Atari 800 Winter Solstice Celebration Demo 2022
owl writes:
https://8bitworkshop.com/docs/posts/2022/happy-holidays-2022.html
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.
I changed the snow-falling algorithm so that the snow piles up only when it collides with existing snow. This scheme reserves one of the palette entries for snow, so we can detect snow vs. background.
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