Coder Corner

Somebody on Facebook suggested uploading this to GitHub so, there you go.

https://github.com/Pierre-Terdiman/Atari_ST

I wrote some more recent ST code in 2017, I’ll upload that later.

Some of my oldest graphics on the ST were copies of Peter Elson & Chris Moore’s art in the “Parallel Lines” artbook (”Navires de l’infini” in French).

This one was called “Hot Sleep” from Chris Moore:

My copy was one of the first drawing I did on the ST, so it was a bit poor:

I used it in my very first demo (here).

This one was from the same artbook (I got that picture from the internet, sorry for the poor quality):

I already showed the right side in a previous blog post, it looked like this:

This is again one of my oldest attempts at drawing anything on the ST, so my technique wasn’t great there. In fact the left side was so lame I never showed it to anybody anywhere, but here it is:

I did a lot of Dragonball Z copies but good luck trying to find the source material in 2019. How many million hits do you get if you Google “Dragonball Z” these days eh?

Well.

My Google-fu seems to work because I did manage to find the source of this picture, by Googling “dragonball z yellow orange red group picture” (!). The image quality isn’t great though, if you know where to find a better version for this image, tell me:

UPDATE: here’s a higher-quality version:

In any case here is my (fullscreen) conversion on the ST, used in Japtro:

As a bonus, I also found some work-in-progress versions that show a few intermediary steps:

Madoka was a character from Kimagure Orange Road. I drew her a lot.

This original was from an artbook by Akemi Takada:

The copy I made was found in Choice of Gods, and I made her blink from time to time:

This other original was from the same artbook I think:

And the copy was included in our Rising Force demo:

Finally this one was the cover of Animeland issue 7 (a magazine dedicated to japanimation):

My copy was included in an obscure (and rather lame) intro/demo called Dreamways:

IIRC there was another ST graphist who copied the same image and then claimed I “ripped” his picture… Which was very strange considering none of us were the original authors. We both liked the same stuff and copied the same source.

This second example is called Witch World, from Rodney Matthews. I had a couple of Rodney Matthews artbooks and I copied a lot from them (fonts, logos, etc).

Here’s the original:

And here’s the copy, found in the Choice of Gods intro:

Like many of my Atari ST pictures this was unfinished. I wanted to do more for the sky but never did…

Speaking of unfinished pictures, here is another Matthews-copy that I also didn’t finish:

Since it was never finished, it has never been used in a demo.

A lot of the ST graphics I did were just copies of existing art (because I’m a coder, not an artist). It could be interesting to show the source and the copies side-by-side so I’m going to start a serie of posts about this.

The first example is from Cat’s Eye. The original was a poster in a City Hunter artbook:

The copies are displayed one by one in the Japtro intro. I am not sure why I separated them all, it could have been more interesting to put them all in one picture, but maybe I ran out of colors (the ST has a 16-colors palette by default). One can change the palette each line but maybe that’s not enough here. In any case here’s Ai (Alex in the French version):

Here’s Hitomi / Tam (actually I think I did have multiple palettes just for this one already):

And here’s Rui / Cylia (you can tell I got tired of this project because the mouth and the legs are not finished, but it was only displayed for a few seconds in Japtro so you barely notice):

These are some of the largest pictures I drew on the ST.

A long time ago I was drawing pictures on Amstrad CPC and Atari ST. I vaguely wanted to create adventure games. I recently found a bunch of these old pictures on backup CDs. Here’s a selection (click on the picture to enlarge it).

I heard a rumor. My brother had a friend whose brother had a brand new computer… Intrigued, I arrived at the friend’s place, whose brother was the happy owner of an Atari 520 STF. This was a mythical machine whose prowess I had read about in the first issue of Génération4. But I approached it unsuspecting, jaded, not expecting much. On paper the screen resolution for the ST was the same as for the Amstrad (320 * 200), the sound processor was quite similar (3 channels, soundchip tunes), and thus I thought both machines would be of comparable quality, with maybe a performance edge for the ST since it was running at a higher clock frequency…

Not at all! What a mistake I made that day, to lower my guard!

First image, first shock.
First note, first slap in the face.

Goldrunner. Head on. I could have thrown myself head first against a wall, the effects would have been the same.

Mouth open, staring eyes. What can I say? Impossible to explain in human words. Complete and utter disbelief.

Ruthless, the brother of the alleged “friend” (a friend, right?! (*)) shows off one game after the other, while my body and soul tremble with jealousy.

And then, then, to finish me off with a sadistic pleasure, he ran… a demo! A fucking demo! And not the lousiest one: the L.C.D. from The Exceptions!

I eat this at point-blank, the impossible comes true in front of me, TEX, Mad Max and his gang for an intense and concentrated mix of extreme code, mindblowing music, never seen before, never heard before, unreal.

As a final kick in the nuts, and to make sure I go back home with my brain in my socks, he presses the RESET button… And I witness my first Reset demo, made of digitized applause samples ripped from 10th Frame. That’s it, I’m done. Overdose. I have seen too much in too little time. My saturated mind does not register anymore what goes on around me. I must leave.

I go back home on autopilot, in zombie mode. Disgusted. Absolutely and terminally disgusted. I do not understand how the two machines, ST and CPC, with similar specs on paper, can be so different. I do not understand and I do not bloody care! I need a ST. In two days or two years, no matter how long it takes, I must have an Atari. How else could it be?

The transition period is unclear in my mind. I guess I kept playing on my CPC, a bit sad. But anyway, you guessed it, one day I finally got a ST.

I got an ST, and it changed everything.

The first days were incredible. I was in awe of even the beep sound effect from the Atari’s keyboard, it was so pure and crystal clear! I was amazed by Barbarian from Psygnosis. Just as the CPC was a different world compared to the Apple IIe, the ST was another galaxy compared to the CPC. There was no competition here. I experienced almost a big slap a week, and always came back asking for more. One day I bought Captain Blood. And when I heard the intro music, the first digital music I heard in my life, I just went bonkers. There was a gaping hole between this and my little music from The Temple of the Sun, and I was dizzy, looking straight into the abyss. At this point there was only one thing left to do: I laughed frantically, thinking the future would be eventful and tumultuous.

As it turned out, I was right about that.

(*) Despite what I wrote above, we became very good friends afterwards. I spent countless hours at that guy’s place, watching ST demos or playing ST games. That person was Amaury Aubel, now working as Head of Effects for DreamWorks.

ST games had an interesting new feature: the “cracked by” intros. ST games were unreal for me, coming from the CPC. But these intros were the ultimate form of unreality, unidentified mutant objects that surpassed anything I had ever seen in video games - and I had seen a lot.

Better. These intros were better. Better coded, no doubt. Unquestionably more beautiful, with more colors. Out-of-this-world colored bars called rasters, that one could only find in those “demos”, managed to invade the usually empty screen borders. They were displayed outside of the screen! Again: unreal.

Rasters

Curious, as always, I gradually gave up playing games to investigate these famous intros and get a closer look at them. It was also at this time that I first connected to servers such as SM1*ST or RTEL. This was on the Minitel, long before the Internet. I made contact with some people. With a lot of people, in fact. Not doing things halfway here either, I ended up with a lot of mails – I’m talking regular “snail mails” here – coming from all over the country. My mother used to joke I had more mails than a French minister. That network had basically a single goal: to share demos.

And one day in 1989, I received a particular demo from one of my contacts. Not your average demo. The most legendary demo in the history of ST demos: the Cuddly Demos by The Carebears (TCB), from Sweden. And that day my life changed. It is no exaggeration on my part: it is clear that the next 5 or 6 years of my life have been in one way or another influenced by what happened that day.

What happened was nothing out of the ordinary on paper: I just inserted the Cuddly Demos disk in the drive, and I booted the machine.

…

And I got torn apart like never before. I remember this like it was yesterday. I had never felt anything like this. It happened at just the ideal time: I had not seen enough to be completely jaded (that would happen later with the Amiga, which for this reason impressed me far less) but I had seen enough to know that the world had never seen this before! Mindblowing is too little a word to fully convey the force, the power that exuded from this demo. Brain petrified, leached, liquefied, shoo! I fail to explain with words what I thought and felt at that time. It was not just unreal anymore – I had come to terms with the unreality of that world -, it was worse than anything I had brought myself to accept so far. The Carebears invented everything that day, and put on a single disk what others would then painfully rediscover in the years to come. Techniques that even the designers of the Atari ST would have had a hard time replicating. A visual unthinkable folly. Think of it as if suddenly your black and white TV had started to produce colored images, out of the blue. Complete madness.

That was the last drop. It pushed me over the edge. It was too much for me. I was terrified and ecstatic at once. Terrified by the extent of my ignorance. Terrified by my littleness. I was wasting my time playing stupid video games when others were doing… this? But I was ecstatic because it was possible. It was possible to do with this machine so much more than what people believed!

My decision was made. And irrevocable. Whatever the cost, I would also create demos. Me too.

I learned that demos were coded in Assembly, which reminded me of bad memories and put my ambition to rest for a while. I could not wait to start programming these magical things myself, but I did not know where to begin. Taking advantage of the STMag and RTEL servers, which both had programming forums and chats, I unearthed a few experts in Assembly language, looking for any help, any tool, any source code sample.

I quickly found a mentor, a guy named Loïc – a.k.a. Pirateal. He kind of took me under his wings and provided me with tools (Devpac!), a few source code examples, and more importantly agreed to answer my naive newbie questions. And boy those kept coming! I had a thousand questions a day, for any small insignificant detail…

Questions kept coming, demos kept coming. I am not going to list here all the demos that blew my mind at the time, but one of them deserves a special mention. While the Cuddly was the unquestionable number one for me at the time, a close runner up was the MindBomb from The Lost Boys (TLB). I do not have a lot of programming heroes. I think I might have maybe 3 of them: Nick of TCB, Manikin of TLB, and Steve Bak – from Goldrunner’s fame. So it is worth mentioning all those years later that the world caught up with one of them, Manikin of TLB, now responsible for nothing less than God of War. Yes, that game. There are very few people who managed to blow my mind twice with a 20-year interval inbetween, so, well done sir.

Anyway, in the end I learned 68000 Assembly. To make demos. Learning by playing, as always.

I created a few small demos that I submitted to the STMag server, so that other people could download them - I knew the sysop, Mic Dax, well enough at that point to just boldly ask him. And before you ask, yes, we could download stuff from the Minitel, from at least as early as 1986. Those first demos were not great, but quite decent still. I was very proud of them in any case.

But something was missing. Something vital.

To create demos seriously, I needed a group.

The group was born one day at a computer convention, the “Salon de la Micro”, in 1990. I went with a friend, coder-wannabe like me, from High School. Let’s see… I got my “baccalaureat” in 1992, so I was at the time in Tenth Grade. This computer convention was the event of the year for me. Impossible to miss it. It was the logical sequel to the old AmstradExpo I had followed in the past. But the 1990 edition would have broad implications.

In one corner, on a screen, a demo. I catch a glimpse, but shoulders and heads block the view. Ouch! That’s a screen from The Overlanders. For those who do not know, The Overlanders were the French counterpart of The Carebears: the best in their field… Especially when they joined forces with another star who often revolved around them: M-Coder!

Alert-eyed, I listen carefully and focus my attention on the ongoing discussions. And a shiver goes down my spine when I realize that… Dammit! Those guys chatting in front of me are The Overlanders! And I finally notice, in their back, embroidered on their jackets, the well-known logo: OVR!… I feel humbled.

Feverish, I look for my friend so that he also enjoys the show. I find him talking with a stranger. I quickly learn that the guy he’s talking to, Selim, is looking for people to start a demo group. Wait, what? We take the bait immediately, of course. I hear with amazement that Selim has many contacts in the fortress that the small closed world of demomakers can be. With The Overlanders in particular since he has been in the same class as Ziggy Stardust, their leader! A weird picture forms in my head: Ziggy in school? It sounds so amazing, so out-of-place… But this brings me back to Earth: yes, these people are regular humans too! Contact is made with Selim: he lives in the Paris area, like we do, and we promise to meet again. You bet! You don’t let go someone who has followed the same courses as Ziggy Stardust! I take this opportunity to dot the i’s: Ziggy is not a fan of David Bowie. Legend has it that he chose this pseudonym for a completey different reason: you can also read Stardust as “star du ST”…

The machine had been set in motion.

I remember a few code sessions with my coder-wannabe mate, later known as Elric. New contacts as well. Newtek, Dan Nato… how did we meet them all? I do not remember anymore. One thing I do remember from this period is the day we found the name of the group: Holocaust ! Rather aggressive and loaded, right? This could be seen as the same provocative and iconoclastic behavior that made me appreciate Hebdogiciel. But it would be dead wrong. At the time, the historical connotations of that word completely went over our heads. The only thing we saw was that it ended with “ST”, and that was it. Fair enough: that was not our brightest moment… Nonetheless, it popped up one day from the tortured mind of our friend Michael, whose musical taste at the time was somewhat standard for a teenager: Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse, Iron Maiden, that kind of cheerful music. This may very well explain where the name came from. I can still see us at school, in the middle of the study room (!), seeking a nickname for the future Elric and a name for the group. Well, we had just found both. That is what study rooms are for.

That was it! We had a group, we had the structure, we had the people. Better: we had the potential thanks to Dan Nato. Dan did not produce much for Holocaust, but he did one fantastic thing in the early days of the group: the FlexiScroller!

It was awesome. Very impressive. Never seen on an Atari, and as far as I was concerned never seen at all, anywhere. And yet he had done it, easily, quietly, with an unusual modesty – that was definitely not the norm amongst demo coders. And it was for the group! Merely thinking about the opportunity that Dan was offering us here made me feverish. That was it: we suddenly had a chance to create a demo that, whatever happened otherwise, could make a few jaws hit the floor – if nothing else, at least for the FlexiScroller. This was the key to the castle’s locked door. This was a way to make our breakthrough. A way to reach the other side of the mirror. A way to reach the same level as our idols… Terribly exciting. And also very, very scary. For the first time in my life I experienced a classic phenomenon in demomaking: anxiety related to time! Time passing too quickly, leaking, and playing against us. Because we had to be the first ones to release a 3D FlexiScroller like Dan Nato’s… It was a unique opportunity to create a name for ourselves. The stakes were too high, failure was not an option. Unfortunately, apart from Dan’s routine we had nothing. Not a single screen. Nothing at all. We had to create everything else from scratch. There was this terrible anxiety that gave me the chills (really!) when I received a new demo in the mail, the fear of seeing someone else releasing a FlexiScroller before us…

Let’s fight! Dan Nato’s effort had galvanized me, had showed us the way. I gathered my strength and threw myself into the battle, heart and soul. I have never learnt and coded as much in my life as during that time. I spent my days and nights coding, living each new demo as a missile to dodge, every minute of code as an ongoing challenge. More than ever I was on the Minitel looking for clues, hints, new routines, useful contacts. Like a lot of other people at the time, I focused my efforts on the two greatest ST mysteries: fullscreen and sync-scrolling. Information was scarce. I spoke at length on the Minitel with other sorcerer’s apprentices, experimenting my magic potions on the video controller for hours… My fears increased gradually as time passed. I already felt we were too late, that we had missed the ST boat, missed the great discoveries from Level16 or TCB. I had the feeling we started coding on the ST when the boat was already sinking and the rats already leaving the ship…

In any case, I made my first fullscreen thanks to a girl.

I beg your pardon? What? Yes sir! Thanks to maybe the only coding girl on Atari: Killer D, from FMC Connexion. Or at least, it was somebody pretending to be a girl, you never know. In any case “she” was my teacher in anything fullscreen-related. She sent me bits of the Full Show source code… and when, after a long time deciphering them I finally managed to run my first fullscreen, I got seized with a wild and uncontrollable joy. Finally! Finally I was ready to compete with the best! I felt like I was unveiling one of the best kept secrets in the history of the ST. It gave me an unquenchable sense of power… Encouraged, more than ever determined to create the demo of the century, I plunged headlong into the code again, living for that and only that.

As for the sync-scrolling, I only “got it” months later thanks to a friendly chat on RTEL with Fury/Legacy. And I must note here that, perhaps not so surprisingly, the same Fury now works in the same company as Manikin/TLB, on God of War as well. This really is a small world.