A 96ktro by Live! - for Atari STE

A moderately popular folk song once posed the question "Hey Hey 16K, what does that get you today?" The answer, in these bloat favouring times, is frankly, not much at all. Not even a letter, apparently.

As time passed, many intrepid intestinal explorers of the demo scene chose to find their own answers and salvation in limited size coding, with (almost) none of them opting for the aforementioned "Hey Hey 16K". (Gasman is waving furiously at us now! Hi Gasman! I realise that you have, but you're kinda the exception that proves the rule.)

A common size limit, here on the Atari ST and Falcon, is 96K. Why this is, I'm not sure but vague ghosts of memory suggest it is something like the Amiga 64K size limited format, but with some extra data overhead allowed for digi-sound samples for music mod files? 96K, now that might well get you a letter, perhaps even a couple of angsty overlong party reports laid end to end, written by me. On the other hand, more talented and sensible people might well make a better use of that space.

The 96ktro, and its slightly bigger brother, the 128Ktro, has served the Atari scene well. There have been a number of enjoyable productions, but in my humble opinion, there is one which stands out proudly from all the others. I'm speaking of 'Terrorise your Soul' for the Atari Falcon, which hearkens back to that glorious third Fried Bits party in 1995. The combined efforts of three groups, namely Inter, New Line and tSCc were thrown into this pot.

What came out simmering from the other side was effectively a megademo, packed into the 96K! This featured effect after effect, in a seemingly non-stop procession, with an epic 8-channel soundtrack. It has never been surpassed on the Falcon since 1995. It seems we hit perfection at that point, early on, as no-one else has tried to come close since?

Well after all these years, at last it looks like we have a new contender for the ultimate 96Ktro crown! Do you want to know something else, it's showing on the 'lesser' b Atari STE!

We've got the makers of the rather excellent 'Base Case' to thank for this one. The team behind 'Live!' providing some of the ultimate viewing thrills from the projector at Sillyventure 2011 and now 2012. From a promising beginning, effect after effect just spilled out, as if it was never going to stop!

Now I'm trying to get away from the tired 'list of effects' reviewing format for demos, with varying degrees of success. This time around, with a production that's setting up its stall with the amount of action packed within its file, I can't really avoid doing it that way, sorry.

Here's a guide to the world of Muda, step by step.

1. Loading executable, a game console style start-up with a smart logo to open proceedings. Is your Atari STe a gameboy tribute act? A punchy and smart sound chip tune from Tomchi starts and a series of parallax grey scaled layers scroll beneath. A French style arty demo title 'MUDA' comes in over the top of this, letter by letter.

2. We have a series of coarse acid circles, all in green and brown. This part is almost a Checkpoint 4Ktro moment. 'We are back in town' declares the bold white lettering coming in here.

3. The preliminaries over, the first hardcore screenful, consisting of a bunch of large textured 3D polygons, starting with the larch, erm cube. (Sorry, clicked on Monty Python's tree recognition guide entirely by accident there!) The textures are a cunning use of monochrome black on yellow. The single bitplane textures are used to ensure the objects are relatively quick? This culminates in a complex looking beast with 24 faces, an attack of pyramids perhaps? At the side, as if to emphasise there's ple-e-e-nty still to give, there is an upward scrolling continuous graphic strip, in a four colour abstract sort of sci-fi style.

4. Pause, here's a lovely little still planetoid graphic to introduce a half-screens worth of fast and fugly voxel flying antics, mapped onto a large virtual globe. 'From another Galaxy, another dimension' overlays. This carries off the design part quite well.

5. Fitting the fifth and greetings are compulsory, but satisfyingly done with text displaying over a rotating pretty double layered single colour plasma, the patterns varying as the screen goes along.

6. Sort of a follow on next, with a reflected spinning textured disco ball inside a larger copy of itself, again as a mono-coloured screen. 'We don't drive you crazy!' This leads straight into a still pic of an Isaac Asimov lookalike trying to keep a straight face. (Which was entered into the graphics competition under the title of 'Genius').

7. We're 'console-d' with a Bombaman and Mario tribute screen. These two characters are blown up into massive pixels made into 3D sprites and spun around for the fun of it.

8. The Atari Falcon sitting next to my STE has been watching proceedings with slowly mounting interest. Suddenly it's panic time! 'From the Family tree of old school scene' comes a smooth flight through an infinite tunnel of textured bars, which are blurred and distorted in a dreamlike state!

This is a superb effect, normally expected on a 'bigger' machine than an STE!

9. A star is born, flicks off, then reappears much closer to the viewer. It is textured with golden colouring . Then an artfully produced cube shows up next, with four colours made to look like sixteen. The maker credits are given cleverly in time with 'glitching' in-demo and the soundtrack. With those out of the way, the cube then warps and twists like crazy! Atari Falcon is openly expressing sentiments of "Hang on a minute?"

10. A pretty logo to get the next bit ready to rock to. Then we see a truly astounding effect which makes even my CT60 modified Falcon look uncomfortably over its shoulder, with a 3-D morphing pulsating 'thing' which screams of many gazillions of calculations per second to get it moving.

The other Falcon is sobbing uncontrollably in the corner by now.

11. We're pretty spent at this point, shattered into pieces of ecstatic code worship. Surely this is the end? But there is a suitable ending. The end-title text is heavily upstaged by a shiny enviro-textured sixteen colour torus, with proper lighting and all that. Which is a just and proper way to end this ground-breaker.

So you have just watched over five minutes of solid demo wowness, and not a single byte or second of it wasted!

Which is best?

I've taken an enjoyable look at 'Terrorise Your Soul' in the course of writing this article, for comparison purposes. It's too close to call between the two. 'TYS' is definitely a timeless classic, as fresh as the day it was made. (Those super fast Wolfenstein routines!) Maybe it will get a 'classics revisited' article sometime?

'Muda' is however, the first really serious challenger for the epic-ness of the 96k format on any Atari system since 1995. It is fresh and contemporary now, but it will age with dignity in the same way as TYS has. Muda is definitely the emperor of Atari ST/STE size limited code and picks up further credit from being made for a lower specced system than the Atari Falcon, even whilst TYS is a perfect showcase for the latter system.

Conclusion..

Whilst we're cravenly avoiding the whole 'which is best' issue, there are some things we can definitely state about Muda.

It's definitely the best 96Ktro made since 1995! It was the best demo for all categories at Sillyventure 2012. It confirms Live! as one of the top demo groups in the current Atari scene. It will probably not be challenged for a long time again (depressingly.) It would be nice if Live! provide some technical notes of what they did, especially the bits where specific STE features were used. But it was so awesome generally, maybe that doesn't matter?

And I'm really really looking forward to whatever Live! are planning next.

I think that is about as far as I can take this text.

CiH for Mag! - June 2013..

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