pouët.net

Hi, a bit late to the afterparty, but better late than never!
I want to thank the orgas for being very responsive and pointing out sound differences between the optimized 256 byte intro I handed in and a recording I made of an earlier version. The thing is that this intro is very sensitive to the exact number of clock cycles used by the DOSBox emulator, since it affects the timing of the writes to the OPL3 (Adlib) chip that produces the sound. I didn't notice the difference, but the orgas did, so kudos for that.
Unfortunately during the compo, only 40s were shown, while the intro was actually calibrated to max out the 60s given in the compo rules. As a result of this, in the compo recording, the intro is exited abruptly at a rather loud point, where the starfield-like graphics hasn't yet completely dissolved. Admittedly this dissolve effect is pretty hard to see, as it's replacing the default blue (color index 1) with black pixels, especially since it's running at a resolution of 1600x1200 pixels. Also, due to the rescaling that had to be done to convert the to the projector's 1080p resolution, some of the contrast seemingly got lost, so therefore it is hard to see the full dissolve happening, while the music gets more mellow during those last 20s.
I would have preferred to have less noisy bits in the sound scape, and also the OPL3 doesn't allow for nice panning (unless you use two voices), but there wasn't really space left to keep this under better control.
I'm sure there is still a lot of potential for interesting sounds in this chip (as Otomata Labs keeps showing us), so I definitely want to explore that more and encourage others to also have a play with it.
https://youtu.be/shWND7b0zlQ

Dance to the music!