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The Amiga was, during its time, particularly well known for its demoscene -- one side of this was, of course, the hacking of lots of Amiga games and all of that good old piracy stuff, but plenty of talent went into the "cracktros" that usually accompanied said games, not to mention the graphical demos that these teams would create on their own, using the Miggy's graphical hardware to create some definite magic. There are lots of different stories from the demoscene world of software whizkids doing their thing, and occasionally taking their talent and applying it to games -- one group of demoscene kids known as The Silents went on to become Digital Illusions CE, made their name with the likes of Pinball Illusions on the Amiga, and gradually became one of the world's biggest video game developers as EA DICE. Another ex-demoscene group, Thalion, weren't quite as fortunate -- but before their demise, they left us with several classic games, chief among which is the frankly staggering Lionheart.
When I talk about Amiga graphics, "parallax scrolling" is likely to be the first thing that comes to your mind -- the art of differently-scrolling planes is something that the system was pretty good at, as evidenced in the main by Psygnosis's Shadow of the Beast. Naturally parallax scrolling could get overused -- it soon stopped being impressive after a while, and there were plenty of egregious examples where parallax frankly just got in the way of the actual game. Lionheart, however, even after years of parallax-based fun before it, is the definitive example of how well it works on the Amiga -- it manages to do the whole "every screen is a Roger Dean prog rock album cover" schtick even better than Beast does, and I'd struggle to find a game on the Amiga that, on the whole, is prettier than Lionheart. For the game's artist, Henk Nieborg, this would be the title that made his name -- you can also find his work on the likes of Flink, The Adventures of Lomax and the Shantae series.
Even better than the art, however, is the fact that Thalion matched it up with excellent gameplay. Lionheart is a very playable hack 'n' slash title -- it's fun to deal with the various creepy-crawlies and otherworldly behemoths the game throws at you. There's enough variation to keep things moving, and as opposed to a more straightforward game like Shadow of the Beast you're allowed to explore somewhat without things going wrong. One of the big problems with a lot of parallax-heavy games was the significant lack of gameplay that ended up being associated with them, but Lionheart showed that you didn't need to sacrifice good gameplay for pretty pictures, and that they could co-exist comfortably.
Lionheart's developers, Thalion, were all about creating games that, technically, were right on the bleeding edge for both the Amiga and the Atari ST -- the majority of their games were all graphically excellent, and that was often married with very good gameplay. Alas, good sales often seemed to elude them -- as one of the smaller games studios around, they often found their sales damaged greatly by the sheer prevalence of piracy in the Amiga scene. Lionheart was their attempt to see if making such graphically strong action games on the Amiga was still commercially viable -- and despite excellent reviews, the sales showed that it weren't. Thalion ultimately closed their doors in 1994, preserving their work on the UK computers for all time -- Lionheart is perhaps the most accessible and greatest example of the legacy that they left behind, and one of the strongest Amiga exclusive titles out there to boot.
MSX was the first attempt to standardize software and hardware between different home computer vendors. With its 3.58 MHz processor, Microsoft BASIC, three-channel sound and modest graphics the MSX represented a very typical 8-bit home computer of the early 1980s. Several well-known companies such as Sony, Canon and Philips produced their own models, but their efforts were largely shadowed by the king of the hill, the Commodore 64. In spite of the tough competition, in some countries, such as The Netherlands, Spain and Brazil, the MSX line of computers was actually quite popular. A big factor in the success were the quality games produced by Konami, well-known for its numerous popular game series.
The MSX demoscene is a small but curious resident of the demo world. It could be roughly divided into two eras: the Dutch scene of the early nineties and the MSX renaissance of the late nineties. The Dutch demos ran on the advanced MSX2 computers that had improved graphics modes and often expansions such as additional memory or a sound cartridge. The effects seen in the first wave of demos were typical for the time: scrollers, colorbars, wobblers and even simple flat shaded vector graphics. Interestingly, in the Dutch scene it was considered perfectly normal to sell demos at fairs to other people, to get compensation for the hard work. In contrast, usually demos are distributed for free among the sceners and demo watchers. Many Dutch demogroups also went on to produce commercial games for the platform.
When the MSX started to disappear from the face of mainstream computing towards the mid-nineties, the Dutch scene also cooled down. It wasn't until 1997 that new demos started to appear, this time for the original old MSX1 computers from 1983. This tiny renaissance started from Finland and then slowly spread to the rest of the Europe. The new wave demos typically feature effects such as tunnels, plasmas, and character-based animations. These days a few demos are released for the platform every year. The increasing popularity of retro computing has benefited MSX too, and there are still a couple of yearly happenings such as Nijmegen ( ) and MSX Info Update ( ) in existence.
There are two popular high-quality MSX emulators available: the multi-platform openMSX and BlueMSX for Windows. Both of them run most of the demos and games perfectly. For a list of MSX demos with download links see the corresponding section of Pout.net, and for MSX-related news plus discussion The MSX Resource Center.
For Revision 2022 - the world's largest demoparty - my friend Will Flux and I entered the Wild Category with a demo of our own - a completely unique FPGA board running a short visual and audio treat. Completely designed in Verilog and unlike other demos we used no libraries, no code, not even a CPU! We didn't even use a development board. Everything was made from parts we bought from places like Farnell and Mouser. This is a short blog post on how we went about it.
The small board we designed is built around the Xilinx Spartan FPGA. This lovely little bit of silicon generates the HDMI video signal and the sound. We have a small flash memory chip to store the hardware configuration binary, a 4MB SRAM chip, a 100Mhz oscillator, a PMOD connector and an SDCard connector on the bottom side.
The board we've designed is the second major release of our design - called Flashback (the first was called Frontier - all Amiga game references you see). However, since Will and I started this project we've built and designed at least 4 prototypes before getting to this one. We started with seeing if we could get an FPGA to flash an LED - the typical 'Hello World' of hardware. It's a good place to start as this would require getting the voltages and clock signals right - a major part of any subsequent project.
For the most part, the power rails aren't too difficult to get working - i'm sure there are some areas I could improve on. Keeping the capacitors close to the pins on the FPGA, making sure power lines didn't run too close together and paying close attention to the data-sheet got us a long way. We had some brief issues with the oscillator, when I realised our footprint was actually flipped, but aside from that, the first prototype went well. BGA soldering with the largest pin-pitch on offer really helped. I'd hate to have to go down to a tiny pitch and attempt to place that by hand! The largest pitch Xilinx offer the Spartan in is 1mm, on a 15 x 15 mm package. This seemed to work fine for me, but I don't think I could go any lower without a proper solder mask and a pick-and-place machine.
With the power rails, oscillator and FPGA in place, we moved on to HDMI. A HDMI video signal requires very fast and accurate signaling. There are 8 main wires, in 4 differential pairs, required to send a picture to the screen. In addition, there is an encoding standard called Transition-minimised differential signaling(or TMDS) that you need to apply to any signal you send down the wire. At first, we tried to use a special TMDS buffer chip to strengthen the signal, but I had terrible trouble soldering it to the board. The chip comes as a QFN, or Quad Flat No-Lead. I found this package incredibly difficult to work with; the footprints are too small for the Mylar solder masks I was using - using solder paste and a reflow oven wouldn't have worked. I tried hand soldering but the video signal was still not correct. Not having a logic analyzer not even capable of sampling the clock, let alone the HDMI signals, we decided to give up on the TMDS chip and have the FPGA send the HDMI signal down the wire directly.
When we started out with HDMI, I used a standard connector that would take the normal HDMI plug. This connector proved difficult to solder, so I hit on the idea of using a Flexible Flat Cable (or FFC) connector and making a separate board with the normal HDMI plug on it. The reason was at the time, we weren't sure if the TMDS chip would work, so hedging our bets, we put two smaller FFC connectors on the board - one connected to the FPGA directly and the other to the TMDS chip. That way, if one didn't work, we'd still have the other. The FFC connector stayed on for the next revision as it takes up less space, reducing the board size and saving us a little money. However, this connector proved very fiddly. Several times I thought I'd broken the board, only to discover the cable had not made good contact, or the soldering hadn't gone well. In future versions, I'll go back to the original connector.
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