This was the thirtieth Vammala Party, and Thirty years of Vammala Party. It was also the tenth anniversary for me, and the eleventh visit overall.
The location is the almost standard Kauppila farm, with good accommodation and suitable outdoors options. The weather was mixed, but not limiting in any way.
The event is not purely a demoparty, one could say the demoscene events only occupy one corner of the whole thing. This in some ways makes it more appealing than many demoparties, but it's also apparent the compos don't have many entries.
The Wild compo was strong as usual, there are even certain traditions and styles observed, which have grown (or in-grown) during the years.
I had nothing to contribute beforehand to the compos, except an idea for the Tuplain compo where existing youtube audio is combined with another video. I combined a slowed down C64 Delta footage with Koyaanisqatsi music. When I have little expectations about winning the compo, I submit something I'd personally like to see, or want to show to others.
The reverse also exists, of combining slowed down SID Delta music with a Koyaanisqatsi clip, but I spared the audience from this as the music sounded rather horrible.
The customary on-site Commodore 64 PETSCII was done, and it turned out ok.
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| Pals, Commodore 64 PETSCII |
Then I began working on a Tic-80 fantasy console image. This I supposed would be small enough to do on location. Yet my ambition grew and I saw the idea would not really fit into that resolution. So, I switched over to Atari ST format and kept on pixeling.
I am working on adding a Tic-80 mode to Multipaint, but the more I understand about it the less interesting it seems. With 24-bit RGB colors, the mode is so flexible as to be almost pointless.
Also, using the two layers, 32 colors could be invoked, and with some tricks I believe even more is possible. So I could almost just as well enable a low resolution 24-bit RGB mode. Meh.
But enough of that.
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| Pixels in Space, Atari ST, 320x200, 16 colors out of 512 |
The Atari ST outcome is nice, and although I could see a few more evenings would help a little, the hands are a little lazy and the dithering could be more refined. But there's also a certain roughness I like.
Perhaps using the default Tic-80 palette as a starting point helped take the image in this direction, instead of doing the "one color slide and accents" approach. I'm also relatively unaware what peak Atari ST images look like, so I was not too much pressured by precedents.
Congrats! Not familiar with ST graphics, but the dithering on that last piece (particularly the face flesh tones) is absolutely insane. There have also been a couple C64 multicolors in recent years that've used a similar technique, almost like layered CMYK screens, but the color clash limits it somewhat.
ReplyDeleteThanks! Yes, especially Joe has been working with that kind of dithering patterns on the C64. His work is what gave me the epiphany, that dithering doesn't have to be "slide color 1 into color 2 and then to color 3", but working with proximity of unexpected colors. It's maybe closer to pointillism or indeed a print technique. I'm not skilled enough to make it work on the C64, but at least I could make some use of it on the ST.
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