I was surfing around for some counterpart to Horsenburger’s masterful teletext advent calendar entries, thinking that they needed a complement for their appearance in the “Silent Night” music video and MIST1216 artpack, but something substantial was needed to counter them at the risk of being “all the teletext and then a couple of other things.” Then I found Vinny “@C64_endings” Mainolfi sharing a series of self-winterized images from classic C64 video games and I realised we just might have what we’re looking for! There were a pile of them (indeed, there are some he hasn’t even released yet) – these are ones we’ve featured in Mistigram so far, revamped versions of Bubble “Bauble” (Bobble), Impossible Mission, Bruce Lee, and Last Ninja (I Gave You My Heart). Formidable!
It was a retrocomputing extravaganza, with the Apple ][ represented via Melodia’s curation of seasonal demos for that pioneering platform extruded into three dimensions through her Octalyzer, the Commodore 64 in full effect thanks to @C64_endings and his winterized screenshots of classic C64 games, Atari ST representing courtesy of STuART “Forgotten Grove” and his STatariART cadre… I faked a Mac Classic selfie thanks to the iOS Retrospecs app, and of course we had a pile of amazing Horsenburger pieces on board thanks to his advent calendar project this year! (The only truly vintage platforms missing are the TRS-80 and ZX Spectrum… well, and the Amiga, but they have their own thing going.) All that plus a few pieces from Mistigris irregulars – Diane Smithers’ Prismafied photos, FidoNet-style ASCII art by ldb and more.
You can enjoy the whole thing, admittedly a little after the fact, through a browser-accessible web gallery at textmod.es. Cheers!
Is it possible that we somehow failed to tell you about our major Christmas 2016 project? It is possible – the smashing of my main computer’s screen interfered both in the commission of the project and the promotion of it. Well, season’s belated greetings, folks – it’s an outtake from Melodia’s “1999” music disk, a remix of Enya singing “Silent Night”, complete with an array of vintage and contemporary retrocomputing holiday imagery from Horsenburger’s teletext advent calendar, @C64_endings’ winterized screenshots of classic Commodore 64 games, imagery from Apple ][ demos run through Melodia’s Octalyzer, a few tidbits from the STatariART crew… plus even a couple of seasonal pieces by Mistigris regulars! Don’t worry if you didn’t get a chance to see this in time this year, we’ll certainly be parading it out again next December!
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.
