pouët.net

why do i sense an unofficial compo brewing? O_O

onstage semidrunk armwrestling compo hosted by smash!

... naked!

What? A beer brewing compo???

smash armwrestling breakpoint2008's mr.freshness compo winner would defnitly impress me O_O i defnitly want to see their demo.

Lets just not forget that you are, easily, working with 20 year old hardware that tends to go "poof" in the middle of a running demo more then once. Oh yes, and then there's swapping out old vs new sid machines, taking of cartridges, changing diskdrives, finding out that your floppy disk containing the demo just NOW has died and you need to rewrite the d64. Desert Dream is a fine example of this as it took 4 tries to record it for the exact reasons mentioned above - imagine that live in competition. You might not care on a 'smaller' party but personally, I like things to go smooth at Breakpoint.

Yes, we did set a too low Gamma on C64 releases in 2007. This wasnt noticed in the testcompo, sorry 'bout that.

Fr. (Breakpoint C64 organizer)

..Assembly..cof..2007..cof..

I don't see any problem in delivering the pre-recorded demos as long as you show them working on the real machine (or even an emulator)... as long as they're not recorded from an emulator :)

*cough*TBL*cough*.... (interesting still how "real" it looks if we send the PC's TV out through our recording chain.. ;)

But yeah, apart from very few well deserved exceptions at least we orgas see everything running on the original hardware, either by recording it ourselves or (if somebody gives us a recording in the Wild compo) by checking it live at the producer's table in the hall. And yes, we will continue to record everything that's outputting a PAL, NTSC or at max VGA (640x480) signal. And yes, we'll address the remaining image quality problems such as lack of brightness in the C64 compo.

(did ANYONE appreciate our perfect smooth 50fps captures btw? :)

exactly! please, PLEASE check them out, the videos came out pretty amazing :)

... and set your video modes to either 50 or 100Hz BEFORE complaining that the videos aren't smooth, 'mkay? :))

franky: Smooth is good, and like I said, it was debated. Though, I'm personally in favour of only granting one test run and once chance during the compo. If the coders have been sloppy, let them fail while people everyone is watching. But then that's just me.

The idea that old hardware "tends" to go poof during a compo seems strange to me. I'd rather trust an A500 or C64 in a party environment than some PC. (Even Ataris are fairly robust. Did you know that an Atari can withstand hydrochloric acid? It's true, try it some time.) Floppies would be the most noteworthy exception, but then again, if you can't trust the disks to survive one day while sealed away and properly cared for, that doesn't seem like a platform worth writing demos for. ;)

kb_: Note that 50 Hz is preferable to 100 Hz if you're on a CRT. Not sure about LCDs. Sadly it's hard to get anything to sync that low or high anyway. :(

Doom: my Samsung 204B LCD at home syncs everything from 40 to 120 Hz... C64 emulators suddenly look very yummy :)

reading that in hungary is hillarious. the average wage here is under 600 eur. stop whining.

Oswald:
And your chepest small-ass apartments costs at minimum 350 Eur? And your only lowpriced affairs are located in the bush needing a car to get to, ie a poor student has to buy food expensive in the city.. Etc etc. Btw, what does a beer cost in Hungary? In Sweden it's minimum 1.2Eur for 50cl.

I talked about those social things with a girl from Serbia some weeks ago.
The majority of house rents in Lisbon is higher than €400. And you can buy beers for ... I have no idea.

house rents?

stefan, income differences sure are a huge lot larger than price differences, across europe. gather some data. it isn't at all comparable. f.ex beer and apartments are roughyl 1/3rd / half the price in bucharest compared to holland. income is more like 1/10th.

Ever tried an Amiga 4000 ? I'm still having nightmares about that compomachine... (see KB's TBL *cough* etc...)

A beer brewing compo would be amazing but it's not feasible. First, because it defeats the purpose of REALTIME!!.. you need more than 4 days to brew your own beer. And even if you have pre-recor..uh.. pre-brewed your beer, you'll have trouble getting it on the plane.

And finally, mass poisoning is always a risk.. kind of like watching noise demos..

I've had an A4000, yeah. Steady as a rock. Cyberstorm MK1 CPU boards are a bit dodgy though, and you can blow the sound chip with bad audio equipment I'm told. But I'm not talking about hardware that's already faulty (like the CS MK1) but something like a well-kept A1260.

Also, I believe the TBL problems you hint at were related to the demo, and the fact that it was written on an emulator and not properly tested on real hardware, in which case the appropriate thing to do would be to let the demo run until it crashes and say "that's as much of the demo as you're going to see until TBL finish coding it".

doom: we of course verified that the demo ran on real hardware before allowing it in the compo. the compo machine in question made a long and protracted affair of dieing piece by piece over the course of the party - the first component to go was the network card, by the end it wouldn't even boot anymore for god knows what reason.

this wasn't the first time we had that either - when we tried to re-show a mawi demo we had incorrectly recorded after the other demo compos at ms2002, the compo amiga literally went up in flames. someone ought to remember, because when that happened more or less the first thing we did was get a cam and hook it up to the projector to show people that this was actually happening. i've been compo organizer for quite a while now, but this is still the most bizarre thing that ever happened to me during a compo presentation, by a wide margin.

stefan, avg beer price is higher than 1.2 eur for .5l beer, cheapest apartment rent is about 200eur + the costs. at the end of the day BP costs are the same of everyone, but for east europeans travel costs more again.

Average beer price wasn't discussed, but the cheapest undrinkable shit you could buy (not at a bar). At a bar a drinkable beer is somewhere around 4-5Eur in Sweden. So anyways, you have 200Eur rent and we have 350Eur rent (yes you still have to pay for electricity etc). We are acctually talking about 58% versus 33% of the original income here only to pay rent. And after this i can pretty much guarantee your food prices aren't comparable to ours inner-city prices.

Skrebbel: well we where discussing a fixed sum of money (rent) and therefor it's easy to relate proportions against that fixed sum.

BEERPOINT2008!11