Ideas from the demosceners

[nesbox]

There is a group of us demosceners using the TIC80 for sizecoding tiny programs in <256 or <128 byte TIC files....
This is a whole subculture doing this for various platforms. This is because TIC80 is more suitable for sizecoding than say a PICO-8 and therefore could be a driver of cool demonstration programs for the TIC80

Something that is really holding us back:

1. loading a TIC file without filled palette chunk will revert to pre 0.8 palette/waveforms, that is quite unusable for direct color access without wasting bytes/chars on color-index remapping... same for waveforms being initialised at random.. a single byte in the TIC file format for legacy <0.8 defaults (=default/0 value) and 0.8 defaults (value=1) would be perfect.. most of the sizecoded small <256byte TIC files only have a (compressed) code chunk +4b chunkheader and nothing else to go with

2. a special demoscene category with finished/competitive demos and intros on tic80.com / surf would be icing on the cake.. right now we have a list at pouet https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=TIC-80&page=1 that will grow considerably over the next few months with dedicated TIC80 intro competitions

3. a commandline option for forcing crt filter (F6) upon startup

Point 1 and 3 should be relatively easy to implement

[nesbox]

To force CRT filter pls use --crt option on startup, it's already implemented in 0.90

TIC-80/src/studio/studio.c

Line 2022 in 61b6515

OPT_BOOLEAN('\0', "crt", &args.crt, "enable CRT monitor effect"),

[superogue]

thanks :D

[nesbox]

2. I'm thinking about how to do it better, maybe we could add a new subsection to the Demo or maybe add tags or add a new Demoscene category

[superogue]

I'm assuming more TIC80 demoscene productions will come this year (already a handful in the first week of january).
Somehow dividing the demos between game/tech demos and demoscene stuff in the form of officially released audiovisual presentations would be a good division. Alternatively: you could consider moving some more game/engine oriented material to the WIP/tech section.

An always updated list of released demoscene TIC-80 productions can be found at: https://demozoo.org/platforms/92/

[nesbox]

A new Demoscene section was added, also the Demos section renamed to Tech
https://tic80.com/play?cat=5

[nesbox]

1. It's a bug if you see randomly initialized waveforms and should be fixed. As for restoring the old palette, it's a workaround to not break compatibility with old carts, I'll think about how to fix it.

[superogue]

Great to hear the waveforms are on the to-fix list, this helps a lot with sound (a lot of sizecoded prods are missing sound for this reason).

One way to fix the sweetie-pal / db16 pal selection (and future pal selection) in a compatible way that requires as little bytes as possible could be to include a special chunk with no data for default pal selection (not including this chunk or a chunk with 0 data would be reverting to <0.8 compatible palette and for the least amount of bytes (3) have the reserved third chunk byte select the palette and have a 0 length chunk with no data... or alternatively a 1 byte length chunk with 1 data byte (4 bytes total).

[nesbox]

I just added CHUNK_DEFAULT chunk to the cart (#1308), so the Sweetie16 palette and default waveforms will be loaded if the chunk exists.