One of the major drivers for computer art has traditionally been working around constraints and limitations. In today’s world of processor-intensive creative techniques that are ONLY possible through the heavy lifting of banks of supercomputers, the idea may seem jarring and dissonant, but today’s retrocomputing enthusiasts (and, y'know, the demoscene) keep burning the torch for those eras where making a computer perform any trick, despite their gutless innards, was a feat worth celebrating.

So this little demonstration included in MIST1016 shouldn’t be brushed off as a bit crude – given 40 minutes on a Commodore 64, it’s likely that you would come up with quite a bit less! But given the geographical proximity of these hackers to our traditional heart and homebase of Vancouver, BC, and the undeniable spookiness of these 8-bit ghosts flying around, we knew we had to share this little piece of instant code with the world in MIST1016!

If you want to get this program off the ground on vintage hardware at home (or in WinVICE) you’ll need to know that making it run requires a typical step – LOAD “*”,8,1 – and an extraordinary one: instead of RUN, tell it… SYS 4096.