moment – listen for this at 1:31). They tracked this down to the pause in the music and thus the cassette loader uses a slightly different tune which doesn’t stop.
And in response to someone asking if they can update the HSVC entry for this song with his information, he replied,
Sure, feel free to add to the list. I also forgot to add that the Level Complete music from Retrograde is based on “Jack your Body” by Steve “Silk” Hurley. 🙂
Someone recorded the Retrograde title music with two SIDs creating a stereo effect the original C64 lacked. It sounds pretty good to me!
Fabulous looking game. It got a bit boring after a while but there were great power ups and the amazing visuals and sound were stunning.
This is a game I’d forgotten about until recently when I saw someone playing it on Twitch. Solar Jetman came out on the NES in 1991, and conversions were made for the C64, Speccy, Amiga and Atari ST. Unfortunately due to poor sales of the NES original the conversions were never released.
Luckily the team at Games That Weren’t were contacted by Martin Holland, someone who knew about the game’s development.
GTW got to work and began to search for this elusive conversion, and started with Haydn Dalton, who sadly could not find anything of the game after some searching. Two years later, and a month or two after the site relaunch, efforts were made to find the game’s programmer, John Buckley as a last ditch effort. After tracing John down to PlaypoolUK, GTW got the news it dreaded.. John hadn’t got any of his old disks no longer… But a week or two after almost giving up hope of finding the game, Haydn Dalton was one day searching through some things at home, when he stumbled upon a disk with the label missing. The label was in there too, and stated “Solar Jetman Disk 1”, and after a bit more digging, Haydn found the second disk.
It’s a fascinating story of digital archaeology and the game now be found in various places including the Solar Jetman page on GTW! You can play the original version on archive.org, but Triad released an excellent version that packed the game into one disk side, and trained it too.
The game itself is like Thrust or Lunar Lander, but it came later and is much better than both! Controls are easier and enemies are more varied so if you liked those games you need to try Solar Jetman.
The conversion is missing a few things present in the NES version, and apparently the maps are a little cut down from the original. I need to download the NES version and give it a spin too!
What do you see when the game ends? Vinny has the answer and posted it on the (old) C64 Game Endings site here.
I discovered an interview with John Buckley, the developer who worked on the C64 version.
What were your first and last ever productions on the C64? The first thing I did on the C64 was called Jeep Command. I did this in my spare time including the graphics and sound FX. If you have seen it, you will know I ain’t no artist! I sent it off to Bug Byte I think, and they put some music on it and shipped it out. The last thing I did was Solar Jetman, which never got released… until now.
Out of all the games you have worked on, which were you most proud and disappointed with? I can’t say I am disappointed with anything I worked on. Most of them were conversions, some I wish I hadn’t of worked on but such is life. I liked working on Solar Jetman on the C64 but overall I am most proud of PLOK on the SNES.
Going through some of my old C64 discs and I found a bunch of “work in progress” demo parts and routines I was playing with.
Back then I didn’t know about revision control but it was a pleasure to find these bits and pieces of code that I had completely forgotten about. Here’s a few screenshots from Vice, but it’s shocking the difference between Vice and real hardware. The cascading Ozone logo is very pale compared to what I see on another screen. Could it be the screen? Or is it the emulator?
These were found on disc 23, side 1. All those discs are littered with small files, chunks of code that I was working on before throwing them together in the Action Replay monitor.
Kids these days are spoiled with their fancy editors. 🙂
In the bad old days of the 80s and 90s computers weren’t as fast as they are now. You had to fill ’em up with leaded fuel and they were noisy and hot and you had to keep the windows open to let the fumes out.
Well, maybe not. They weren’t as fast as the handheld machines in our pockets now but I’ll bet that a larger percentage of users back then at least tried to code something. People had to because it wasn’t always easy to get games. You had to go down the shops and get out of the house to buy any new software! You had to open the manual to find out how to load anything!
So it was that I figured out that I’d rather be coding than playing games, and with the purchase of a book on assembly (that has sadly gone missing in the last year) I got busy and created a bunch of demos on the C64.
I wish I’d had this video to watch when I was starting out! If you’ve done any sort of assembly programming it won’t be anything new but it’s presented in an easy to understand manner and is worth watching if you’re at all curious about how computers work because a lot of the terminology is going to apply to other systems too.
I’m really looking forward to seeing the rest of this series. I want to get back to doing some assembly programming. There’s plenty of documentation out there but it’s a matter of finding the time and energy to do it.
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