#msxdev compo 2012 #3 - No Pressure

Called 'Yet again!' ?

totaly not?

Thanks! And no - we only use a mildly modified Moonblaster replay routine (without bank-switching as we only use 64k). The only reason to not support MSX-MUSIC on MSX2 is that our demo would not run smoothly with MSX-MUSIC on an MSX2, not even in MSX-MUSIC only mode.

(during the development of this demo we only tested on turboR, only on the day before release we used an HB-F500P to check and fix MSX2 compatibility)

Is the text supposed to go that fast btw? I'm having problems keeping up...

FLYING BYTES PROUDLY PRESENTS
NO PRESSURE
AN ENTRY TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THE
ERR LATOK
YES SNOUT
ERR WHERE IS THE HASH CHARACTER
WELL SNOUT WE DO NOT HAVE ONE
ARF WELL OKAY
AN ENTRY TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THE HASH MSXDEV COMPETITION
SO DO YOU GUYS LIKE THIS ABSOLUTELY SMOOTH SCROLLER
IT IS OUR VERY FIRST ASSEMBLY PROJECT EVER AND WE THINK IT IS THE BEST THING FLYING BYTES RELEASED IN THE PAST FIFTEEN YEARS
IT IS ALSO THE ONLY THING WE RELEASED IN FIFTEEN YEARS
WAIT I THINK WE EVEN CAN DO A LITTLE BIT BETTER THAN THIS HANG ON
BAM!!!!
THAT IS A WHOLE LOT BETTER, ISN'T IT?....
ALTHOUGH....
WE COULD REALLY USE A LOGO!!!
AHHHH THAT IS MUCH, MUCH BETTER...
SO THERE WE ARE, THE FIRST FLYING BYTES DEMO IN MORE THAN 15 YEARS...
... DID YOU MISS US AS MUCH AS WE MISSED YOU?
....
NOT REALLY, EH?....
SAY LATOK, I THINK THIS DEMO IS STILL A LITTLE BORING.
WHAT WAS IT CALLED AGAIN?
AH YES, NO PRESSURE...
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT, THIS IS OUR VERY FIRST ASSEMBLY PROJECT FOR THE MSX...
A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO WE STARTED EXPLORING THE Z80 AND THE VDP...
ONE THING WAS CERTAIN: WE WANTED TO CREATE SOMETHING BUT WE DID NOT WANT TO RAISE THE BAR TOO HIGH,
SO WE DECIDED THAT NO MATTER HOW GOOD OR BAD WE CODED, NO MATTER HOW LONG IT TOOK AND HOW BIG OUR IDEAS BECAME...
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING WAS FUN, NOT STRESS....
HENCE THE NAME NO PRESSURE
ALRIGHT SNOUT, ENOUGH...
BOUNCE TIME!!!!
EXACTLY!
FLYING BYTES IS GOING TO ROCK THE WORLD ONCE MORE!!!!!!
THIS DEMO RUNS ON ANY MSX2 WITH 64KB RAM AND 128KB VRAM...
USE AN MSX-AUDIO AND YOUR EARS WILL GET BLOWN AWAY BY A DAMN GOOD JORITO TUNE...
ON TURBO R YOU CAN ENJOY THIS DEMO IN EARDRUM POPPING STEREO AND SOME PARTS OF THIS DEMO LOOK BETTER ON THIS MACHINE
TIME FOR SOME CREDITS, THEN...
CODE: LATOK AND SNOUT
MUSIC: JORITO
GRAPHICS: SAKAMOTO-SAN AND JORITO
...
THIS DEMO IS DEDICATED TO ALL OF YOU WHO LOVE SCROLL AND LOGO DEMOS (YES SAMOR, WE ARE TALKING ABOUT YOU!)...
AND GUYS WE CAN TELL YOU: CREATING SUCH A DEMO IS AN ABSOLUTE JOY
OF COURSE WE KNOW THE MSX2 CAN DO SO MUCH MORE THAN THIS, BUT HONESTLY...
WE COULD NOT CARE LESS
THAT'S NOT WHAT MSX IS ABOUT
MSX IS ABOUT CREATIVITY AND FUN RETRO IS ABOUT CREATIVITY AND FUN SO WHY AIM FOR TECHNICAL PERFECTION?
IT WILL ONLY GET YOU STUCK IN A PURISTIC AND ELITIST PARADOX
SO ANYWAY, ARE YOU READY FOR OUR FULL SCREEN IMAGE ROTATION IN SCREEN 5 WITH REALTIME CALCULATED VECTORGRAPHICS AND SPECTRUM ANALYZER?
NO?
WELL, NEITHER ARE WE...
SNOUT, SHALL WE CONTINUE WITH SOMETHING WE CAN ACTUALLY CODE?
YOU'RE RIGHT LATOK, WHY DON'T WE WAVE TO OUR FANS THEN?
HMMM.... OK....
WWWWWWWWWOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!!
LOOK AT THIS BOUNCY BOUNCY SCROLL, IT IS REALLY FAST AND SMOOTH.....
WHAT BETTER PLACE TO LET OUR GREETINGS FLY OUT TO THE MSX COMMUNITY?
ARE YOU READY?
HERE THEY COME!
TNI THANK YOU FOR ORGANISING THE #MSXDEV COMPO
WELL WHAT DO YOU KNOW
WE DO HAVE A ##### CHARACTER AFTER ALL!
FURTHER GREETS GO TO THE OTHER CONTESTANTS TO THIS CHALLENGE, BEING
GAMECAST ENTERTAINMENT
INFINITE
SYN
AETHERBYTE
AND DARKSTONE

ARE YOU STILL WITH US?
GOOD, BECAUSE HERE COME MORE GREETS!
RETROWORKS
NYRRIKKI
XLS ENTERTAINMENT
TRILOBYTE
MSX POSSE
KAROSHI
AAMSX
XELASOFT
BANDWAGON
LIEVES!TUORE
BITWISE
MATRA
KRALIZEC
NEAR DARK
DVIK
JOYREX
WORP3
SUPERSONIQS
SUNRISE
THE C-MEN
TEAM OPENMSX
WAMMES
MARTOS
THE MSX RESOURCE CENTER CREW
COMMODOREJOHN
Z80ST SOFTWARE
CRISIS
ALMA
NERLASKA
303BCN
AND OF COURSE........
YOU!!!!
ALLRIGHT THEN, IT IS TIME TO SAY GOODBYE
IF YOU THINK THIS DEMO ROCKS (OR SUCKS) WE CHALLENGE YOU TO RELEASE A COUNTER-DEMO
LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL AGAIN, LADS!
WE MIGHT HAVE OVERHEATED THE VDP A LITTLE, SO WE WILL TRY AND WAVE GOODBYE...
AND LATOK SENDS THIS ONE TO HIS MUM.
HERE´S TO THE FUTURE!

Hey, pretty cool demo!

I'm also pretty sure that you wanted to send me greetings, so 10x!

@mars2000you - thank you for your kind words.

@FiXato - yes it is supposed to go this fast. Otherwise it would not be a tribute to 90s scene demos. Playing the demo on a real MSX turboR does significantly improve readability, however. For some reason it doesn't go very smoothly on emulators (at least, not on my PC. might be my hardware is not fast enough?)

@Nyyrikki - oh dear, oh dear... euhm... my bad... I guess you will now have to make a demo and greet FLYYING BYYTES in that one... Perhaps something with full screen image rotation in SCREEN 5 with realtime calculated vectorgraphics and spectrum analyzer?

Unfortunately, neither of the videos come close to the smoothness that you get when watching it on The Real Thing. Although part of this is because of YouTube re-encoding the video (to 29.97 or 30fps, if I understood correctly) I'm quite surprised to see this massive difference between emulation and real MSX machines.

Would adding video encoding setting particularly meant for YouTube improve quality?

And to thiink that the demo reveals some minor bugs in blueMSX... I thought the things we were doing were really not that special or difficult. Ah well, perhaps this will come in handy for a future MSX Emulator Comparison...

Even the original video doesn't look smooth to me, there seems to be quite a bit of frameskipping going on. It is such a giant difference with The Real Thing. Would results somehow improve when emulators encode at 30fps themselves, optimizing their frameskip to that framerate as well? (eg. don't even try to render 60fps at some point and 30fps at another, but keeping things steady at 30fps all the time?)

It stutters for me in openMSX too. Not surprising because the refresh rate of my monitor is not exactly the same as that of an msx. Found that out with testing PD too. If you want it smooth, use a real msx with and old fashioned monitor.

I'm not asking for absolute perfection, but imho things that run absolutely smooth on real MSX should not look like a total abomination on YouTube. They should at least look somewhat smooth, right?

as for youtube videos, maybe someone should record an actual turbo-r

I ran it on a real MSX, but not with a ye olde CRT screen. It was impossible to read. Fixato's source video was the best readably thing I've seen so far

1) the scroll is too fast
2) the font is unreadable

But that is no problem for me as I never read scroll texts
Still a very good entry and example that coding ASM for MSX is fun and accessable. Good work.

I really like the style of these old style demos. It takes me back to the dutch scene of 90's, even if I wasn't around to experience it at that time.

bash

Review on MSX blue :

http://www.msxblue.com/?page_id=8261

Manuel : listen to the MP3 on my site and compare .... it's a question of 'color' in the sound (probably due to a different conception, as Wouter has already explained in another discussion). I'm pretty sure that Jorito will prefer the blueMSX 'color'.

Manuel, you can compare the music's demo here:

• OpenMSX version
• BlueMSX version

In general the OpenMSX version sounds a bit more sharp, harsh than the BlueMSX one, that sounds more rounded.

The BlueMSX version sounds more pleasing to me and closer to the real sound I got through my Bose Companion II speakers while composing it on a real MSX.

Those things do not explain the difference that Jorito is talking about. The openMSX method should actually give a very accurate sound quality, when we implemented it we noticed that the then implemented method (subsampling, I'm not sure if this effect also can occur in blueMSX) for high frequencies like in Solid Snake in the elevators is not sufficient.

The stereo thing is also in openMSX, you can set the balance per chip. But also that is not related, I think.

true. **** Amiga!
I wasn't that much into the community at the time, but still enough to experience BCF, Fony, probably some others.

Try the files on my site (DSK + ROM).

thanks mars, fixato

..is this a bug in Disk-Manager? I used that tool for as long as I can remember but I never had it fail on me.

I don't think so, maybe you are using an old version or you've made an error when transferring the files.

Actually your DSK is DOS2-formatted while mine is DOS1-formatted.

So, on turboR, your DSK takes advantage of the DOS2 when booting and you don't need to press CTRL; it's the same on MSX2/2+ with the DOS2 cartridge in a slot for both DSK (just tested in blueMSX).

o.O
O.o

@NYYRIKKI - you never cease to amaze me. Perhaps I can allow you to cheat on the full screen rotation a little bit by using a clever colorloop or something like that...

Maybe, I'm still on Win7

Ok, in that case next time I'll use a color loop.

So, what can we do to change it? If you put 'resampler' setting to 'simple' you will get the old algorithm. Does that make any difference? What if you try 'hq'?
If it doesn't make any diff, I have no clue what the difference is that you actually hear. And we can't do anything about it if we don't know what it is... :S

Kudos for this demo. I did some simular newbie z80 coding at the beginning of 2012. My attempts died out around march. Cool to see that you continued. Maybe I should pick it up again

No specific reason really. Maybe I should expand it a bit and use it for msx dev 2013 (which has been announced on http://msxbanzai.tni.nl/compo/)

Btw, Manuel, you avatar has a green haze over it. any chance to update the white balance on it?

I've finally managed to make a better blueMSX video of the No Pressure demo :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17urbi4ipGs

This time, I don't have used the video capture feature of the emulator, but a nice freeware tool called SMRecorder :

http://www.video2down.com/

In the video options, you can select 30 frames per second and it seems to be very helpful for the YouTube compression also based on a better AVI (this tool has its own powerful codec).

Of course, it's still not the perfection (blueMSX bugs are still present), but it gives a better idea of this excellent demo ! ;)