Copper Showdown
This year’s evoke is hosting the world’s first Copper Showdown.
In a Copper Showdown participants compete live and on-stage against each other. There is limited time for them to code some effect and once the time limit is reached the visitors will vote and determine a winner.
The tool we will be using can be found here:
https://gitlab.com/akronyme-analogiker/copper-showdown/copper-showdown-editor
If you are interested in participating please contact us
The editor is an IDE for Win/Mac/Linux with an integrated Amiga Emulator and allows you to code so called “Copperlists” in LUA that will then be executed in the emulator. The concept of the editor is loosely based on bonzomatic. Namely you have the editor and the realtime output of what you are creating in the background.
Copperlists are very simple to understand (but hard to master) because they only have 3 instructions (MOVE, WAIT, SKIP). Copperlists operate on the CRT beam and you can wait for a beam position and then do something in the Amiga chipset (for example change the color). That is how copper bars are done!
If you are thinking “ok I can do live coding and all that but I have no idea of Amiga. I will just close the page now” STOP.
As copperlists are that simple you can probably grasp what is going on quite quickly.
We have a few examples with annotated source code to get you starting. The downloadable .csd files are just .toml files so you can just open them
in any text editor. You don’t need the editor to check them out.
First the obviously needed copper bars. The example source code goes quite a bit into detail what is going on. But copper bars are very simple to do using the editor. WAIT for a beam line. MOVE a different color into the background color and that’s it.
Then we have a simple example that should get people going that have never done anything on the Amiga. It allows you to create 50 unique b&w screens and loop them together. From there you could iterate and for example integrate changing the colors per frame using the hints from the copperbars example.
The next example is more complex and in the example copper loops (using the SKIP instruction) are briefly shown. Also this example illustrates some limitations of the copper (namely you can only address every 4th pixel). It also uses the sprite DMA of Amiga which can be controlled from the copper.
We are planning for a 2 round showdown (semi final and final) with 4 participants. Each round will be 30 minutes with a little break in between.
The exact CSD template file that you will be using will be announced a week ago or so before the party. It will likely contain some evoke related Sprites and Bobs (like a full “beam-slide”, maybe evoke characters as sprites) for you to play with.
We would love to hear back from you regarding this new showdown format and hope that a few people apply. This is the first copper showdown ever and whether you are an Amiga veteran or a TIC-80 byte jammer: Do not hesitate to apply if this sounds interesting to you.
Copper is for everyone ❤️
The editor also has an option to export your copper lists as a floppy disk that can run on a standard A500. Your first Amiga demo might be about to become a reality!
If you need more info/help or want to apply please contact us.
There is also a discord community for Copper Showdown to help you get going: https://discord.gg/w7KSRFx2Ne.