Attendance
- Christian
- Ty
- Luke
- Paul
- Karl
- Jeremiah
- Matthew
- Abu
Meeting Overview
Paul Shriner, treasurer of the Software Development Club, created a presentation on the Demoscene. We watched some Commodore 64 and Amiga demos.
The Demoscene
This is a worldwide community of programmers who create “computer demos”. This niche began in the 1980s, and was popular among retro computers and consoles.
Techniques
Sometimes, programmers must be creative when designing complex programs on retro computers, given memory and speed constraints. Here are a few methods programmers would use to develop impressive demos.
- Raster interrupts were used to render more colors on the screen. While the computer renders each horizontal line of pixels, you may execute a raster interrupt to override the color palette for the next line to use.
- Speedcode were techniques used to optimize assembler instructions. For instance, repeated lines of code execute faster than using a “Jump” instruction.
Votes
No votes were held during this meeting.