Batman Forever Team

Initially published on Push'n'Pop.

Hicks - Hi to the whole Batman Forever team, I mean Rhino, Arnoldemu, Factor6, Yzi, Dadman, Mac and Paulbrk! First, I think it would be interesting to introduce yourselves by explaining who you are, when you started CPC and what you already released on it?

Yzi - Hi, I’m Yzi, coder and musician from demo groups Fit and Lieves!Tuore. Before Batman Forever, I had never done anything for the CPC. I got connected to the other folks via MSX.org forums, where Paulbrk asked for Arkos Tracker musicians. I had just switched to Targhan’s great tracker and playroutine from my own old Lieves!Tuore MSX music system, where I had to compose the songs with a text editor straight into asm source code. My old system’s songs were a bit smaller in runtime size and allowed things like freely flowing polyrhytmic track patterns, but composing songs was really slow, because I had to recompile and “test” the song every time I made a change. With Arkos Tracker I’ve already made more songs in one year than in the thirteen years in my own system.

Factor6 - Hi, I’m a human from Earth J My name is Alan Petrik and I live in the Czech Republic, which is that small country to the east from Germany. First I must say, I’m not a real 100% CPC man – My mother platform is ZX Spectrum and I’m doing some bits also for other 8-bit platforms like Atari 8-bit, C64, Sharp MZ, PMD-85, ZX81, CPC, etc. My first CPC job was some graphics for Optimus, AFAIK. I remember some graphical and musical CPC attempts for Forver party. I also made picture and music for CPCtro by zeroteam. After its release, the CPC scene discovered a new “source of music” in me J and I was asked for making music for Plasmorphy and Batman Forever. Music for Plasmorphy has been made on the ZX, but it’s difficult to convert it due to different AY frequency of ZX and CPC. It was a pain to make it listenable on the CPC. So I decided to make the next one, the Batman Forever in the Arkos Tracker, which is one of the most comfortable trackers I’ve ever used. It’s a pleasure to work on the CPC, in opposite to e.g. C64, which has awful music editors.

Mac - Hi, my name is Marco and I'm Rhino's brother and a Batman Group member since its beginnings, when we focused on Amiga. I know CPC from 1987, when my father bought it, and it was for me, basically, a computer for games and to make some stuff in Basic. But honestly, I always liked the Spectrum. Batman Forever is my first contribution to the CPC scene.

Paulbrk - I am a professional artist, look in Mobygames “Antonio Galvez Alcazar”, since childhood, I was very impressed of what computers can do, I grew up with 8, 16, 32 bits... systems, I like all the machines, every one has his advantages and weakenesses. Since 2005 I am more interested on the retroscene, specially on develop software for 8 and 16 bit machines.

DaDMaN - Well, my nicks are DaDMaN and DaDoS, and my official presentation to the CPC scene was in 2005, with a "remake" for PC of Street Fighter II, using sound and graphics CPC style. These were the first graphics that I converted to CPC after a complete inactivity since late 1992. Thanks to "Street Fighter II CPC Edition", I joined the programming group Amstrad ESP, where I made the cover of the game Phantom Saga: Infinity, and I collaborated doing gfxs. I have also participated in "Mariano the Dragon", "iLogicAll", "Smart Games for Smart Minds", "Paciente 106" and the re-edition of "Columns" for CPC.

Shortly after, I joined the group "CEZ Games Studio", where I made all the graphics of "BETILED!" for CPC, and I collaborated in the MSX version, participating in the cover of the game "Aqua" and "Nanako: The Japanese Monster Castle" and the game menu (gfxs + code) of the compilation "CEZ Collection, Vol. 1" for CPC.

Currently, I am part of the programming group "RetroWorks", but we have not published anything for CPC, and the group "RetroFactory", with Syx and me, and under this label, we are programming the CPC version of "UWOL: Quest for Money","King's Valley I 'and' King's Valley II".

I am the author of the blog: "ladrillopixeles.blogspot.com" where I try to comment the retro news from a technical and precise view.

About hardware issues, I have several projects underway, but the best known is the VDRIVE Host USB for CPC. There are several videos on youtube about it.

Arnoldemu - Hi. My name is Kevin Thacker and I’m from the UK. I’ve had a CPC6128 since 1986 and I’ve been active in the scene with my emulator “Arnold” and my website www.cpctech.org.uk. I have also released some demo previews (4096 colours), and in the past a long time ago I also released some musics discs with musics converted from Atari ST. More recently I concentrate on games but help others where I can. The musical loader was always something I wanted to do.

Rhino - Hi, my name is Alejandro and I’m from Seville/Spain. Concerning demoscene, I was an Amiga coder from 1992 to 1995, afterwards, I was inactive until now. About CPC, I made some routines in basic and assembler when I was a child, so can say that Batman Forever is my first CPC release.

Hicks - Are the reactions about your demo similar to what you expected? You put some jokes about the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC scenes but, behind the joke, what do you really think of these two scenes? What do you plan to do when Booze Design and Vanity answer to your attacks? :)

Factor6 - Yes, it’s exactly what I expected J. About the attacks. I think it’s not too bad to do this in a decent amount. Of course when I’ve seen it for the first time when Rhino sent me a beta of the demo, my first impression was it is something bad, but then I thought about it more and decided not to force Rhino to remove it. I’ve personally nothing against Commodore 64. I like that computer (it was my second computer after Speccy) and its scene. I think Booze Design could include answers for those attacks, because it was the C64 scene who started these attacks in the 80’s (namely against Atari). So it became a kind tradition right on the C64, at those old times J Booze do phantastic demos, so if there was a mention about Batman Group or the Batman Forever, it wouldn’t be a surprise for me. But, bigger surprise would be if Vanity or anyone else made next outstanding demo on the CPC. Because CPC simply needs more demos and BF shows clearly, that the demo-oriented potential of the CPC is bigger than most of people thought.

Mac - I knew that BF would be received very well because it is a careful work in all aspects, but I think the welcome was somewhat higher than I expected. As for the jokes about Booze, Vanity and the C64, I find funny the vain and arrogant style, and I'm glad that it was not misinterpreted. In the scene that I knew in the 90's there was always something like that. Vanity is not a sin if it is supported by talent and is accompanied by humor.

I know very little about the retro scene, but it seems the C64 is as great as the Amiga scene in its time.

Paulbrk - I am only thinking on make people move, to maintain the scene alive and better every year. I hope no one get angry with that comments, be always positive.

DaDMaN - The most important thing is to talk, whether good or bad. When they talk about something or someone, is that you have not received indifference. I am personally very proud to have participated in this demo, to shake the retro-foundations and to have contributed to changing some attitudes.

Arnoldemu - When I first saw the previews from Rhino I was blown away. The final demo is great and I always enjoy watching it over and over again. I knew the result would cause a storm through the Amstrad scene. I knew there would also be both positive and negative reactions to it. I believe there may be some who may want to discredit it because of their own personal reasons. I was particularly interested to see some reactions from the C64 scene. The C64 scene is huge, they are active and produce interesting and good productions. In the past I have owned a C64 and watched a lot of demos and appreciated the design and work that has gone into them and I think this demo is close to the same feeling I got when I watched those. So it was interesting to see the first response (c64’s version of the rotating bat logo). I think we still have some learning to do from them, so that we too can do quality and more productions. I never thought of myself as part of the CPC scene. I have watched demos since 1989, and I have seen many impressive and great demos released, but more recently I feel it can sometimes be a bit closed and critical and “you’ve got to be in our gang”, I think this could be damaging and I feel we need to encourage more from both old and new and I am thinking positive that this will happen. I expect an answer from both Booze and Vanity and I look forward to seeing that. It will be fun to watch and learn... will the result have the same feeling as this production?

Rhino - Absolutely not, Batman Vuelve only had 80 thumbs up on Pouet when BF was released (80 after 10 years) and I thought it was a success! Now, BF has 280. I honestly not thought that a CPC demo would have this reception and I'm happy for this. J

About C64 scene, I think they have the best retro-scene. They have many active groups and people, and this is the key of the quality of its productions. But human resources is not the only thing to keep in mind about demomaking... real machine capacities is also important.

CPC scene is small, but I think and hope will grow soon. Its main attraction, in my opinion, is that there are many things to do yet. And CPC is the best 8 bits computer series for me. About people, I think it's like everywhere, there is everything. I have found very nice people and also some details that I don't like, as the controversy after Phreaks release.

Attacks? hehe, well, if I remember correctly, Booze's zoomscroll says something like "beat this!" ... its zoomscroll only has 3 colors and is small, so I think that I just did what they asked. :) And I think "watch and learn" is a familiar phrase for you, right? J. More seriously, I think healthy competition and challenge are good things to improve and motivate. And, if you attack to the Elite, it is an act of value. Attacking the weak is cowardice. Of course, Booze and Vanity will be owned again if they dare to attack the Dark Knight, hehe.

Hicks - Batman Forever is of course visually impressive, especially by your clever use of animations and rasters, but some people were frustrated by the lack of technical approach. What do you answer to that? Do you attach some importance to the “real time” approach or to the kilo-byte size of a demo?

Rhino - The lack of technical approach? Well, I think that who argues this, should explain why... I have to say I don't like to do technical judgments about demos and less about my own work. But for once that CPC has a demo envied by the C64 scene, I think it is very unintelligent for a CPC lover, spreading false rumors that degrade the work. So, I will clarify any inaccuracies about the technical level of BF.

First of all, I would like to know what effects do you mean with "animations"? I think using the term “animations” is inaccurate. Animation is a very general concept, and therefore imprecise. An animation, by definition, is a sequence of frames that give the sensation of movement, and from that view, all demos are animations after all, because there are not interaction. In this way, if you says that your favorite part of the demo are the "animations", probably few people know what effect are you talking about, but if you says, for example, dots, zoom, 3D objects…, everyone would know what you mean. J

That said, the technical discussion focuses on how each frame of a demo is generated. And I think we would be not very accurate, again, if we make the typical Manichean classification about "real-time" or "pre-calculated", because from the moment you use a sinus-table, you are using pre-calculated data. We can say that all the effects of any demo have a number of pre-calculated data, which are processed in real-time to generate each frame of “animation” that make up the demo. To be precise, technically we should talk of % pre-calculated and % real-time, and evaluate all aspects (visual quality, speed, technique, originality, innovation, ...), this is a hard and very subjective rating, so I not try to change anyone's opinion (but, if a purist coder only likes real-time orthodoxy, can remove the effects with high % of pre-calculated of BF and still get a very long demo).

Of course, I disagree with those who say that BF lacks of technical approach and I'll explain why. First of all, a trackmo is, technically, a superior concept in comparison with a single load demo, because you are not exploiting the technical capacity of the hardware (FDC) doing a single load, and as a result you get a severe and unnecessary restriction of the memory usage, which affects the visual quality and duration of the demo and, usually, results in a worse product.

Other details to keep in mind about the technical level could be the compatibility, bugs, etc ... I would have liked to be more careful about loading times, and although I did not notice any problems with my floppies, I received some comments from people who have some sync bugs after loading for a few milliseconds. Moreover, BF runs on all CRTC except type 2, and keeps exact 50Hz frequency all the time, despite the strong and continuous use of CRTC techniques and, consequently, you can watch on any projector, TV or monitor without problems.

About the size, it is logically related to the duration, number of effects, graphics, musics, sfxs... BF takes over 11 minutes and uses one 3" disk and a side, doing a simple division about 4 minutes per side. Considering the amount of graphics, musics, samples, effects ... I think it has a size suitable for what it is.

I also think in an analysis and technical assessment, it would be fair to consider concepts such as innovation and the ability to make the difficult thing, easy. For example, talking about rasters, it may be fair to say that elastic zoom is in real-time, because calculates the X and Y stretch of each frame without pre-calculating (though not called "real-time elastic zoom" in the credits) and it uses CRTC + rasters to do it possible in overscan at 50 FPS, I think that rasters are a very usual effect in CPC, but why no one did a real-time zoomer like this one before? The same applies to what I think you call "animations", everyone knows how to program an animation, however, if technically anyone can do it at 50 FPS and overscan, why no one did? Has anyone calculated how much memory would be necessary to store more than 800 frames of complex 3D objects without loss of quality, high resolution, colorfull and overscan? If it were a simple uncompressed animation without technical approach would be more than 20Mb! And, how many MHz are needed to display it at 50 FPS using any animation technique known? I think that recently there are people trying to make my 3D Batlogo using optimized animation techniques on C64 without success... Maybe it's something else than another raster and a simple “animation” with little technical after all. The truth is that I used lot of innovative techniques that exploit simultaneously the Z80, CRTC and Gate Array to render effects of size and speed never seen on CPC, mixing optimized real-time (soft) and advanced hardware techniques (hard) to improve the performance. If anyone thinks that it lacks of technical approach, I respect his opinion and I congratulate him for being someone else demanding than me, but I disagree. And, of course, to say that From Scratch is technically superior to BF, as Longshot said, is not acceptable from any objective view.

I also have read to Longshot say that my rotozoom is a compressed animation, and I must say that is not true. If anyone wants to know how an effect was made just ask me, please. I want the CPC scene to grow, and it will always be better than the spread of misconceptions that degrade the work. I do a real-time zoom and rotation of 1450 pixels per frame, from a pre-calculated rotation of only 3 vertex that represent the "window" of the rotozoom (typical rotozoom algorithm). Note the low ratio pre-calculated / real-time, and that the reason for pre-calculating 3 vertex is the fact that a pre-calculated sinus-table had a similar size than a pre-calculated list of only 3 vertex. Anyway, the theory of compressed video animation is very easy to refute: the rotozoom takes about 20 seconds and has no loops or repeated frames, so it is about 1000 unique frames at 50 FPS, real resolution is 50x29 pixels, so each frame are 1450 pixels in 16 colors, this would be 725.000 bytes of complex gfxs, even with a compression ratio of 2/10 It would be 145.000 bytes. On the other hand, if this were a video animation, I would not have "simulated" a simple rotozoom, I would have used a complex ray-tracing scene or similar. But I think he says that almost the entire demo is a compressed video animation. J It is funny! I am very surprised by what some people think about the storage capacity of a 3” disk, and my ability to compress data. J More seriously, I do not know Longshot, but I think he was a famous CPC coder, and I would want to think that he speaks out from ignorance, not trying to discredit my work. Anyway, would be good if he stops talking about what he does not known.

But more important than technical issues and theoretical explanation, are the feeling and impact that a demo has on the public. Does anyone see reasonable ask to Juan María Arzak to write three pages of technical arguments in order to convince us why we should love the meal of his restaurant? Well, that's what often happens in technical discussions, where some critics and theorists teach us why this or that is important and blame us ourselves if we doubt his criteria. Each to their own, I think that a demo, if does not produce feeling and impact, is an artifact, but not art. Even though theories to justify the quality of a demo, that can and should be justified only by itself.

Btw, the capacity to impress decreases greatly when effects are not new, so I hope you do not copy much of the BF techniques in your next demo in order to impress the public again, hehe (is joke J)

Hicks - It seems that you tried to draw attention on CPC with your demo, for example, by giving some exaggerate information (only 6% of capacities of CPC used by the commercial software!), or multiply by 4 then 6 the number of dots really displayed on screen. What was your main goal by doing that? Giving an “everything is possible on CPC” message for the other scenes?

Rhino - You are right, I think that many people may have noticed my purpose to draw attention on the capabilities of the CPC, especially to impress the C64 scene. The choice of the effects was conditioned by the idea of ​​demonstrating that CPC is better than C64 almost in every aspect. For example, color (703 colors), resolution and text mode (192x54 text mode), processing power (zoomers, 3d objects, dots...)...

Btw, the text of the phrase you mention is not the first version, in the original, at the end says "What we are going to see now is only 17%..."J. About exaggeration, well, I have used every trick in my mind to give the impression that they looked impossible things to do on 8 bits. Multiply by 4 then 6 the number of dots is another trick to get a better visual result, after all, if you've seen 3D objects rotating on all axis in overscan at 50 FPS, why 4.000, 6.000 or 60.000 dots would be not possible on CPC? In my opinion, this is the magic of demomaking, make the impossible possible, creating illusions. As I said in my previous answer, I think that getting this feeling for the general public is more transcendent than beat a record mathematically.

Hicks - Arnoldemu, you are the musical loader's author. Can you give us some technical details about your work (transfer rate, error managing, etc.)? What do you think of the previous musical loaders on CPC? You spoke about releasing your code, when do you plan to do that?

Arnoldemu - Creating the musical loader was not easy. I created and ran many tests on the floppy disc controller and with different drive configurations. Rhino especially helped with the testing. My conclusion was don’t rely on exact timing, especially when 3” drives are involved.

The loader almost uses a standard amsdos format but with 9 sectors per track, 512 bytes per sector, except the sectors are not interleaved and the gap length is different.

The sectors are setup so that in ideal conditions and perfect drive rotation speed, the transfer of one sector size falls within a frame without error. In reality this doesn’t happen often, especially with 3” drives, so it checks for errors and retries. The only part of the loader that requires exact timing is the reading of the sector’s data all other parts can be done with interrupts enabled without the fdc giving errors. The loader retries if there is any error, mostly this is to account for the overrun condition from the controller, but it will do the retry for any error. The music is played between sending the read command to the fdc and before the data is read, there is enough time here to play an ayc tune. With starkos it should be possible but it would be tight and there will be more errors.

I don’t have accurate information about the transfer rate. I will describe in more details when I release the source.

About the other loaders, I have a great appreciation and admiration for the coders of musical loaders on the Amstrad. It’s not an easy thing and each is done well. Of course, I have looked at their code and analysed what they do, but although looking at code can help, it really doesn’t help if you don’t understand the why and how.

My first experience with musical loaders was in “The Demo”, impressive for the time but slow. More recently they have been better and better. I think my loader is not that much different from the others, the trick is the way that Rhino has joined it together to give the final product. If the loader had existed in another demo, it would probably not have been so impressive.

Yes I will release the code, but not for a couple of months due to work commitments and because of a music demo I want to finish first, but then I will release it and all the tools along with all the information I found out about the fdc and other loaders.

Hicks - A question for the graphists team. Can you explain us what was the role of each of you and how do you proceed to do you work? It seems that a lot of graphics are transfers, why didn’t you try to create a screen from scratch? In your opinion, is there a difference between a touched up transfer and an original creation?

Mac - Really I left the demoscene in 95 after the Batman Vuelve release on Amiga, and now, I had not much interest in being part of this return of the Dark Knight on CPC. BF is something orchestrated solely by Rhino, who at first had to contact other graphicians (Eldrik, and then Paulbrk and Dadman), and even he made ​​some graphics. What happens is that seeing the progress of the demo, I could not resist to participate. I love to do graphics for 8 bit systems because it is a simple technique that highlights the important things, ie, quality and style of each one as graphician. It's like chess or billiards, the rules are simple and everyone knows them, so just trying to play well. About tools, as I am not a purist, I have to admit that I used Photoshop to pixelate because it is more comfortable than Art Studio for me.

But the second question I have to answer with a question: how do you know if there are retouched gfx conversions? XD Honestly, I would be very difficult to know if the work of a graphician is based on a computerized conversion or done from a blank screen. I think there's a cliche in the world of the graphicians, which is to identify certain uses of dithering with graphics made ​​from scratch and more uneven distribution of pixels with conversions. However, this is not always true. Sometimes I have heard that I use little anti-aliasing, for example, but that happens is that these little tricks must be applied with discretion, and sometimes it not needed. For me it is not so important the technical and pixel dithering, and I think it should never prevail at the expense of more important aspects of a gfx like capturing the essence, a well-defined shape, creating an atmosphere, etc.

Anyone can learn a technique, be a good graphician is another matter.

So, in effect, there are some graphics in the demo that are reworked from conversions, but I think this is just a matter of time. As I said, I did not work on BF until very late, and I did it occasionally. It was not like for Batman Vuelve, for example, when my enthusiasm for doing demos was much higher, and where almost everything is pixelated from scratch.

In short, if we are talking about a certain level of quality, the difference is no between using retouched conversions or from scratch, but between creating something 100% original or based on the work of another one.

Paulbrk - I like to make graphics from scratch, but, this time was graphics on demand, Rhino wanted a pic from an original on the net, I convert the picture but if has a lot of pixel work to finish like it is. You know the pic is on Mode1 with raster color changes. This is only possible with a hand job.
On this end pic, this part was originally an animation but we had to leave it and use only one picture because we had no space available. The Amstrad Begins logo design was my idea, to mix the 6128 with Batman logo.

DaDMaN - My contribution was the screen where it shows the Joker and Batman in full fight. In my case, I would say the main reason for using a conversion instead of an original creation is time. I have been the last to participating and at the last minute. One day, Rhino contacted me through my blog to ask me for a gfx for his demo as "contribution". The demo was virtually complete, and it had to be ready for the "Forever C 2011", so we had not too time. On the other hand, I'm a busy man J and a conversion is faster than a new creation. In any case, I lost enough time with my contribution, because the first screen that I did, was eventually replaced by Joker vs. Batman.

My methodology is simple. I use Microsoft Paint for Windows, nothing more. It's that simple.

Hicks - One of the successful aspects of the demo is the great synchronization between visuals and music. How did you work together on that? Who did create the samples? What about the music player, which seems to be a stable version of Madram’s AYC one?

Yzi - I only did the music for the prologue/intro, but even in that short time there are quite many music sync points. When I started working, Rhino had already practically finished the intro’s visuals, so all I had to do was make music that syncs with the demo. Only a few small adjustments were made to the demo’s timings to make some transitions happen aligned with the song’s tempo, so I was able to keep the tune simpler. Rhino made the digitized effect samples. I actually had to re-do the whole intro music, because my first idea turned out to be too loud and dominating to fit the whole, and the samples didn’t stand out very much. I had only seen the intro part, so I didn’t have a good conception of the whole, and now looking at how the demo ended up being, it’s just good that we scrapped the first version.

About the AYC player. It was used instead of the Arkos Tracker playroutine, because Rhino was able to use the AYC player with a constant, and very small, CPU usage, and interleave the PCM wave player code with it. From a musical point of view, I would have liked to use the Arkos Tracker routine, because it would have let me make the music compositionally and texture-wise much more complex without sacrificing the size goal. I had to simplify my compositional style and tricks a lot, in order to make the stream of AY port commands compress enough to fit the AYC size limit. It’s a little bit like bitmap vs. vector graphics – bitmaps are simpler to draw for a microprocessor, but if you have very strict memory limitations, vector graphics give you much more artistic freedom. The Arkos Player playroutine can, for example, play note patterns with different transpositions, so you can make just a single drum/bassline pattern and do many different chords with it without practically any increase in the song’s size. But with the AYC format – if the patterns sound different, then the data just won’t compress. Actually, a lot of the time I spent doing the music went to just trying to “debug” my song and find out how to squeeze the AYC size down to a minimum. (By the way, the size of the AYC file that was used in the final version of the prologue intro was 2679 bytes, which I don’t consider awfully impressive for such a simple 90 second song.) For a long time, I tried all sorts of ways to shave off a few bytes here and there, but in the end I just gave up and cut out all variation and copy/pasted the exact same note sequences all over, and then it started to compress well enough. It was really hard for me as a musician, because I always try to have as much variation as possible, to make the sound more interesting and less mechanical. But it doesn’t really matter, because nobody will have anything to compare the music to, and it’s actually an essential part of the whole “demo magic” that you’re able to do something that seems impossible. The audience isn’t supposed to know what kind of restrictions and trade-offs there are behind the scenes.

Factor6 - I don’t know who did the samples. I did only the main music. When I sent it to Rhino at first, I thought the job is almost done, but he forced me to shorten/extend some parts, to make some more attractive, and the hardest work was with the sync. Anyway, he did the demo in accordance with the music. I even think the music could be even better, if I wasn’t so lazy J

Rhino - I had finished the introduction and effects, when I contacted with the musicians, and both parts were made in different ways. For the introduction, Yzi made the synchronization work except the samples, which are played from code. (Btw, I made the samples so I think they are very upgradable). The hard work for me was in the main part.

When I had the first music from Factor6, I began to imagine how could I put the effects synchronized and following a script. I had to think about memory problems, loading time, etc... so it was hard. And, to increase the synchronization, I added some flashes reading the volume of the AY channels.

About the player, I asked to Arnoldemu what is the faster way to play music on CPC, and he told me about Kitay. Fortunately, it is open source, (thanks to Madram) so I only needed two things, reproduce samples while music, and a stable version of the code (stable version was necessary because the techniques used in most effects requires a very precise timing and they are in one frame). But stable version was not the best option for all effects, so I made some changes to do it selectable. For the samples, I asked Targhan for help, which helped me kindly.

I think it's very good to have open source for this kind of routines so that coders can focus on the effects of the demo and I think that Arnoldemu will release the open source of his musical loader for this purpose.

Hicks - To close this interview, can you tell us in which project each of you is currently involved? Thanks to everybody!

Yzi - I guess you mean demo scene related projects. I don’t have any publicly announceable projects going on at the moment. It would be great to be able to do something for our MSX demo group Lieves!Tuore again this year, but with everybody having so-called normal lives as well, it can be a challenging task.

Factor6 - Well, after several small ZX Spectrum things for Forever C party I’m preparing one stupid little game for 8-bit Atari. Then I’d like to make a demo with beeper music with Yerzmyey on the ZX (coding and some graphics). I’m also working on my graphics contribution to an Atari party (yes I’m quite involved into Atari 8-bit last time). And finally, I’m going to prepare my second music album with chiptunes, mostly AY ones.

Mac - Well, I have several projects, but have little to do with the demoscene: a strategy board game, a graphical user interface with icons, windows and menus for Spectrum +3 (in a very early stage yet), and mobile games...

Paulbrk - On the retroscene, I am making a fast action arcade for Msx2 and begin to make a game for Commodore 64 J with Lobogris. In the professional area, I am involved on develop mobile and console games.

DaDMaN - As I said before, currently, we ("RetroFactory" ) are developing the CPC version of "Uwol: Quest for money,"King's Valley "and" King's Valley II".
We also continue developing (Syx and me) the famous "Mode 5": a peculiar multicolor version of the mode 1. Other things are under developing, but we can not say anything, hehehehe.

Thank you!

Arnoldemu - I am working on 3 projects. The first is the code for a music demo. The other two are games. One game is about 60% complete. This still needs a lot of work to make the final polished version but already it is a promising fun game. This game originated as a homebrew title on the Nintendo DS, but it has been reworked and modified for the Amstrad. The other game is about 20% complete and is on hold. I’m not the game play is fun, so it may not ever be released. BTW, if you want to learn more about CPC, make some demos or games for it, head over to the cpcwiki and I’ll be happy to help.

Rhino - I'm on retro-vacation now.
Thank you! J