A C64 "loader" with the Scratch mascots. ☛ Click the green flag and watch/listen. (Once the image is displayed, that's it, but feel free to stick around and listen to the music)
⚠️ The original effects (an animated row-by-row "rendering" of the image) gobbles up memory like the cookie monster for some reason*, sometimes causing the browser to crash, despite being extremely simple: just a series of vector shapes masking the image less and less. I'm not sure what is causing this, and haven't been able to fix it, so I added a "simplified effects" version, skipping the animation and simply revealing the entire image at once. * I figured it out. Partly. I made a new version, pre-loading the mask costumes without any effects, which lightens the burden during the reveal. However, as I ran one last test run before sharing it, my browser crashed... So I'll have to test it out a little more before I share it. ◰◱◲◳ What is this? ◰◱◲◳ "Loaders" were a full-screen graphic with music (a several minutes long piece - often the most impressive music in the entire game), which entertained you while you waited for the game to load. This was invented for datasette (casette tape) games, because loading those took several minutes. But there were diskette versions that had them too. They often created an exciting atmosphere that lifted the game way above what the in-game experience gave you. Although all my friends had datasette, I was blessed with a disk drive, which was super fast in comparison. The title image shows a C64 with a disk drive and a monitor (most people used a TV set), and a diskette in the foreground. The projects simulates loading a game from a diskette with a single game on it. ◰◱◲◳ Graphics ◰◱◲◳ I drew the loader graphic in the bitmap editor, but stayed true to the limitations of VIC-II (the C64 graphics chip) Multicolor Bitmap Mode graphics. This means (1) 160 x 200 pixel resolution, (2) 16 specific colors available, (3) the screen pixels are divided into groups of 8x8 pixels, and each group can only contain 4 colors, and (4) each pixel is doubled in width. Here is a great explanation/demonstration by the 8-Bit Guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfh0ytz8S0k Getting the correct color values turned out to be difficult, because although a clear definition does exist for the output signal, a variety of factors determined the resulting color on the TV sets, meaning that the colors would vary quite a bit. On average though, they were less saturated versions of the original output signals. There are a number of palette versions attempting to recreate those colors on modern screens, and I chose the one that seems most accurate to me: the Colodore palette. You can learn all about it here: https://www.pepto.de/projects/colorvic/2001/ ... and it out on a virtual CRT TV set with adjustable brightness and saturation (a standard functionality at the time) here: https://www.colodore.com/ In order to get the PAL aspect ratio right, I converted the bitmap image into vector format, and stretched it vertically to 110%. I have added some effects to simulate a CRT TV set. (1) scanlines, (2) a slight horizontal blur, with very slight color shifts, (3) a slight fisheye effect, to simulate the rounded surface of a CRT TV set, and (4) slightly lowered contrast, and increased darkness the closer you get to the corners. For a more hi-tech simulation, check out Colodore above. ◰◱◲◳ Music ◰◱◲◳ I made the music in BeepBox, doing my best to be faithful to the limitations of SID (the C64 sound chip). This means (1) Three voices (sound channels), each of which can only play one note at a time, (2) four basic wave forms: pulse (with adjustable pulse width), sawtooth, triangle and noise (for drums/SFX). But you can create chords by switching rapidly between notes (arpeggio), and alternate wave forms to give the impression of more than three simultaneous voices. The song is about 2 min long, and loops indefinitely. ◰◱◲◳ Credits ◰◱◲◳ All graphics and sounds are by me except the following: I got the computer setup image from this page: https://interface-experience.org/objects/commodore-64/ The "switch on" sounds are edited versions of the "Clock Ticking" sound in the Scratch Library.
