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Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club hosted a demo party Demosplash 2019 on November 8 and 9. I deployed full strength of my Fujitsu Micro collections, FM-7, FM77AV, FM77AV40, FM TOWNS 2F, and FM TOWNS II MX.
First thing first, my compo submission, "DUCKY IS BACK" for FM77AV series won the Retro-Demo category competition! Last year I lost to the first-place winner, Apple II demo just by one vote. Actually, I should say one point, since everyone can give between 1 to 5 points to each demo. This time I tried to make it funny. Humor always leads to victory. While playing in the Compo Screening session I heard some audience laughing and chuckling, so I was feeling it was going well. And, I won the first place!
But, I've been programming long enough to know that the program that had been working 99 times no problem go berserk when it needs to work the most. I was praying, "Go, AV40! Go! Go all the way!" while screening. Actually, when I finished testing on the emulator, the program initially ran several times no problem. A few weeks later, when the submission link was on, I was preparing the submission package, and tried to make sure it works fine, and then the program froze. It never freezes in the emulator. I had only one location that could freeze, I changed that part, and the program was running again, but I could not be sure if the problem was really fixed. Then from the next day on, I ran my demo five times on actual FM77AV daily to make sure it didn't freeze. And it didn't. Probably I made the right correction.
I'll upload the video to my YouTube channel. For the meanwhile, I upload the disk image that you can run in a FM-7 emulator. I am using XM7, but there seem to be a few other ones available. Any one of them that supports .D77 format would do. Or, you can write it to actual 3.5 inch floppy disk with my utility to run on the actual FM77AV, or you can feed it with my Disk BIOS redirector.
I haven't confirmed it, but probably it runs with the user-developed minimum ROM image since it does not need F-BASIC. I ended up with writing my own loader for F-BASIC file system because Disk Basic does not allow my code to use $7000 to $7FFF. At first I was chopping up my program so that it avoid that block, but I got sick and tired, and wrote my own loader called YS-DOS.
[DUCKY IS BACK Disk Image (for FM77AV series)]
It took three months to develop all of this. Actually I re-gained full confidence in assembly programming. I also learned Arduino AVR assembly programming as well. Only one problem is for some reason, my assembly-programming skill never did anything for my real work :-P
Next year I go with FM TOWNS. I already have some idea about what to do next year.
If you don't know about the demo party, it is a lot of audio and visual presentations. Spectacular graphics on the state-of-the-art hardware, unthinkable graphics from just 4KB program, of course, a lot of retro computers, chip tunes, and so on. Below are some pictures from the event.
Main Stage for Demo
Screenings and Presentations
My FM TOWNS II MX and FM
TOWNS 2F in the Retro Gaming Room
My FM-7, FM77AV, and
FM77AV40.
2008 MacBook Pro was working as a Disk/Tape drive for FM-7,
and keyboard for FM77AV.
FPGA-based FM77AV keyboard
emulator. Absolute overkill.
Someone left a message.
I also put some of my collections on display.
GameArts Legend
My Duckies Waiting for the
Voting Results
Victory!
My Duckies with the Trophy
This FM77AV40 was used for
screening my demo.
Some of my game pads had bad contact. I opened them, and sprayed Deoxit contact cleaner, and then they worked like new.
Comments are welcome.
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