Coder Corner

Yesterday I woke up from what must be the geekiest nightmare ever.

In the dream, I was back to my old Atari ST days. A friend of mine was at home, using my ST to watch demos and play games. Suddenly he complains that the drive doesn’t work anymore, and that all the disks he tries are failing. I check it out, and I realize that the moron managed to insert 2 floppies at the same time in the drive! Shivers down my spine: it’s the 2 disks of Blood, and I’m starting to panic because he may just have killed my only copy. I painfully remove the 2 disks from the drive, then put one disk back to check everything still works. I reset the ST by pressing the small button in its back. The drive starts reading the disk sectors slowly… one at a time… tac… tac… tac… Something’s wrong. The frequency of the “tac” sounds is too low, like one per second. Should be much faster, like when booting Return To Genesis, here it sounds like the horrible Atari ST version of Out Run, which was loading for ever, super slowly. tac… tac… tac… I’m white with fear, the asshole killed my ST ?! tac… tac… tac… It loads ad infinitum, nothing happens… the thing is dead… tac… tac… tac…

The dream blends out, reality blends in. I emerge from that nightmare. Slowly.

Something is still wrong. I still hear the drive.

tac… tac… tac…

Half asleep I turn my head towards the noise.

And I see that loud, annoying, fucking alarm clock that my girlfriend recently bought in a cheap chinese bazar. Tac… tac… tac… tac… tac… That thing makes the same noise as an Atari ST floppy disk controller, and it took a nightmare for me to realize it.

Some discussions in the office about current issues on modern consoles curiously remind me of similar problems on the ST. A background loading thread that streams stuff from the DVD, where assets have to be carefully laid out to minimize seek times, is really the same as what people did in “trackmos” on ST and Amiga.

We didn’t use real “threads” with mutexes and everything, it was a lot simpler:

• the demo code was put in the VBL interrupt (One ASM line: move.l #callback_address, $70.W)
• the main code continued in the background, free to load, decompress or precompute the next effect, whatever was needed

No threads, but the end result was pretty much the same - although limited to one “main thread” and one “background thread”, granted.

We didn’t stream from the HD or the DVD, we streamed from the only thing we had: floppy disks. Properly storing your data in contiguous sectors on the disk was not only important to speed up loading times. It was also important to minimize the awful noise made by the floppy disk controller when seeking. With large seeks it sounded like the thing was about to break, so, yeah, we paid attention to those issues.

Those days I see some PC developers moving to consoles and rediscovering those problems, or cursing the next-gen consoles for those painful thorny new issues. But they’re nothing but new.

My old Atari ST has been locked in a box for years. Today, out of the blue, I decided to open the box again and check the machine was still working. My first surprise was that its color changed. I don’t know what happened but the light grey disappeared and got replaced by a dirty, sick-looking, brownish yellow. I have no idea how it happened, but it looks nasty.

The second surprise is that everything works like a charm - machine and disks. I expected both to be dead by now. But no, more than 20 years after I bought it, the Atari ST still works flawlessly. I watched a few of our old demos and I now realize one thing: our taste sucked. Check out those beautiful RGB colors in “Inverted Landscapes”, one of our first screens…

Woah! Jean-Charles Meyrignac (a.k.a. MCoder) recently released most of his old Atari ST sources:

http://euler.free.fr/AtariST/

Years ago I would have killed for that When I was programming demos on Atari he used to be one of my coding heroes - along with Niclas Thisell (”Nick of TCB”), God of War’s Tim Moss (”Manikin of TLB”), Steve Bak, and a few others.