Atari 2600 VCS Desire Demo

A 4k demo for the Atari VCS (PAL)

This Demo was shown at Demosplash 2022.

Video Capture

This is captured with the MAME emulator as I don't have access to a PAL 2600, I'll try to get real footage at some point.

ROM Image

I later made an NTSC version. Mostly just fixed up the colors and resolution, left the music the same so it plays fast.

System Requirements

Source Code

Source code can be found as part of the dos33fsutils project http://github.com/deater/vcs in the demos/vcs_desire directory

Screenshots and Dev Notes

Opening Screen. A nice desire logo with gradient by Hammerfist, plus some scrolling.
Parallax scrolling using sprites in the back and playfield in the front. Reflected playfield to make the kernel easier. Scrolling sidebars that are affected by the percussion.
Some 48-bit pixelwork, with a nice picture by JiskeyJasket.
Rasterbars. This was part of an experiment to see how many effects I could fit in one single-scanline kernel. I didn't have enough cycles to make the second sprite into a bouncing box. I also tried to have some musical interaction with this but couldn't get anything nice.

Final fireworks. Had some extra room when the final music was smaller than expected. Atari 2600 gradients make it easy to do fading effects. The code itself is used as a random number generator for location/color. Would have had liked to make the scrolling credits a bit more fancy but ran out of time.


Music

The music is some nice TIAtracker music by Triace. TIAtracker is fairly easy to integrate into something like this. I modified it slightly so the rest of the code could know when percussion was happening. I use ca65 assembler so I do have to change some of the autogenerated code to work in my workflow.
Vote for this at Pouet
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