4mhz has announced a new Amstrad CPC game : Operation Alexandra (see also IndiedRetroNews). It's a platform game with nice graphics. The music of Operation Alexandra by McKlain is on Soundcloud.

The Amstrad CPC demo phX by Condense has been released a few days ago and now its source code is available.

Metr81 is back on youtube after one year away, this time with an complete HD video of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner who found back the sources of the game in 2012.

The last version of RASM is v0.81 (5th April 2018) :

- added special maxam priorities for parenthesis and boolean operators

Athanor 2 - the legend of the birdmen by Eric Safar is now available for 30 € (plus 2 for postage). First boxes were sold to the happy ones present at the AC 2018.

Novabug presents his personal top 11 of the Amstrad CPC games of 2017.

The top 11 of 2016is here also.

1Kusai by Shinra is an Amstrad CPC 1Kb intro released at the Forever 2018.

The source code of 1Kusai is available.

So, the idea was to fit Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa in 1K.

I worked from an SVG file and removed a lot of details until it would fit the allocated space (packed with zx7). Eventually it ended up too small after some late minute changes to the code which improved the compression. Oh well.

The SVG was converted to bezier curves using NanoSVG, then a custom Lua script to convert the usual bezier curves definitions into a form more suitable for computation. Normally a Bezier curve is defined by X and Y equations which look like this :

x = A(1-t)³+3B(1-t)²t+3C(1-t)t²+Dt³

We can rewrite this as : Z + t(Y + t(X + Wt))

With:
Z = A
Y = 3B
X = 3C - 6B
W = D - 3C + 3B - A

So in this form we need only 3 multiplications.

The computations are done using CPC firmware which provides neat floating point math support. I compute 256 points along each curve (this could be adjusted to less points for faster drawing, at the cost of slightly less smooth curves) and draw lines between them. Then the system FILL routine is used to fill the closed shapes.

The sound of waves and thunder you can hear is just the Y or X coordinate (I don't remember, whichever sounded best) sent to the AY noise register (again using the CPC firmware, because this is the most space efficient way). I tried to write some music using the free bytes left but did not manage to do anything very convincing. Next time I'll try to spend more effort on the sound side.

Seascape CPC by Devilmarkus was released at the Revision 2018 demo party.

Onescreen Colonies by Vanity was released at the Revision 2018 demo party.

Isometrikum by Vanity got the first place at the oldschool demo competition of the Revision 2018 demo party.