ATARI 16*16 Sprite Record History (other screens)
If you're an old ATARI demo coder, you probably know how nice it is to break a world record ! What's a world record ? Simple: take a very simple program (Sprite display, 3d cube, rasters, or anything you like) and try to put as more as possible in a vertical blank, on a fixed hardware. (ATARI ST in our case). Some crew or people were specialist in optimizing, with various technics. I personnaly really enjoy that kind of contest, and even today I search some new technics to break old ATARI records. (It changes from DirectX stuff I code all the day :-)).
Recently I find back on my hard disk a new record I broke in may 2001 ! That record was one of the oldest "official" one. So here is the story of the record, and all people trying to beat it ! I hope you'll enjoy ! Of course we beat many records, but I can't do a page on each of them ! :-) So here is the story of the 16*16 2 bitplans sprite record !
NOTE: Mega thanks to Phantom to make that page up to date. Thanks to Gnu for informations about Vector record.
1989 is a very good year for ATARI demo. In the same year came three of the best demos ever: The Union-Demo, the Cuddly demos and the Sowatt demo. The picture on the right show you the first 16*16 sprite record. It was done by The Carebears. The record consist of displaying 16*16, 2 bitplans, non masked sprites. Please notice there is a grey background. (that's important for the next). Record was here: the world famous crew "TheCarebars" saying "You can't beat this", a nice and very pure screen, some energic MadMax music (the famous S.O.S tune !). When I first saw that screen I don't know anyhting in assembly programming but I was impressed by the design of the screen. ("Nothing else than technic"). No scroller, no gfx, only technical code ! They managed to display 131 sprites with a MadMax tune. (134 without music) |
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End of the year: The french crew Overlanders brings a totally brainblasting demo called "The Delirious Demo 2". This mega demo contains some of the best screens written by one of the best ATARI french coder: Ziggy Stardust. As he writes almost all the demo, he try to beat the famous record too. As always, Ziggy has another approach: his technic is totally different from the others and he displays 136 balls instead of 134 ! (132 with music and vu-meter). For the first record breaking, things were a little tricky. If you look at the Ziggy Sprite, you'll see it's very nice, but 16*14 sprites ! You probably say 2 pixels is not important, but YES it is for a record ! This is not a "broken record", but nice try anyway ! People know it's possible to beat TCB, so let's see the big adventure ! |
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1990: Great demo from great swedish guy: The Overdrive demo by Phalanx. This is the real "TCB record break". Their sprite was a little more complex (but not really nicer :-)). Please note they add a scroll-text. A 16 pixels vertical scroller (for speed). They managed to display 143 sprites without music and scroller. (Please note that sprite is 15*16 pixels, so it's a bit cheated) |
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1991: A very rare record, coz I never seen it at that period. (I discover it in 2002, thanks to Anders Eriksson for the news). The author manage to display 148 sprites (142 with music, vu-meter and scrolltext). The sprite is really 16*16 pixels, but it's almost one bitplan. The technic is quite inovative. Great code but bad colors.. :-) That screen was spread with a Soundtracker called "Digicomposer". |
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1991: In our second megademo (The O-Demo), I decide to beat the record when I find a new clearing technic, first introduced by the famous french crew Equinox. This technic really looks like some old PC mode-X technic. It allow you to fastly clear a screen in two bitplans using MOVEM. The only drawback is that it uses all the bitplans, so you can't have a backgound anymore. I put 206 sprites, with music ! Record were really splashed ! (206 instead of 143 !). Even if the record were explosed, I was not satisfied because in a way, it was not the original record. (there was no bitmap background). |
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2000: We ar eplanning to go to the ST-NICCC, ten years later ! We had to prepare some nice stuff to bring there: First, we made a 3d demo and we won the first place of the demo competition ! Second, I made a special version of the Nostalgic Demo. That version contains a new screen: The classic 16*16 sprite world record ! In my last attempt I had cheated by removing the background. But this time, back to roots !! Look at the screen on the right ! this is *the* original TCB screen ! I choose the classical MadMax SOS tune too ! So here is a real record break: 165 sprites WITH music, and WITH a nice one pixel scroller !! Please note I use *exactly* the same sprite as TCB, so I can't cheat on the bitmap. I manage to obtain that speed by writing a new generated code in C++ and optimize it to the max by hand ! :-) |
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2001: After writing some DirectX 3d stuff for my job, and some sound synthesys at home, I like to write some ATARI code when I have some spare time. I decide to include ALL optimizing technics I know, and write the fastest code of my life to defnitly break that classical record ! I know there is no people trying to beat it at that time but that's just for fun. I take my last record back (165) and add a new clearing technic I call the "Mosaic technic". I pre-compute a 16*16 mosaic bit-field. That bit-field contains spatial information about area to clear during a frame. When I write that new technic (I think never used in an ATARI demo), I saw the CPU time was really moving, depending of the frame. Generally, when you have a no-constant CPU load, you can use the "multi-screen" technic. That technic was first used by the great "Mega Tridi" screen by Ziggy Stardust. I fastly add that technic and reach the incredible number of... 197 sprites !!! I was really happy to get that record !! You can download the disk here (20Kb) !! |
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2002: After having some new ideas since long time I finally decide to code it ! The main code consists of a big data builder written on PC, using a lot of sort routines and generated code. Here is the result: 212 16*16 pixels sprites, running on a 1Mb STFM machine. You simply *CANT* beat this !! You can download the disk here (225Kb) !! *WARNING* : If you want to test it on real ATARI hardware, don't forget the disk image is double sided !! (2 sides, 23tracks, 10 sectors) |
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2002: After some computations, I change my databuilder in order to include a new technology :-) ! As many people complain about my own "rules" for the record (cf. 1Mb machine), this demo disk contains two world records: 520-STF and 1040-STF version. You can see both one if you have a 1040 by pressing ESC key during the boot fade. Believe me or not there is a *lot* of code and ideas to get such a number of sprites :) I hope it definitively pays homage to The Carebears ! Thanks to Heinz Rudolf (Cyclone/XTroll) for nice ICQ speaks and ideas about sprite record (and especially the idea of putting both records together on the same disk). You can download that beauty here !! ( 538 Kb ) NEW: Now work on ST,STE,MegaST,TT and FALCON ! (Thanks to Cyclone/XTroll for heavy help on debugging all these machines !)
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October 2004: Back with this funny contest. Rules are simple : break my password or break my previous record to discover my new explosive record on a 512 Ko ATARI STf.
You can download the disk here !! ( 312 Kb ) |
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November 2004 : After some tries, Phantom
has beaten my previous 220 sprites record with 221
sprites. You can download the disk here !! ( 189 Kb ) |
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November 2004 : Gunstick finally published his
record. The number of balls is exploded compared to the
preceding record, with 18 more. You can download the disk here !! ( 194 Kb )
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This record is mythic because it displays twice more sprites than the initial screen of TCB. Lot of work on PC-Builder (that represents the greatest part of the background work) and on ST code optimizations (tower code for displaying and deleting) You can download the disk here !! ( 312 Kb ) |
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You can download the disk here !! ( 259 Kb ) |
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You can download the disk here !! ( 300 Kb ) |
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You can download the disk here or here !! ( 317 Kb ) |
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Based on Scum Of The Earth approach and combined with new optimizations, it is now possible to obtain a clear improvement : 9 more balls ! Displaying even more balls (at least 5) can be done but the 512 KB limit is a true trouble. You can download the disk here !! ( 317 Kb ) |
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The 17th of march 2005: After weeks of thinking, motivated by great records of SOTE and Phantom, the mythic "300" sprites limit is broken ! Here is 312 sprites ! You can get technical details on ATARI Forum in that thread.
You can download a new 9 sectors disk here !! (easyer to write on floppy to test on real hardware. Of course works on emulator) ( 334 Kb ) |
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I hope you like this story ! If you have new informations about that record, or maybe you beat it (!!), please write me !!! |
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Homepage: http://leonard.oxg.free.fr/ |