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.

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Hallowe'en is here again and we are dressed up as … ourselves, 20 years ago. (Are any costumes possibly scarier than our own adolescences?) I know that trends and fashions are supposed to go in 20-year cycles – is 2015 the new 1995? (Microsoft probably hopes so.)

But I digress. You can find our new, 21st anniversary artpack MIST1015.ZIP at our new website at mistigris.org, or download it wholesale at bit.ly/mist1015, or view and hear (much of) it through your web browser at pc.textmod.es/pack/mist1015.

It’s a massive undertaking, containing over 100 files submitted by over 50 artists (including over an hour and a half of music!), representing works created from the late ‘80s to … late last night.

There’s no official theme (if “computer art” is a theme in 2015, it’s one so broad as to be unuseful), but due to the timing of our release, it naturally happened that a certain quantity of spooky, Hallowe'eny art accumulated in our incoming directory. We actually debated just releasing it as a separate Hallowe'en pack, but twice as many packs == twice as much administrative work, so to avoid killing our senior staff (what would be a more fitting Devil’s Night twist?) we opted to lump it all in as a sub-theme within the greater pack.

There’s lots to enjoy here – and even tomorrow, when the Christmas decorations come out, there will still be lots of non-Hallowe'eny material in there for you to continue enjoying. (And how does that joke go? “Why do programmers confuse Halloween and Christmas? Because 25 DEC == 31 OCT!”)

But in the meantime… Boo!

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Posted works: witchy animated .GIF by Janos Horak, Shift JIS by Kalcha, Amiga pixelart by $too, ANSI spider by Vordreque, ballerina spider by Theresa Oborn, Skullflower by Phatal, Zombies, Run! ANSI by Happyfish, DJ of the Dead by Vordreque, ASCII by ldb.

BONUS: appearing in the artpack, though not with this track – electronic music master Ill-Esha has made a sinister electro rearrangement of Danny Elfman’s thme music to Beetlejuice, which you can enjoy at http://subdotmission.com/sub-freebies