At X’2014, the edition of the Commodore 64 party X held in the Netherlands in October 2014, the demo competition was decided by a fraction of a point. When the votes were counted, Comaland, by Censor Design and Oxyron, had 4.7848 points. Booze Design’s Uncensored, listed in the results as The Booze Demo, had 4.7595. The two groups behind the winner had met in competition before. At The Computer Crossroads in Sweden in 1993, Censor’s Wonderland X had won the C64 demo competition, while Oxyron’s Coma Light 10 did not place. Comaland puts the names of the two series together. Nine coders worked on it, among them Bob and Swallow, who had founded Censor Design 25 years before.
Fast facts
- Groups: Censor Design (Sweden) and Oxyron (Germany).
- Platform: Commodore 64, four disk sides.
- Released: 25 October 2014, at X’2014 in Someren, the Netherlands. The finished version, Comaland 100%, followed on 20 June 2015 at Nordlicht.
- Result: first in the C64 demo competition, 0.025 points ahead of Booze Design.
- Awards: Meteoriks 2015, best low-end demo and best low-end graphics; also nominated for best low-end soundtrack.
- Code: Axis, Bitbreaker, Bob, CRT, Lavazza, Mirage, Peiselulli, Swallow and The Human Code Machine.
- Music: dEViLOCk, Fanta, Magnar Harestad and Swallow.
- Graphics: Bitbreaker, Creeper, DeeKay of Crest, Mirage, N3XU5, Sphinx, Veto and Yazoo.
Part by part
A week after the party Bitbreaker posted the credits for each part on the demo’s CSDb page, in running order. The first side has a fade-out, an exploding font, a bitmap scroller five screens wide, a Comaland doughnut, plotted balls moved by a physics model, and a scroller with shadows. Each change of disk has a part of its own, shown while the viewer turns the disk: a scroller, a textured cube and a chameleon. The later sides bring a pseudo-3D part, full-screen line vectors, a part called Fractalus, a masked cube, a reflecting sphere, an upward scroller that runs into the side borders, a dancer animated from motion-capture data and a bumblebee in AFLI, the high-resolution variant of FLI.
Some viewers took the most surprising 3D parts for pre-rendered animations. DeeKay corrected them on CSDb the day after the competition: “The raytracer, linevector and Texturecube are NOT animations btw!” The loader and demo system are Bitbreaker’s own, Bitfire; see disk fastloaders.
The last disk side is a music part. The Human Code Machine, who coded it, explained that it plays “a standard Amiga Protracker module using 4 voices”, with a fifth channel added for Magnar Harestad’s voice, mixed at 7,812 Hz. He advised using an older SID chip for that side, because the sample quality would be much better. The SID entry explains why samples played through the volume register are almost inaudible on the later 8580.
Finished and rewarded
The end part had not been finished in time for the party. The Human Code Machine promised a final version with longer music, faster loading and more animation, and Comaland 100% came out at the Nordlicht party in June 2015. By then the demo had also won two Meteoriks, demoscene awards presented at Revision in April 2015 for the productions of 2014: best low-end demo and best low-end graphics.
Sources
- X2014, official results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): demo competition and points. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/2014/x14/results.txt
- CSDb, event entry for X’2014 (web, secondary): dates, place and organisers. https://csdb.dk/event/?id=2082
- CSDb, release entry for Comaland (web, secondary): release date and credits; production notes by Bitbreaker (3 November 2014, per-part credits), The Human Code Machine (28 October 2014, end part and music) and DeeKay (26 October 2014); trivia by Bob (25 April 2017) on the Meteoriks, presented at Revision 2015. https://csdb.dk/release/?id=133940
- CSDb, release entry for Comaland 100% (web, secondary): release date and party. https://csdb.dk/release/?id=139278
- CSDb, group entry for Censor Design (web, secondary): founders. https://csdb.dk/group/?id=2310
- 576 KByte (Hungary) issue 37, September 1993: report on TCC ’93, “The Computer Crossroad”: Wonderland X first, Coma Light 10 unplaced.
- Comaland, Censor Design and Oxyron, 2014: the release’s four disk images, directory listings.
- The Meteoriks 2015, winners (web, secondary): “Low End Demo” and “Low End Graphics” won, “Low End Soundtrack” nominated. https://2015.meteoriks.org/winners