Robotic Liberation

Post by **Jeff-20** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 8:59 pm

We never managed to discuss PWP and robotic liberation...

Here's a video clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SdGkkp1aq8

Centallica · Post by **Centallica** » Wed Oct 11, 2006 10:15 am

Seen that one before and still amazed by it

Wish there were games with that intensity for the Vic-20

Brian

Schema · Post by **Schema** » Wed Oct 11, 2006 11:18 am

I'm occasionally tempted to buy a PAL VIC, just so I can watch this demo on real hardware. Truly incredible.

Post by **Jeff-20** » Wed Oct 11, 2006 6:34 pm

How did they/he/she(?) do it?

eslapion · Post by **eslapion** » Thu Oct 12, 2006 4:03 am

After watching this very nice piece of work (robotic revolution), I found this old VIC commercial I had never seen before:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pYMHm_Y ... ed&search=

I laughed so much I had stomach pains for a good half hour!!

Enjoy!

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Thu Oct 12, 2006 7:03 am

Wow! Amazing demo! How in the heck do they do the vocoder effect for the robot singing? That alone would have impressed me on a 3K VIC....but to fit the WHOLE demo into 3.5K....Yikes!

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Thu Oct 12, 2006 7:08 am

eslapion wrote:After watching this very nice piece of work (robotic revolution), I found this old VIC commercial I had never seen before:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pYMHm_Y ... ed&search=

I laughed so much I had stomach pains for a good half hour!!

Enjoy!

Those were the days when Commodore actually knew how to advertise.

Schema · Post by **Schema** » Thu Oct 12, 2006 10:22 am

ral-clan wrote:Wow! Amazing demo! How in the heck do they do the vocoder effect for the robot singing? That alone would have impressed me on a 3K VIC....but to fit the WHOLE demo into 3.5K....Yikes!

I believe they pull the voice (and maybe some graphic?) data off the 1541 in small chunks very quickly and use it in real-time. So while the demo "runs" in 3.5K, they really have 170K of storage available to them.

We need to get these guys (and other VIC demo coders) to join the forum!

Boray · Post by **Boray** » Thu Oct 12, 2006 10:56 am

Oh, no... It's a single 3.5kb file demo... He has made a bunch of demos and when I looked at them some years ago I'm not sure I thought Robotic liberation was the best of them... but I'm not sure... anyway, the others are worth to run too...

Wonder-Boy · Post by **Wonder-Boy** » Thu Oct 12, 2006 12:48 pm

It's rubbish!!!

No, I'm kidding. It's great. I bought my Vic-20 after seeing it.

Schema · Post by **Schema** » Thu Oct 12, 2006 1:13 pm

Boray wrote:Oh, no... It's a single 3.5kb file demo...

You can get the demo here - it's definitely in two parts, a 1K loader and 16K of data.

http://pelulamu.net/pwp/

From the README:

The trackloader uses a protocol that allows fast loading even under heavy
interrupt request rates (that is, during speech synthesis). A small part
of the drive-side code is from M.Makela's Veni Vidi Vic trackloader.

Still very impressive!

Boray · Post by **Boray** » Thu Oct 12, 2006 1:43 pm

Ok... Sorry... As I said, it was years ago I saw it

It was after reading one of his scroll texts I wrote my "open letter to the vic-20 demo scene" if anyone remembers it...

Post by **Jeff-20** » Thu Oct 12, 2006 7:33 pm

Look at this:
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?doc ... 2823790589

We need Holmes3000 (who posted the commercials) and PWP to join the boards. I am sending a call out to all bounty hunters!

Mikam73 · Post by **Mikam73** » Fri Oct 13, 2006 6:09 am

ral-clan wrote:Wow! Amazing demo! How in the heck do they do the vocoder effect for the robot singing? That alone would have impressed me on a 3K VIC....but to fit the WHOLE demo into 3.5K....Yikes!

For Finnish groups everything is possible..

http://www.altparty.org/

Post by **Jeff-20** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 4:10 am

Mikam73 wrote:For Finnish groups everything is possible..

I must give respect to Finnish hackers... Assembly blows my mind! I can't even begin to understand how they do it.

However, viznut is really special. From his website's explication of Robotic Liberation:

Robotic Warrior was the first VIC-20 production I made completely without emulators (using the excellent c2n232 device by Marko Mäkelä for development). It was also the first of my demos that didn't work properly with emulators. In this case, the sound emulation was not implemented correctly, which rendered the digital voice into a total mess. Further exploration of the "bug" revealed some previously unknown features of the VIC-20's sound hardware.

Marko's involved. Another score Finns. But what does he mean by "secret feature"?

The voice synthesizer in Robotic Liberation is used to sing out the soundtrack song, just like in Robotic Warrior. The sound player, however, has been somewhat improved, showing off some newly discovered capabilities of the audio hardware (called "viznut waveforms" by Aleksi Eeben of CNCD). The discovery of a totally unknown and undocumented hardware feature in a vintage machine was somewhat surprising, but it clearly demonstrates how a very simple device can keep some of its secrets for decades.

The voice is an impressive trick:

The demo uses a psychological trick causing the listener hear details that are not there. There are only fifteen distinct sounds in the voice synthesizer - far from enough - but since the viewers also read the lyrics while listening, they get the illusion of hearing the words properly.

I wish I could see it run on real hardware (why PAL, oh why?!).

Despite continuous loading, Robotic Liberation is no larger than about 17 kilobytes. It could fit in the memory of a 16K-expanded VIC-20 all at once, and it has actually even been run in such a way. However, there is currently no RAM-based version available in public.

Now someone please explain the ZOOM effect he achieves with the circles...