Atari Demoscene Activity
This page is dedicated to my past hobby and passion related to the 8-bit Atari computers. Thanks to my parents, in the late 80’s I had a quite rare opportunity (note these were the times when Poland was beyond the Iron Curtain) to get in touch with 8-bit Atari computer. My father bought me Atari 65XE computer as a present for the first communion when I was 9 years old. I remember it costed 128 USD what was quite expensive in these days in Poland the time right before the fall down of the communism in Poland.
The computer was equipped with XC12 tape recorder that was used to load and play games. First years I obviously spent on playing the very famous River Raid, Boulder Dash, M.U.L.E., Zybex, Draconus, to name a few. Later on, I started to use ATARI to learn programming. Firstly I proceeded with the build-in BASIC interpreter and then moved to the 6502 assembler language, writing some small programs and learning the basics of the machine language. However, most of my time in between 1994 and 2000 I dedicated to the polish Atari computer demoscene.
These times (1994-1998) the Atari demoscene in Poland, likewise the Commodore demoscene, were rapidly expanding. New computer groups were created, many copy-parties were organized. After a few months of pure freelancing, I joined the newly created group Taquart as a musician. Throughout next years, Taquart teamed created a couple of nice demos and other scene productions. I contributed to some productions, including the first Taquart demo called “Back to life”, presented at Orneta 1995 copy party:
In the following years, we (as a group) created a couple of smaller productions (mostly intros) and a few demos including “Ultra”, presented at the Intel Outside IV multicomputer party in Włocławek in 1997 (quite considerable part of the demo wase written at the party place, partially under low level of intoxication ;-), and as such there was not time to correct it and make a reasonable design):
A few years later I created my first demo called “Cogito”. This one was presented in 1999 at the copy-party in Opalenica, Poland. The demo was nearly entirely coded by myself, with the graphics created by Ars/AIDS and Slaves/Taquart and small chunks of code by Jaskier/Taquart:
The soudtrack from the demo were presented in Voice of Silence V “Cogito” soundtrack (see below). At this time, I was already in two other groups called AIDS and BIT BUSTERS. One demo that I like quite a lot from this years is “Base 33”:
Throughout all years of my demoscene activity, I produce a number of music collections and stand-alone 8-bit Atari music. There were 6 music collections, commonly entitled “Voice of Silence”. First five collections you can run on 8-bit Atari (likely its emulator) once you find the ATR files that are available in Internet. If you don’t have the capability to run it on original or emulating software, here Voice of Silence V is available on this website via my SoundCloud account. The last music collection, Voice of Silence VI “Expectancy”, was something special, though. It was created using the quite rare MIDI interface that was developed for 8-bit Atari and MIDI Sequencer Software – more details and music itself provided in MP3 format on the dedicated page.
See also