notcon 2004 report
(c) gasman
it was 2002's extreme computing festival, where a significant portion of the programme was devoted to a celebration of the spectrum's 20th birthday, which first prodded me into doing a talk. they had a number of short slots available for people to come forward and give 'lightning presentations', but in the end i decided that making up a talk on the spot was a bit too hardcore. instead, i had to wait around another two years for a similar event to come along... finally notcon provided that opportunity.
i was allocated a 10 minute slot for my presentation, with a suggestion to concentrate on the hardware side of things. i started out wondering what i could cover, but soon found out that the bigger problem was deciding what to leave out - 10 minutes isn't very long at all. originally i wasn't going to mention the demo scene at all, and i was just going to demonstrate divide by loading up a game, but at the last minute i realised that this would result in an awkward moment in the talk where i'd go "look, it's manic miner. woo, manic miner everyone. er, yay." so, i went for a bit of self-promotion instead, and put losing victoria on the playlist.
from past experience, i've found that when you mention the demo scene to a typical british geek, one of two things will happen. either their eyes will light up and they'll wax lyrical about future crew, desert dream, gravis ultrasounds and farbrausch, or they'll stare at you with a confused expression. for the benefit of the latter category, i had to give a very brief explanation of the demo scene, and you can probably imagine how hard that is to do. after cutting out countless details of the cracking scene, 256-byte intros, realtime vs precalculation, technical demos vs artistic demos, and all sorts of other subjects i really wanted to mention, i trimmed it down to about 30 seconds.
my turn on the stage came after james larsson, who gave a highly eccentric demonstration of telling the time using a bbc micro and a prawn sandwich. (for those who aren't familiar with it, the bbc micro was the main rival computer to the spectrum in the uk, but seemingly unknown in other countries. anyway, that's not nearly as important as the prawn sandwich.) this was going to be a tough act to follow...
still, there was an encouraging sign right at the start, when (after a small delay fixing up the projector) the spectrum startup menu sprang onto the screen, accompanied by a hearty cheer from the audience. this was, after all, a crowd that largely grew up with the spectrum and have fond memories of it, even if they've long since "moved on".
quite surprising, then, that nobody seemed to recognise the sinclair microdrive cartridge that i brandished at the start of the talk to illustrate how far we'd come in 20 years. all in all, the early stages of the talk passed rather quietly (at least i didn't see any tumbleweeds rolling past...) but the audience perked up a bit when my demo started. i didn't really have time to savour the moment, because i was busy crawling under the table trying to get the sound to work. (in a fit of paranoia, i decided to bring my own speakers along, just in case. this turned out to be a very good idea.)
the demo got a big round of applause, which was very satisfying indeed. a quick breather, and then i moved on to the subject of compactflash. people still weren't laughing at my crap jokes, but there were some definite murmurs of excitement about the hardware developments. to me the leap from ide to cf didn't seem a very big one (or a very interesting one from a spectrum hardware point of view), but i guess the idea of an ultra-modern storage medium on vintage hardware captured everyone's imagination.
- live irc discussion from the event on #notcon
i was running very short on time by this point, so i had to move quickly on to the finale, my streaming video of let forever be by the chemical brothers. the initial mention of streaming video got a laugh - people weren't sure how seriously to take it... i was going to introduce it with some technical blurb about bmp2scr and the limitations of the ay chip, but i ended up skipping that and cutting straight to the demonstration instead. this spot of improvisation turned out to be very effective, as if to casually say "oh, this is what we do all the time on the speccy" - and that was the moment that the whole crowd had their preconceptions about the possibilities of 8-bitters overturned...
in his opening speech, co-organiser danny o'brien had encouraged everyone at the conference to collaborate and strike up discussions, and while i assumed he had the more 'mainstream' seminars in mind, i was pleasantly surprised with the reception i got from visitors later on - i had a chat with someone in search of new things to do with his z80-based amstrad nc100 laptop (deciding that a port of contiki was a possibility), dispensed some advice on speccy cross-development, and met a prospective scener who had recently moved to england from south africa but found that the scene here isn't quite as active as he'd hoped. in the evening, when we all headed out to wagamama, one of london's finest noodle bars, i got talking with mark robson of vectrex.org.uk. the vectrex is an extremely rare home computer of the 80s, notable for its custom crt display which is vector-based rather than raster-based. i got to hear about the peculiar ballet act required to get the electron beam producing smooth graphics... if only they were easier to get hold of, this would surely be the next great conquest of the demo scene.
elfh> the transcription of a presentation, could be read at: http: //www.zxdemo.org /article.p hp?id=8)