The other day I published a video about The Electronic Knight’s new demo called “Hologon”. It seemed that a lot of people liked that video. So I want to show another of my most favorite Amiga OCS demos. This time it’s EON by Black Lotus. There are not terrible many new effects, but everything is highly polished, making this demo a true piece of art.
Author: root42
Learning SMD Soldering 2: Learn Harder
We already soldered one SMD kit, which allows you to practice the difficult task of soldering surface mount components. Now we try another kit with a bit more difficult components: two QFP44 ICs are in the kit as well as the usual array of resistors, capacitors, diodes and transistors. I will show you some techniques and tools for this job and hopefully we get better at soldering SMD stuff!
Brand New Amiga 500 Demo on Floppy Disk in 2021?
The demoscene has been part of Amiga (and PC) culture for at least 30 years. Of course there are still great demos and intros released for all kinds of platforms. I love when the Amiga OCS machines (A500, A1000, A2000) get some kind of love, but getting a brand new demo ONLY on floppy disk, and not for download, is something special. This is Hologon by TEK (The Electronic Knights) — let’s watch it!
Let’s Code MS DOS 0x1B: Fixed Point Arithmetics Rotozoomer
In the last episode we learned how to code the rotozoom effect using floating point arithmetics. This however is pretty slow on ancient DOS machines, like 486 and even worse on slower machines. So in this episode we will rewrite the program to use integer based fixed point arithmetics.
Let’s Code MS DOS 0x1A: I Am Not An Atomic Playboy! (The Rotozoomer)
Back in 1993 the Future Crew published „Second Reality“ on the PC. This was a mega-demo of epic proportions. It showcases many new and some old effects with a brilliant soundtrack. One of the effects that was very well done and that stuck in my mind was the „rotozoomer“. A tiling image being rotated and scaled in a very fluent animation. As a kid I wondered how it’s done. Later I learned the maths behind this and today we want to explore this simple yet brilliant effect. In this part we will deal with the basics and implement a floating point version. However the original code used fixed point integer arithmetics, which we will visit in a second video…
Let’s Code MS DOS 0x19: Fireworks in PowerBasic
As 2020 comes to a close it’s time for another PowerBasic video. Last year we did a little snow simulation in PowerBasic around Christmas. This year we are going to do a fireworks simulation instead. And with a little sprinkle of x86 assembly language even!
C64 Repair: Bad Color RAM
We already had a C64G on the channel, which was working fine, but was missing some keys and came „only“ with a SwinSID. This time we get a regular brown breadbin C64 with a fault: It’s showing flickery colors. This might be due to two things: Either the 1K color SRAM or the PLA might be broken. One way to find out: open up and replace some chips!
The Queen of Soundcards: Roland LAPC I
The Roland MT-32 and its brethren CM-32 and CM64 were external MIDI synthesizers that were very much a gold standard for MS DOS gaming. There was one more obscure device though, which was compatible for the most part, namely the LAPC-I. It was a CM-32 and a MPU-401 rolled into one. It’s a big whopping 8-bit ISA card. Today we will have a close look and listen to some samples.
Let’s Code MS DOS 0x18: VGA Plasma
The plasma is a staple of the demo scene effects. You can find it on all platforms: PC, C64, Amiga, Atari… So why don’t we code one ourselves? We base our program on the Fire effect done in an earlier episode, so if you missed that, please check it out, too. We simply replace the draw function with an appropriate algorithm for drawing… the plasma! It’s actually pretty simple.
The TTL Graveyard Clock
The 74 series of ICs is one of the longest running IC series. They encompass all basic logic functions and more. It is (almost) possible to build basically any digital circuit from chips of this series, without needing to use a micro controller. However it quickly becomes expensive as the transistor density of those chips is not very high. But they are a great way to learn about transistor-transistor-logic, or TTL. Today we’ll build the „TTL Graveyard Clock“, named as such because it… looks a bit like a graveyard, and this is also where 74 series chips go to die…? Kidding aside, this clock is an impressive design by Sergey Kiselev and a great way to learn soldering as well as to learn how 74 series ICs work. Plus in the end you get a fully functioning 24 hour clock with seconds!