Code Like It's 198x

Edge of Disgrace

Booze Design's X'2008 winner

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A Commodore 64 demo by the Swedish group Booze Design, made by HCL, Dane and Jailbird. It won the C64 demo competition at X'2008 in the Netherlands in October 2008 and the Scene.org Award for the best demo of 2008 on an oldschool platform.

On the last weekend of October 2008 the Commodore 64 party X, in the east of the Netherlands, put thirteen demos to the vote. Booze Design’s Edge of Disgrace won it with 9.346 points. Oxyron’s Natural Wonders 2 came second with 8.854 and Xenon’s Pearls for Pigs third. The Scene.org Awards then named it the best demo of 2008 on an oldschool platform, ahead of Natural Wonders 2 and lft’s Craft, and it was one of six nominees for the awards’ public choice prize, alongside PC demos. It was made by three people, the coders and artists HCL and Dane and the artist Jailbird, and it filled two disk sides almost to the last block.

Fast facts

  • Group: Booze Design, Sweden.
  • Platform: Commodore 64.
  • Released: 25 October 2008, at X’2008.
  • Result: first in the C64 demo competition.
  • Award: Scene.org Awards 2008, best demo on an oldschool platform.
  • Credits: code by HCL and Dane; music by Dane; graphics by Dane, HCL and Jailbird; design by HCL and Jailbird; linking and loader by HCL.

What is in it

The demo was released as three disk images. Two, labelled disk 1a and disk 1b, hold the demo itself. A third, disk 0, carries a note file, the soundtrack as a separate program and a graphics editor with two example pictures. Dane wrote on CSDb the day after the party that two finished effects had been left out “due to lack of space on the disk”.

Viewers who posted on CSDb in the days after the party described what they had seen: plasmas and zoomers, vector objects, colour bars and rotating textures, all joined by smooth transitions. The Phantom liked how the group “simply acts like the side-borders don’t exist”, a reference to the trick of opening the borders so that graphics run across the whole width of the screen. Some complained of too many plasmas. Another, Skate, answered that many of the effects had “been done many times before”, and that the demo’s point was “pushing the limits, combining effects together, spending all the cycles with great ideas and having smooth transitions”.

One trick, documented

Public sources say little about how most of the demo’s parts work. One exception is the Codebase64 wiki’s page on sprite crunching. The VIC-II draws a sprite three bytes at a time, one raster line after another, keeping a counter of where it is in the sprite’s 63 bytes. Setting a sprite’s bit in the Y-expansion register, $D017, at the right moment makes the chip repeat a line, which is how sprite stretching works. Codebase64 describes a second glitch: clearing the bit again at one exact cycle of the raster line makes the counter jump by some amount other than the usual three bytes, sometimes backwards.

According to Codebase64, Edge of Disgrace uses that glitch in its 4×4 plasma, where each block of the effect is four pixels high. The glitch is triggered at position $1E in the sprite, which moves the counter back by nine bytes, or three sprite lines, so the same graphics come round again in step with the four-line blocks. A normal stretcher would write $D017 twice on every raster line. This way it is written twice every four lines, which, in the wiki’s words, saves “some life supporting cycles”.

Reception

Its CSDb page had collected more than 300 comments and 306 ratings, averaging 9.6 out of 10, by September 2026. When Booze Design came back to X in 2014 with Uncensored, it came second by a fraction of a point to Censor Design and Oxyron’s Comaland.

Sources

See also

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