ALTERNATIVE PARTY in Turku, Finland 10th-12th April 1998 Party report by Ravel (ravel@iki.fi) *** Friday the 10th I and Kameli packed all of our stuff in our (actually y mother's :-) car. This procedure took about 30 minutes (there were so much stuff to be taken with us). At about 11.30 am we headed to Espoo where we were to pick up our friends' (AS & Jss) IBM PS/2. And so we did but we noticed that we had forgotten our food stuff at home, so we returned to get them. That consumed about 20 min. And then, to the highway number 1 and straight to Turku! The cassette player in the car didn't work but we listened to various radio stations (Kiss FM, Radio Nova, some Swedish ones) and wondered why the speed limit varied so much. We arrived happily at Turku but it was difficult to find tha party place. We parked at Hämeentie and I went to check the map pages in a nearby phone box (yes, the phonebooks were intact except that the map page I was looking was was torn away...). So we just headed "somewhere" and surprisingly ended up in Eerikinkatu and found the party place (Palatsi) easily. It took again about half an hour to take all of our stuff from our car. When we arrived at Palatsi, I saw people playing Defender on Atari 2600 and lots of foreign Atari people. With Viznut and Inka we connected all the cables. Inka was very helpful and she was seemingly the only girl at the place. We played some nice records (children's songs :-) and Inka wanted to play some games on SV-728. She played Road Fighter (but didn't make it to the second level (Kameli did)). Kristoffer "Setok" Lawson came and asked us to come to Megazone laser battle with other party people. I and Kameli decided to try it and at 18.00 we headed to nearby Megazone and had one hell of a battle. There were 15 players and three teams, I and Kameli were in the green team. I ended up as 9th and Kameli was 15th... Setok was, of course, the best player of all and the red team (organizers) was superior to the others. I and Kameli didn't attend the second game but I heard it was a great battle, too. I had started to program a "demo" on SV-328 but when I saw the MSX prods to be contributed in the demo compo, my motivation somehow died... For some time. Those demos were far too cool. Anyway, I added some stupid effects (the demo was made in BASIC :-). Kameli had made a funny intro called Rosk! using QuickBasic and 286. Viznut's VIC-20 was in the state of falling apart and I had to borrow him my SV-328 RF modulator and later he also borrowed a working VIC-20 from somewhere. His demo for unexpanded VIC-20 was really wonderful. In the evening there was the classic game compo in which people played Frogger against each other. This time Setok didn't win...? The best players then played Pong (actually it was a Conic TV Sports machine). I don't remember who won, the results file doesn't state the winner... I had forgotten my ASCII gfx compo entry at school but I was able to download it from the net (two Win95 machines connected to Internet were available). The stink in the elevator didn't prevent us from going to sleep in some midnight hour. The sleeping hall in the 3rd floor was nice and quiet until they started to show Star Trek: First Contact in the main hall... *** Saturday the 11th Somehow I managed to sleep some time. Setok said that the compos would start at 12.00 so there was enough time to finish my demo on SV-328. We played some more music and let Speedo/Haujobb compose his Chip music competition entry on my Amiga 500 (KS3.1 btw :-D). People also wanted to see all the classic demos (Scoopex's Mental Hangover, Spaceballs' State of the Art etc) on my machine. Kameli showed Harmu animations on the 286 and made a stupid Space Invaders clone (Inka was a keen beta-tester). Viznut also tried to bugfix his VIC-20 demo. The organizers had some problems in connecting Amiga 2000 to the video projector (it did have mono video output but without RF modulator it was not possible to get color video output from it). Well, the mono video output was OK for the ASCII gfx compo. Lance/Aggression was the 1st with his ASCII version of classic Atari demo 'Braindamage'. Yes, I admit it was better than my ASCII conversion of the battle of Wolf 359 in the beginning of the pilot episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (which the organizers were unable to show correctly at first). Viznut's Nethack-style art was not understood. Too bad, it was a nice pic. You can check the votes in the results file. Ascii gfx was showed on a Amiga 2000 with a terminal set to 19200 bps (the files were then transferred to it from another machine). The compos were late (well.. it's difficult to say since no exact times were given) but after a while the music compo began. The first three pieces were played by a Commodore 64 and the third one of them was great (the other ones were good, too). I have never heard so clear sounds from a C-64. I think that was the one that ended up number one. Speedo's chip tune was played on my Amiga 500 (the machine it was composed on (using Protracker 2.2)). It was nice, too, but not too original. Viznut's tune suffered from a bad S3M player, some tracks were missing, I heard. Afther the music compo there was a lot of time to prepare for the demo compo. Many entries were coded or finished at the party (however, people should have at least told the organizers about the prods they were to contribute the compos with, the deadline for this was 0.00 in the friday-saturday night). Somehow, between the compos Kameli wanted to make a program using QuickBasic and he asked if I had any ideas. I proposed that he should write an IRC simulator. That's what he did and with Viznut we developed it into a state on which we thought it would be a good idea to contribute the demo compo with it! We added a lot of features, lamers, lines etc and were quite satisfied with it. A lot of people liked it and we felt like we had something to show to the people. The demo compo started with Atari demos. Senior Dad's Fake Demo was funny, but people seemed to forget it soon. 4k intro by Dead Hackers' Society ended up third and was indeed great. The sixth demo was made on MSX and it was a real showing of the capabilities of that machine. And then, I was to show my SV-328 "demo" called MLTWÅRMS. :-D It was easy to connect the 328 to the video projector but then I had to load my demo from tape. :-D People seemed to like the CLOAD command, they gave me applauses! The "demo" featured a nice two-direction parallax dot scroller in the beginning (made just with VPOKE's) and a 3D-starfield with 10 stars! Wow! About 1 frame per second? Yes, it was *real* 3D, however, there was some precalc. I also featured "vertical sinus scroller" and "realtime sinus wave" (with sound). Anyway, the other MSX demos were *great*. Bandwagon's Rappio on SV-728 featured a lot of colorful effects and a nice music using normal MSX sound chips. Lieves!tuore's Avaakkus was a real mindblower and ended up second. Nyyrikki's demo (running on MSX Turbo R!) was also great. The Amiga demos were showed using my Amiga 500. They were not special, Zynosis tried some old skool style and Haujobb's demo was just "nice". Actually, it was *nice*. :-) Then Kameli (under name Samel) showed his intro on 286 (featuring realtime ladder and a "vector cube" coded by Viznut). After that he loaded the QuickBasic with #freenet source code, edited the source a bit and ran it! And people got to see some almost authentic IRC chat. It was in Finnish so foreign visitors didn't understand a word. Unfortunately. Oh, it featured even Setok! This "intro" ended up sixth, right after the outstanding MSX demos. Then it was Viznut's turn to show his demo. This demo running on an *unexpanded* VIC-20 featured some interference stuff, a raving "ravedood", colorful tunnels and a 1 pixel sinus scroller. And a great music. Outstanding indeed. Viznut (the winner of Asm97 PC 4kB intro compo winner!) ended up first as predicted by us. :-) The last demos were 600 kHz Power by Lonewolf and Modeemi by ALF. The machine on which 600 kHz was running also was awarded Obscure computer prize. The machine was MC6800 Evaluation Kit II! A Motorola 6800 -based microcomputer with a 6(?) character LED display as the only gfx output device! So, that "demo" featured only a scroller. That CPU ticked at 600 KILOhertz... I don't remember which machine Modeemi ran on but it was something like Commodore 8964D... The green phosphor display had a very long glowing time... Setok called it motion blur. :-) The night was long and I showed all my classic Amiga demos on the big screen. Spaceballs' State of the Art is still astonishing. We ate popcorn and voted, of course. Organizers wanted to show Aggression's Braindamage on the big screen again. Yes, it was a nice demo and especially the music was great. I heard it is still the best demo made on Atari ST. Finally, we were really tired and decided to go to sleep. People in the main hall seemed to be too tired to play music loud so it was quite quiet in the sleeping hall except that a bunch of guys disturbed others by laughing for a while. *** Sunday the 12th I woke up at about 11 and when I went down I saw the results. Viznut had won the demo compo! And our #FREENET had ended up sixth. Wonderful! We had to come up with a release version that could run at correct speed at any machine. We also added more lamers and lines and also a way to quit the program. The prize ceremony was simple and prizes low but I was awarded a big Coke and 10 Hesburger discount coupons! Viznut also received 500 FIM (and the 2nd and 3rd in the demo compo 200 and 50 FIM). Kameli demonstrated the Space Invaders clone of his to everybody passing by, also to foreigners. And the Nibbles clone by Viznut, too. When I went to take our car nearer Palatsi in order to carry all of our stuff back to the car I noticed that I had left the lights on in Friday so there was no power in the battery. Fortunately I found some friendly guys who gave us some power. As we pkzipped all the stuff in the car we found out that there still was not enough power in the battery to make the car start. Same guys helped us again. And then, finally, we headed to Helsinki, but... Once again, after fuelling, we had to get some power. After that, there were no problems and we drove happily back to Helsinki. Unfortunately, Kameli dropped my Technics deck and it doesn't work any more (maybe some problems in the power switch). But we tested #FREENET on my Pentium 166 MHz and it worked fine. And, of course, we went to IRC to spread our hot wares. :-D And Kameli also joined #freenet to see if the people really were so lame we thought (answer was YES). We also downloaded MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, demonstrated by Wiztom in Turku) and played Gravitar, Space Invaders, Robotron and other classic games. And it was an opinion of both of us that we had really good time at Alternative Party.