Posts tagged graphics
Atari 800 Winter Solstice Celebration Demo
- 23 December 2022
Every December, I try to make a little wintery demo to exercise one of 8bitworkshop’s platforms. This year, I chose the Atari 800 to test out the new native TypeScript emulator in 8bitworkshop. You can see the demo emulated here.
I revisted my Bally Astrocade “Happy 2020” Demo, which simulates falling snow. It uses pixel-level collision to simulate each falling particle, which creates neat little piles of snow and particles that ripple off the sides of obstacles.
Atari ANTIC Mode $F uses the GTIA chip to add additional modes beyond what the original CTIA chip provides. I used GTIA Mode 10, which is 80 x 192 pixels with nine different colors.
Displaying QR codes on 8-bit hardware
- 01 December 2022
It’s often hard to interface the world of 8-bit computing with modern digital devices. These machines don’t have USB, Wifi, Ethernet, or anything resembling a modern interface.
It’s interesting to think about ways older machines can communicate with modern devices using only hardware of the era – even if it might be kind of convoluted. One of these methods might be via QR code.
A QR code is a two-dimensional pattern that encodes a short string of bytes or text – often a URL. These patterns can be printed on paper, or displayed on a screen. If you scan the pattern with your phone’s camera, it decodes the pattern, and displays the encoded text or URL.
