pouët.net

It might be a bit hidden in the Wild-Releaes of Revision here. So to give it some more attention and have a thread open to any question I'll leave this here.

The CodeCraft series was an online demo compo hold already 3 times back in time when there were actually some nice groups and single coders active in the Acorn demo scene. It was also open for tiny tools and tiny games. So I thought it's about time after 20 years (!!!) to revive that as I saw generally an interest in the platfarm...as the OS is still alive today, thanks also to the latest Raspberry Pi hardware more powerfull than ever.

So I coded that invitro to give things a start. Special thanks for the music goes to Saga Musix and Exoticorn for some additonal code !

Cheek out the compo website here (thanks to Sensenstahl for the webspace): Codecraft#4

...now you got 6 months to prepare your RISC OS code ! Categories are 256 Byte Intro/Game, 1 KByte Intro/Game, 2 KByte Tool, 4 KByte Intro/Game ...just like 20 years ago...I just added the 256 Byte category :-) Entries can be handed in all the time until deadline.

On that website you'll find also all the links to the first 3 issues and all the cool releases back then.

Anything welcome, no platform limits as long as it's on RISC OS - oldschool Archimedes or latest Raspberry Pi -

Yes, RISC OS has it's limitations (e.g. for the recent hardware no shaders, no multicore, lack of software in general)...but it's a very slim OS and the built in BASIC is still superb and very powerfull, including Inline Assembler, ports of other coding languages are there, GCC runs well...GNU Assembler was used for the intro above.

Nice initiative! Would be awesome to see some old groups like DFI and ArmsTech make a comeback :)

Roughly 2 weeks until deadline ! I guess you RISC OS coders are all busy coding entries :-) !

I am working on a 256b, and might give a go at 1k too. Hope there will be more entries.

@Optimus: Nice! From what I hear and got already it looks like we'll have a real compo for 256b and 1k.

CodeCraft#4 is over ! I'm happy I received 9 entries in total, which is even more than one could hope for looking at the active user base :-) Here's the list:

256 Byte intro
------------------
It spins / Progen
LightWeaver / Exoticorn
Confetti tail / Kuemmel
McBump / Optimus

1 KByte intro
-----------------
Zoom³ / Progen
Booster / Optimus
Chaos Equation / Jin X

4 KByte intro
-----------------
Relentless / Phlamethrower

2 KByte tool
----------------
Pad / Gavin Wraith

As the compo website can't be updated due to technical reasons for some days. I'll make all the entries available for download as one package. You can download them here

To all the contributors: Feel free to add your entry to pouet right away, including video links.

Be aware that some entries work on old school Acorn Archimedes and some on latest Rasperry Pi's. Check the individual readme's.

Now the voting starts. Just drop me an email (look up my 'confetti tail' entries readme) and tell me how many points (0 to 5) you want to give an entry. Of course it only makes sense for 256 Byte and 1 KByte.

Cheers & Thanks a lot to all the contributors !!!

Kuemmel

I forgot to add that I'll keep the voting up for 2 weeks (deadline Sunday, 17th of October) so everybody has a chance to undust their old Archimedes or wait for the video uploads...we waited for 20 years anyway ;-)

@EDIT: Chaos Equation moved to 256 Byte as a shrinked version was handed in.

How compatible/incompatible is RiscOS stuff with regards to hardware? You stated that some entries work on Archimedes and some on Raspberry Pi.
That something targeting the Pi and using lots of memory and/or cpu might not work properly on an old Archimedes makes sense, but are there hardware dependencies that create problems the other way around as well, so that some stuff *only* works on the old Acorn machines?

@SdW: Hm, sometimes there could be speed issues, if you don't use vsync or so, but I think all old school entries from the Codecraft compo also work fine on my RPi3/4. There's even a tool that detect the usage of special screen modes and makes them work and RISC OS is kind of good when it comes to backwards capabilities.

IIRC lots of issues of ancient software was that they weren't 32 Bit, only kind of 26 Bit. But if you took care of it it's okay and of course if you would use some special hardware tricks that won't work on the PI's.

May be Exoticorn or Progen can elaborate more about it but I think if you stick to the basic needs, like standard screen mode, vsync, timing, etc. those will run as well on Acorn Archimedes from 1987 up to the RPi4, as the essentials SWI's are still the same.

Is the vote open? And where?
Website is still empty :(

I am guessing website's not updated yet, however Kuemmel posted a link to a zip (this reply) in this thread with all of the entries.


Anyway... can someone provide a video capture to "Relentless" by Phlamethrower? I tried using RPCEmu but failed.

i was not available the last 2 weeks. site will be updated as soon as i get the new data :)

@Sdw: Older ARM processors stored the status flags in the PC register. This meant that you could return from a subroutine and restore the flags in one "movs PC, r14" instructions. Newer ARM processors needed those bits to support a larger address space. So any code that relies on being able to restore the status flags on return doesn't work on newer HW any more. But as long as you keep that in mind you can easily write code that runs on all HW.

And indeed, all of the cc#4 entries technically run on a Pi. However, the raspberry pi gfx hardware does not support color depths less than 8 bit per pixel and some entries use 4bpp or 1bpp modes. Those look slightly wrong to completely broken on a Pi.

Those are the main sticking points. There are also some undocumented tricks that worked on the Archimedes machines but (unsurprisingly) broke on later HW/RISC OS versions.

@Jin X: Like I wrote up there, just drop me a mail with your voting :-) I'll update the website content once the voting is done.

So everybody sent me some votes !

in the meantime i moved the files to scene.org

but you missed to add results.txt xD

@gOblinish: Read above: deadline voting Sunday 17th of October :-)

What about results? :)

Results published now, check on pouet. Website will be updated accordingly later. Thanks a lot again for all the participants !!!

congrats to winners!\ö/

Nice. Thanks ;)