Ten Years, Two Demos, One Demoparty

At the recent Sundown demoparty I released two new Ate Bit demos – one for PC and one for ZX Spectrum.

0xAnniversary

First up is the PC demo, 0xAnniversary. The title is a pun on the the hexadecimal code for the number 10, which can be written as 0xa, and the fact that this year marks the 10 year anniversary of Ate Bit. To make it even more poignant, our first demo was released 10 years ago at the first ever Sundown.

0xAnniversary was written fairly quickly over a period of about five weeks. The demo was written mainly from scratch but borrowed a few key bits of code (mostly texture and shader loading) from AteBitVJ. Music is by 4mat.

Daytrip

The second demo, Daytrip, is probably the most tortuously slow demo I’ve ever written. The first code commit was made in August 2013 at.. I think.. the Sundown 2013 party place. The demo started off as something very different back then – an attempt at a fast paced, 4k VJ-style demo. The title “Daytrip” stuck however, even when the direction went completely the opposite direction.

Daytrip is an intentionally retro looking Spectrum demo and it runs on a 48k Spectrum with an added AY interaface. It will also run on a stock 128k Spectrum. The demo marks the first time I’ve done a co-op with another demogroup (Desire in this case) who helped out with the graphics. However, a lot of the graphics were ripped directly from old ZX games. I think it’s pretty easy to spot which are which though ;)

Downloads

You can find the executables for both of these demos on Pouet:

0xAnniversary will run on any relatively modern PC that supports DirectX 11.

Daytrip runs on a 48k Spectrum with added AY interface, but since that’s a slightly unusual configuration it’s easier to just run on a standard 128k model.

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