Drobe talks to the organisers of Codecraft #3: Let's talk graphics

Earlier this month, coding group Icebird announced themselves as organisers of this year's Codecraft, a demo coding competition for RISC OS computers. It's still early days yet, you have until the 30th of April to get your entries in. There are several catagories, ranging from the useful to musical, although with a common theme that small is beautiful. Depending on the demo catagory, you must restrict yourself to a final file size of either 1024 or 4096 bytes. It's not much, considering this article already exceeds that file size, though you will be surprised by what some people can squeeze into that.

Drobe will follow the coding competition through to April and the results thereafter. To kick this off, we spoke to organiser David Schalig (aka mrh of Icebird), about what he will expect from this year's entrants as well as coder Michael Kübel, who incidentally wrote this year's customary invitation to Codecraft #3.

Codecraft #2, by the way, was organised by Pervect of coding group Topix.
"Codecraft 2 was a platform for beginners in some way. Pervect watched through the sourcecode of every single entry, gave advices and answered questions", recalls David. Codecraft 3 is intended for all round coders, the emphasis on music has been highlighted by the 4kb music catagory.
"Codecraft #1 was held by baah of ARM'sTech", continues David. "It was based on the 1k coding competition we organized in 1996 in the Coder's Revenge diskmagazine. This original competition in 96 had a very cool atmosphere, all participants were more or less famous people from the acorn "demo scene". But since then Codecraft developed into a competition open for everyone. The aspect of programming the thing became more important than the atmosphere of the compo's background.
"ArmOric and baah of ARM'sTech will produce some entries which can be expected to be very sophisticated. Also Topix, VOTI and Kulture are likely to produce something. Last but not least Icebird will enter some entries - probably 'out of competition' as we organize the thing."

Icebird plans to hold another Yelling Jam Party, to coincide with the demo event. The first Yelling Jam was held in 1996 in Bremen, Germany and is a popular party for coders and demo designers. Icebird expect people mainly from the Atari, Amiga and the RISC OS scene, so it is open to just about everyone.

1. Set up 2 offscreen buffers
   
2. Create 2 fullscreen text bitmaps with the antialiased font
   
3. Calculate a nice colour palette
   
4. Depending on the part of the demo (Text 1/Lines 1/Text 2/Lines 2) combine the text bitmap or the lines with the offscreen buffer
   
5. Zoom a circular displaced fraction of this offscreen buffer to fullscreen with the use of a bilinear filter algortihm.
   
6. Plot the offscreen buffer on the screen and switch the buffers to get the feedback effect
   
7. Jump back to 4
   

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