Our member Gunstick has started his workshop series about the Atari ST platform with a focus on oldschool demos which were the craze in the 90’s.
This Saturday was the first talk (get the slides from there too) with a focus on the convoluted history, the specifications of the machine and showing off a whole lot of applications, programming languages, games and demos.
That show was a bit long and also some disks just did not work or crashed mid way. Still it gave a good impression how, with time, the technological perfection was all the time increased. Concern was raised with all those bad floppy disks if everything has backups. As answer Gunstick presented his latest acquisition from Kryoflux: a nice little gimmick which makes it possible to use an old floppy drive via USB and directly sample the magnetic information from the disk.
The audience got a glimpse of the somewhat insurmountable task of creating a decent animation with the ST hardware and at the same time was amazed that the impossible was really not impossible. That’s the true hacker spirit: in the end, the word “impossible” does not exist.
Here is a video of one of the demos we watched (will be replaced by HQ version when video repository is again available).
The next workshop is already announced. Stay tuned!
Though I didn’t follow the whole workshop, it was both very interesting and impressive what you did there.
Thanks
Where can I find the other presentations? only part 1 and 2 seem to be online…
(I want to finally understand the secrets of optimising software scrolling on the ST!)
There’s also slides for workshop 3, but the other workshops don’t have slides. And the scrolling method was presented in part 2. Optimizations, well that was in the later workshops but not pushed very far.