Zoo 2022

The largest Finnish Commodore 64 demoscene party, Zoo Party, took place in Orivesi campus 28-30th of October, 2022. Although 2021 saw the mostly-online "World Wide Zoo" event, there really hasn't been a proper Zoo party since 2019.

Given the somewhat lacklustre Assembly 2022, I had mixed expectations. Have sceners been sharpening their weapons and ready to release their pent-up creativity in full pressure? Or do we get to see a small batch of zombified entries?

The Party Bus arrangement made it easy to join from Helsinki to the party location somewhat east of Tampere. A train would have worked well too. It was already known there would be rather many participants, and the bus was quite full. As the evening turned from the depressing grey to night-time darkness, the atmosphere began to build up.

It was nice to see the campus setting had far more space than that hotel at Akaa, and the accommodation was very good.

At this point I have to say the Akaa hotel (2013-2019) had a nice atmosphere and the mezzanine added some "dimension" to the space. Yes, having a sports hall as the main party space just doesn't have that Kaurismäki/David Lynch feel that the tiny hotel had.

But still I'd say overall this location wins and when it comes to sitting in front of your C64 and enjoying the party audiovisuals, the architecture doesn't matter that much. Also, in Akaa the bar in the party hall was something of a mixed blessing.

The responsibility of feeding, when carried by the party organizers, was unclear at times. But as there was an arrangement with the house kitchen, the breakfast and supper were professional. As a welcome bonus, Wide Load additionally provided hot dogs, if you were there at the right time. Now there were no pre-bought beer tokens, and beer did flow freely, up to the rumored 700 liters in total.

Entering the foyer, one was greeted with arcade game selection from Reprocade: Wizard of Wor, Crystal Castles, Tempest and Klax. I was able to try each one quickly during the party. 

The merchandise was there too, notably the obligatory Zoo T-shirts and the new Finnsids II SID album. The exhibition of Game Boy art, displayed on real Game Boys, was an additional curiosity. That's a rather hardcore display format for graphics! The entrance space also hosted the flea market on Saturday, and you could also upgrade your C64 with diverse gear. I bought a replacement PSU and I'll discuss that in another blog post.

As usual, there were a couple of talks. One was Miha Rinne, a long time game industry professional and the author of the graphic novel Journeys in Game Industry (Matkailua Pelialalla). He told of resurrecting a very old C64 game project called Undead, with side-scrolling zombie smashing fun. The completely new version will re-use the concept of that old game with new graphics and sound. Interestingly for me, at least some of the background graphics had been mocked up with Multipaint.

Lasse Öörni AKA Cadaver, of the Goattracker fame, is of course also known for the C64 games such as Metal Warrior and Hessian. He showed interesting details about the tools and cross-development environments he had built for game development.

Both of the presentations seemed to highlight the importance of self-made (or in-house) tools that can be even particular to one game project. In Rinne's case this approach enables the designer to build game content without having to become entangled with the coding. In contrast, Öörni, coding everything on his own, could explore the possibilities of memory- and speed optimized level storage through creating his own map editors.

The musical acts were there too, such as Terracuda (Deetsay/Tero and Barracuda) and 8-bits high. I would enjoy these shows but somehow tend to miss them as there's either something else to do or I'm already asleep. At least 8-bits high are gigging here and there, so you don't have to go to a demoparty to hear them.

Off to the compos.

Zoo Kids was a fun competition for kids, let's say the daughters and sons of middle-aged sceners. The works were submitted remotely (I doubt many would bring their kids to Zoo) And it was nice to see Multipaint used for this purpose too.

For the SID music compo, my seat wasn't probably at the best place so I grew a little weary of the fat kick sounds and had to move farther away. After the party, I enjoyed some of the winning works at the comfort of my home. To me SIDs are best enjoyed in small quantities, and Zoo often has dozens of pieces!

In the graphics compo many reported that Multipaint was part of their tool palette, which was a pleasant surprise. Clearly, over the the years the software has grown steadily in popularity to the point that a number of people came to comment on the software, often with some development ideas.

Cartoonzone

I worked on my compo entry image for quite a while and to me Cartoonzone represents quite well the kind of picture I really want to do currently. It combines Multipaint work with modest sprite multiplexing. Unfortunately it did not do especially well at the compo, I hoped it would land in the top 10.

The more jokey PETSCII, Samantha Fox Strip Poker, actually did reach position 6. Overall the compo had a solid selection of great works, but PETSCII perhaps isn't able to impress me so much as it did back in 2013-2015. Perhaps Peak PETSCII has been reached?

Samantha Fox Strip Poker

Earlier in the autumn, I still had some hopes to contributing to the game compo, but these hopes withered as the deadline loomed. Especially the last few weeks before the party were not conducive to finishing a game project, doing the graphics entry was enough. Although the number of entries was not high, the quality was pretty good. Perhaps not a surprise the more humorous and "demoscene-esque" of the games won (Burger Ninja) rather than the one I felt had a solid game concept (Knight Trap).

And let's not confuse this Game Making compo with the games compos. Lumberjack was surprisingly exciting to follow as the players one-upped in what appeared to be quite an intense and stressful game.

Cosmic Convoy

The disc cover compo doesn't have that many entries, so it wasn't impossible to get into 3rd position. It's a compo I have often wanted to contribute to. But I rarely get into the mood before the party, and when at the party place the time is often spent on other things. This time it was possible and there were some spots where I could advance the drawing while eating and listening to others.

I'm a little confused why Party Feature and Wild Compo need to exist as separate categories, but I guess it's more comfortable to submit to Feature things that would be at the party in any case, such as logo banners. The Wild I guess is still reserved for the video works and alternate computer platforms.

Oh, and by the way why is it ok to play SIDs on top of graphics entries, but not ok to show graphics while SIDs are playing?

The demo compo was so late and we knew there would be a huge number of long-ish demos, so frankly I had a nap during it. But from what I saw the quality and number of the best demos was really high.

So, yes, to answer my question, it looks like Zoo and the C64 sceners were back in full force.

Zoo 2022:  5/5, I'd take part again.

Zoo 2019

Some recollections from my participation at the Commodore 64-only demoparty, Zoo, held at Akaa during 4th-6th of October. Again, not really a party report, I'm mostly talking about my own works.

Not the general theme of the weekend.

My pre-party mood was a bit pessimistic, after not catching a hotel room. Another thing I worried about a bit was not having any prods for the compos by the time I arrived. But I managed, as usual, do something on the spot.

It turned out the common accommodation at the nearby building was much better than I expected. The airbeds are cozy and the space was not jam-packed. It actually has a few pros compared to the hotel room, mainly it is very silent (the party noise won't reach there) but it's also cheap. If only I hadn't forgotten to pack the roll-up bed...

The unsuspecting Viiala neighbourhood, somewhere in Finland.

SID

SID was a general theme of the event. Grue gave an overall 'mythbusting' session about the SID and played concrete examples of playing the same songs on different SIDs. The differences were quite drastic, in some cases the wrong SID can even hide the lead instrument.

The bottom line is there is no overall 'best SID', some songs sound better on the 6581 and some better on 8580 - not even always the one the author intended! Your ears be the judge.

Flex gave a workshop on Goattracker. It's a complex piece of software, and SID is complex, so I doubt anyone could have started up Goattracker there and then and gotten finished results, but as I had at least some previous experience I could pick up one or two new things.

I mused that to be able to do SID music on C64, you have to have an understanding of many things, not just one thing:

• About SID features, behaviour and constraints
• The convention of "a SID" as a tracked format on Commodore 64
• How Goattracker (or some other editor) works

And maybe some musical knowledge too. Well, anyway, these SID presentations encouraged me to think that it does not matter so much if I don't achieve the perfect iconic SID sound, so I started tinkering on a crappy tune following some of Flex's tips.


VIC-II

Dr. TerrorZ: Light

I had a Multipaint presentation, but I found I couldn't really 'teach' anything at this point so I simply told what the program is for and showed the main features of the new version. This led me to have chit-chats with various sceners which was maybe the best outcome of the presentation.

The software is now already quite known in the scene but not everyone will adopt it. But I don't think I'm bragging if I say it is a good introductory-level software for making C64 graphics!

First time i saw the zoo from this angle.

My graphics entries were even less successful at the compos than last time.

Normally parties tend to go so that I pick a half-decent half-completed image from the archives and finish it, but this time my folder was rather empty. I also spent a lot of time getting a demo production working (see further below), time taken away from drawing.

The bitmap work was a quick experiment with drawing using wacom tablet with Multipaint.

Dr. TerrorZ: Spacesplash

I preferred the initial quick lines and was even afraid to lose them with too much detailing. So I actually like this image quite a lot (perhaps because I did not have time to grow tired of it) but it didn't go down that well in the compo.

Admittedly, a further session would have helped it a bit. (That's a damn long arm!)


CPU

I was greatly impressed with the amount of quality demos at Zoo. I recall the dry year 2013 when even a crappy PETSCII demo written in c by some idiots could win.

The Finnish Gold 'returning' with a full-size demo should/could have been a bit more grandiose. Although it was presented at the show-stealer last position, it was a bit on the short size and petered out in the end. Artline Designs demo Out of Contex delivered better overall and was the clear deserved winner. The Void Mind was still incomplete at the party but is clearly a memorable demo. PWP's Metadimension was an atmospheric generative-algorithmic work.

In the drunken tired atmosphere there was a tangible mood of having passed a turning point and a feeling of living amidst a new rise of the Finnish C64 demoscene. In a more sober hindsight, it's perhaps not all there yet... X'2020 will mark the spot.

I submitted my modest Nine Rings one-filer, based largely on re-writing Digiloi game routines. Digiloi object drawing system is naive in that it draws characters and colours separately to two buffers, and only combines them at the screen. Now I have the graphics stored in a reverse interleaved order for the drawing, and the buffer is also interleaved. So I could have 9 Digiloi-style 'sprites' on screen.

From Dr. TerrorZ: Nine Rings

The PETSCII mode is forgiving in that I can go with 1/3 framerate and it still looks kind of acceptable. The routine was in place before Friday but I did the scripting, music and some additional graphics at the partyplace.

After hitting the ring theme, my goal was to visualize the One Ring to Rule them all... poem, giving an outline to the demo script. But as time ran out I could not add more graphics and it was left more abstract. It was well enough received.


I/O

Apart from the above presentation, Kasettilamerit made an appearance, and the bid for making demoscene a part of UNESCO World Heritage was also presented here.

At the location I bought an external kernal replacement cartridge, a REX 9628 clone. Equipped with JiffyDOS and JaffyDOS and other jibba-jabba, I'm hoping it will make an interesting companion to SD2IEC or that Raspberry floppy emulator. More about these later.

Also I got a K&A paper magazine English edition with a Digiloi review :)

zooparty.org

Zoo 2019 at CSDb
..at Demozoo
..at pouët

(At the time of writing the listings were incomplete)

Zoo 2017

The grandeur of ZOO (not my computers)

Last weekend I went to the Commodore 64 demoscene party ZOO, held in Akaa, Finland. I participated in 2013, very much intended to participate in 2015 but that plan fell through, so it was nice to "return" to the ZOO atmosphere.

I've never felt like a huge scener, but I've started to recognize and connect a bunch of faces and names, so I guess something is happening :) This is not a party report/review about who was there and what cool shit happened, I'll just ramble about my own participation and the presentations and compos there.


At the Competitions

The PETSCII competition

There were numerous categories: demo, basic demo, graphics, music, wild, party, PETSCII and party feature. A sort of specialty of ZOO is the heavy emphasis on the PETSCII text art competition and the BASIC compo as an added flavor. Both usually have a spate of joke entries so I was surprised to see everyone had taken both quite seriously.

Dr. TerrorZ: Paradrone, C64 PETSCII

Although the standard of the PETSCII stuff was very high overall, I felt a bit weary about it. I guess I'm projecting my feelings about my own competent-yet-a-bit-tired work for the compo here. One novelty was Marq's stereoscopic PETSCII image, I guess a proof of concept that it's possible!

For the graphics compo, I had prepared a multicolor bitmap, again made with Multipaint. I'm quite happy about the process, this time I avoided spending hours and hours on anti-aliasing and dithering. Compared to my Inside Job with same subject matter from a few years back, the figure is much more dynamic.

Dr. TerrorZ: Infestation, C64 multicolor

Against some of the best of Finnish (and some international!) C64 talent, the pictures were not enough to reach prize positions. I also made a BASIC demo entry, but less I say about that the better - I had hoped there would have been only 2-3 entries.

The 2013 victory kind of made us responsible to participate, so it felt a bit bad we did not have a demo for the main event. I guess the main demo compo was ok, but it was getting a bit late I could not pay so much attention to it.


Presentations

Before the compos, there were presentations galore. Marq gave a presentation about PETSCII and the PETSCII editor, based partly on our academic work and partly on the development side of the editor. There was not that much news to me obviously. The creation of the editor was very much tied to the 2013 ZOO compo so it was nice to see it addressed here. But there can be such a thing as a PETSCII overdose :)

Juho Kuorikoski, the author of many Finnish gaming books, was pimping his new C64 book, which sadly was available only in very small numbers. The crowdsourcing campaign probably meant only the contributors receive the book first. Not obsessed with the C64, his relation to the computer could be defined as "normal", so perhaps he is the right guy to write a thorough popular book about the Commodore phenomenon in Finland.

Another enjoyable presentation was given by Pasi Hytönen, the guy who made the game Uuno Turhapuro Muuttaa Maalle back in 1986, pretty much the only Finnish film licence game in Finland in the 64 era. The batch was not too huge, so especially the disk version fetches high prices in net auctions nowadays. Pasi talked about his ORIC/BASIC days, and I was surprised to learn he had been quite involved in the game development scene ever since. (Including 1990s dead ends such as WAP/mobile/multimedia stuff)

It exists, it's real

Gideon, the Ultimate cart guy, gave a Q&A presentation about the new Ultimate 64. He had a functioning board with him, and although it's as good as finished the release is still some times off. He sold all the Ultimate cartridges he had with him, so I wasn't too tempted to buy one. Guess I'll save my money for that total machine, although the benefit of a cart version is that you can use it with any C64...

It would have been sweet if the new C64 and the new C64 book had been properly available at the party, but what's impossible is impossible. What with both the Uuno programmer and the musician ("Jori Olkkonen" back in the day) present I sort of half-expected some announcement of a new collaboration, but I guess that would have been too strange to happen.


Other stuff

The venue as a space is excellent, as the main hall is clearly designed for performative presentations. There's ample room for tables, there's a mezzanine, sauna and connected hotel rooms (for those quick enough to grab these).

The bar inside the main hall, next to the computer tables is a bit of a mixed blessing. Yes, sure it provides a constant atmosphere and is a very clear and professional way to access all merchandise/drinks. But the sound of bar chatter nearby can also be a bit distracting, especially when there are more "serious" presentations.

It's nice to have active lights, but truth be told I'd prefer if the display projection was a bit bigger.  I also sometimes wondered if the saturation from the C64 signal is a bit overblown with the projector. The C64 pics looked almost like ZX Spectrum sometimes. This seems quite common in parties, though. I guess an effort has been put to give a good quality image, and maybe the image is more "technically correct" in some ways, but does it correspond with a conventional monitor display?

Overall, amazing times. Maybe the 2013 event had more novelty and excitement for me, as it was the first time for me, but all the events, participants and programme kept it interesting.

The ZOO 2017 on the net:

http://csdb.dk/event/?id=2425

https://demozoo.org/parties/3080/

http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=277&when=2017