hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0524.txt

Episode: 524
Title: HPR0524: TiT Radio 019 - interview with sigFLUP
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0524/hpr0524.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 22:26:32

---

.
Hello everyone, I'm Musta B and welcome to today in tech episode 19. This
episode was recorded on February 27th, 2010. And today I have an interview with
Sickflop. Enjoy.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Hello, Sickflop. Welcome to TIT Radio.
Oh, hi. How are you? How's it going? Good. You have a hacker public radio series called
Demo or Bust. Yes, I do.
Demo or Bust seems like it's geared towards someone that's already part of the demo scene.
Could you explain to me in the TIT listeners what a demo is?
Yeah, yeah, I'm certainly. And I, of course, am by no means am authoring myself as like a
bona fide member of the demo scene, if that makes sense. But the demo typically is a
program that has no interaction that doesn't sort of audio or visual presentation.
And that's about it. It's kind of a community of sorts and a lot of people like to
run demos on various platforms. And it's kind of a challenge. Can we get something running?
Can we get this effect going on a Commodore 64 or something like that?
And it's quite a lot of fun. Friendship and creativity. Those are the two primary
forces in the demo scene, as far as I understand.
So when it comes to hardware and equipment, can you use anything you want?
Anything that runs programs. I mean, there's a whole like a mind to you.
Again, like I don't want to place myself as in a very authoritative, I don't want to place
myself in a authoritative voice when it comes to the demo scene because I'm relatively new to
it myself. But usually this goes along with parties and usually there are competitions
and I have different categories. And these categories maybe are separated by
platform or type of demo. And they're usually the wild demo too. It's really anything.
Anything creative is usually smiled upon. Yeah, the calculators.
My mates wrote the demo for the P85 calculator, for instance,
anything from calculators to high-end GPUs, whatever runs the programs.
And then when you say competition, I mean, is there like a bunch of people there, judges?
How does that work?
It's usually judged by the audience. And there is some sort of voting mechanism.
And that's usually how it goes. I haven't been to too many parties.
So this is what I understand from the parties that I've been to.
I see Nadecon's going to have a party coming up. Well, Nadecon's April 15th through 18th.
Let me double check. Okay, so is that verified? Do you know that it's done?
I don't know a fan.
Here, let me look it up real quick. And that's Nadecon. I'm saying that right, correct?
Yeah, Nadecon.
Yeah.
15th through the 18th, my friend. Cleveland, Ohio.
46 more days.
Yeah. You're looking at the website. There it is. 26 more days.
Now, is that separate from Nadecon? Or is that like just like a special event there?
The demo competition block party is separate from Nadecon.
But it is there. Like in spirit, it's separate, but it's very similar.
There's a lot of cross-pollonization when it comes to the audience and the participants.
All the hackers put in Nadecon and all the demo people go to the Nadecon as well.
And then the demo people shine at the block party and the hacker is kind of shining at the hacker part.
So, it's kind of like a sister organization that makes sense.
So, my friend, N and R, N-R-R-O, and N-R-R for a reason.
And N-R-R recently held a party in Megfest, which was a similar thing called a Neurupu.
And so, Neurupu is a part of Megfest as block parties part of Nadecon.
Everyone should come. 26 more days. Do your tickets.
So, you're going to be there, right?
I'm going to try too.
That's not quite a guarantee. There might be something happening, but I'm going to definitely try too.
God will be there. Red man will be there. The northern dragons will be there.
I believe Black Pond is going. So, he's a senior from Seattle. He'll be there.
And, I don't know, just the American scene, Phoenix, Trickster, all those people will be there.
So, is it mainly just like people like in the competition there, or is there like people just walking around taking a look at everybody's demos, or is it pretty much...
Everyone there is actually competing, or they have something to show.
I wouldn't imagine I as everyone. It's, I've been doing things different. Some people are working on a production.
There's usually, there's like a break room, and everyone sets up their computers there, and people want to enter, usually work on a production there.
Oh, we have found a lot of people do it the day of. So, there's a lot of party coding, there's a lot of party tracking, and putting together productions during the party.
Some people are looking around. It's a massive people, so you can't really say what anyone is doing at the same time.
It's interesting, though, like the Linux community. Linux is becoming very practical. Well, it's not.
It's practical, more so than it was in 1991's, or even in 1996.
But, you know, the geeky sort of computers for the sake of computers running Linux, albeit maybe unpractical, but still doing it anyway.
I think mirrors the demos in spirits of, let's produce something cool that has no real purpose, but it's cool anyway.
And so, there's a lot of shared energy between the more hacker scene, not a cotton, the more demo scene oriented and unblocked party.
Yeah, because, to me, looking at the screenshots of, you know, other party, it kind of looks just like a bunch of people getting together, playing music.
Because I had no idea that all this was going on. I mean, there's a lot of coding involved, and you have to have some kind of, I don't know, some kind of knack for graphics.
I mean, not anybody could just buy some computers and think they're going to jump right into this. This takes a lot of skills, doesn't it?
Well, I hate to say this, but some of the entries have been pretty, I don't want to say crap.
It's very interesting, like whatever any level of skill you draw whatever, like the graphics competition.
If you could draw something in the mouse, you should enter. If you can do anything, you have to start somewhere, right?
So, there's a, I don't know, it seems like the more popular productions are the ones that are more well done.
There's a, for instance, there is, to every far brush, there is far brush being the European Democratic group that has really good productions, and has developed some really good tools.
For every beautiful far brush production, there are hundreds of other sort of minimal productions, but you have to start somewhere, some of them are very charming, and some of them are very cute.
It's not all about skills, about whatever energy you want to put into it, and also about skill.
It's about a lot of different things.
Did you, did you want to, do you want to go anywhere, aside from the demo scene, or did you want to talk specifically about that?
One more question about the demo scene.
Yeah.
Like, if I walked into the demo party and walked up to your table or area, I mean, what would I see on your table?
On my table, or someone else's table?
Your table, say.
I mean, what kind of equipment do you bring?
I usually bring my laptops, that's about it.
Like, they're really even too much else, but I can't carry.
So, like, for me, like, if you came last year, you probably wouldn't see me working on Sega Genesis code, and drawing a little bit, and put together a couple of effects there.
But, if you go to other people's tables, maybe you'll see them tracking.
There's a big, pretty big tracker card there, and you'll see a lot of that.
See people doing whatever they do.
So, people using whatever tools, albeit their own or others, that make interesting productions.
So, does Sega Genesis, you like to hack on that?
I mean, is there other things you do with it besides make demos?
No, not really.
Like, I've noticed that, in my own personal life, I need to learn more discipline.
And I found that I will stick to something for maybe a few months.
And the Sega Genesis ain't kind of like, oh, well, I don't know too much about the Sega Genesis, that sounds interesting.
And I'll learn about the Sega Genesis for a little under a half a year.
And I wrote a library to facilitate programming on it, and spread it to the door as well as a patch of the door for the sound chip that's in it.
One of the sound chips that's in it, and a handle on it as well.
Let me get you the URL to the panel if you ever want to watch it.
All right, I'll put that in the show notes too.
All right, you all paste it in the IC room once I get over to what the URL actually is.
You can see my greasy face.
I was very greasy during that presentation, but that's the side of the point.
All right, that's what I read a long URL, hopefully you can see that.
I got it. I'll put that in the show notes. I'll have to watch it later once we get off the call.
All right, cool beans. Mind you that I tend to switch a lot of terms.
I've noticed that I tend to not think what I say.
I guess it's an intent.
No couple of times, instead of the second genesis and vice versa,
and sometimes I say that it's a bit of bite, but if you think about it,
it'll probably hopefully come to you.
I mean, but that's not so bad.
It's the minor criticism of my own style there.
The second genesis is an interesting, real interesting system.
As far as systems are concerned, I mean, I said the same thing about the Nintendo when I was doing Nintendo stuff,
but I think every system I think is interesting.
But the second genesis is one that I kind of grew up with, or at least my friend grew up with,
and I would go over and watch and play video games.
All right, but the Nintendo not so much.
Did you have an Nintendo that I had a second genesis?
No, the Sega, the one with, does that have a CD or is that a cartridge?
I have both.
By just a second genesis, you have a cartridge, and then it has a Sega CD if you want,
and that would be an an a CD extension.
There was one for the Super Nintendo as well, but it was, I don't think it was marketed very well,
but the system is a different back then, like the video game system.
There wasn't a frame buffer or anything like that.
Because the hardware was limited on memory for video memory,
I'll be the second genesis had enough video memory for a frame buffer,
but that was in the mindset at the time, the hardware before that was limited by memory,
where you can't store pixels.
So you have to store some representation of pixels.
Typically, these are sprites and whatnot, so you can have maybe 32 by 32 sprites on the screen,
and then store 8 by 8 sprites, maybe 100 of them somewhere else,
and you reduce the amount of memory that you need to draw something.
I'll be it.
The complexity of it is not so complex that you can have per pixel sort of.
It can't be perfect.
It's like, you can't have, it's so complex that you can have a random miss per pixel,
if that makes sense.
But the same thing with the same thing with an Nintendo,
the Nintendo of course use sprites, and it seems like we go through these paradigms right now.
It was sprites before, right now, we're kind of in the sort of rasterization of triangles,
paradigm, and GPU paradigm.
More of this will go from here, I don't know.
Maybe real-time ray tracing is a paradigm, or something like that for graphics.
And it can do all sorts of neat tricks.
It had a horizontal scrolls and vertical scrolls,
and a couple of back planes, and a sprite plane, and a window,
and whatnot, a programmable interrupt per horizontal line, which is very nice,
and stuff like that.
I've been thinking about writing an emulator for the Sega Genesis,
oh, and for the Nintendo, and that was quite a lot of fun,
and maybe I'll pick that up again, and do one for the Sega Genesis.
We'll see.
Yeah, that'd be pretty cool.
How do you dump a ROM from a cartridge?
Well, okay, so I don't have any hardware for the Sega Genesis to dump ROMs,
but because I don't have a neat ROM programmer anymore,
but I'll tell you how it was for the Nintendo.
I think actually maybe all the contents from me on ROMs,
like there was no.com, and then there's.com, because I dumped.com,
and maybe this is from me, I'm not entirely sure if that, anyway.
So like for the Nintendo, what I did was you'd open up the cartridge on Nintendo,
and there would be two chips, two ROM chips, they'd be eight bit chips,
which is perfect because I have this e-prom programmer,
and you'd stick it in the e-prom programmer,
and that had a series of connections through a computer,
and then you can dump out what's in the ROM,
or you could make a connector for the edge of the cartridge,
so you don't have to take apart the cartridge and do it that way.
These cartridges essentially are ROM.
In the Sega Genesis, it's more likely ROM than ROM and something else.
And then Nintendo, most of the cartridges are ROM,
and they also have what are called map chips,
which makes it a little bit more difficult to figure out how to dump.
What you should dump from the ROM chips,
but it's just a matter of reading the chips, right?
I mean, theoretically, you could.
I don't know, I don't know if you could actually do this,
but maybe you can boot off a flash ROM from off your motherboard,
and then go into your operating system,
and hopefully you won't be utilizing anything from your flash ROM,
and maybe you could just replace that with the ROM from your game system,
and read the ROM that way.
Like, if that might be the cheapest way to do it, I'll be it.
I don't know.
It had to be pin compatible with the flash ROM to ROMs,
but there are a lot of flash ROMs that are think compatible,
so maybe you can make an adapter or something like that.
Very interesting.
When you made the Nintendo emulator,
I mean, did you pretty much tear the hardware apart
and see how it worked first, or...
No, no, no.
I talked to this person, this Russian person,
who has made a whole lot of emulators.
I'm really impressed by the work he's done with.
He's written emulators for the Game Boy, the MSX,
the Nintendo, of course, the Game Gear,
and so on and so forth.
And so I talked to him, and he wrote a doc called Neska Doc,
which is a more or less basic description of the Nintendo.
Okay, so this is for anyone who's writing emulators,
and this is kind of a suggestion.
This is how I first think maybe you want to first,
but the...
What I did immediately was try to emulate the processor,
which was very fortunate because this person merits
the Russian emulators,
also wrote a couple of processor emulators,
one for the Z81 for the 6502.
And the 6502 is what's in the Nintendo,
so I took cues.
I manually wrote something to emulate the ROM RAM,
and saw if I could run Nintendo ROM dumps from it,
and it turned out I could.
So you could see that the actual author is running,
and then from there you further emulate more of the machine.
So like the first step, I think the important step
for emulating any system is emulating the processor.
And from there you can verify that the code is actually running.
Unless the code is running, you can figure out how to do the rest of it.
And the documentation for any emulation project
that you're going to do probably sucks.
And so if you can write your own ROMs and test it on a real system,
this is something that you should do,
because it won't be immediately clear,
like for instance, the Nintendo is 140...
I think that's a 114 cycles per scan line.
That was immediately clear to me,
so you might have to run something to test that and not not.
As pretty neat, do you play games on the emulators?
Or are you just pretty much just like to program them?
Not just like to program them.
I only...
I only...
Well, it's like...
Aside from this paper emulator that I'm writing right now,
it's been one emulator and that was for practice,
and I'm kind of like done where,
like I only do things one side.
I'm very...
Not very good at maintaining things,
so my emulator is very old,
but I don't want too many games in play this.
I find I don't really have patience for games,
kind of weird.
I don't know, like...
I don't know how you grew up,
but I grew up watching my friends play video games.
I think a lot more than actually playing them myself,
and I think that that has to dissipation me
to not actually want to play them watch them.
Yeah, I really didn't play.
Well, we got an Apple 2 Plus computer in the late 70s,
and that's where I did most of my gaming,
and then probably a few years after that,
I got the Atari 2600,
which I thought just sucked.
I mean, the graphics were awful.
I mean, even back then it was just like,
ugh, because I used to play stuff in the arcade,
and then you play space invaders in the arcade,
and then you go home and play it on the Atari 2600.
It's like, this is awesome.
Yeah, it was a horrible system.
It really was.
The 2600 is weird though,
because it had only one scan line worth of video memory.
It had pretty much no video memory,
so you had to bang out the pixels
as it came,
and that programming challenge
I think made for sucky games.
So, your Apple 2E,
did you have a motive to do
if I had up any of the Apple boards or anything like that?
No, it was an Apple 2 Plus.
I think it was like the very first ones,
but I'm pretty sure my dad paid like $4,000
for this thing back then.
And he ended up getting a modem like two years later,
and I really never messed with the bullets and board services.
He pretty much got on there,
and once or while I might have got on there
with his account just to download a game
or something like that, you know?
Yeah.
But yeah, we did have the,
we had to just drive the modem,
and we didn't have a monitor,
we just had a TV,
because you could hook those up to regular TV.
Yeah, as it was for a lot of computers back then.
I had a, let's see here.
Well, the first computer we had was a Commodore V20,
but that doesn't really count as that.
For whatever reason,
like I didn't think so,
but I didn't think so.
And as we got our Atari ST,
and it's Atari 1040 ST,
that's when I started seeing computers.
Fortunately, we had a modem with us.
We had a Atari 1040 ST,
and it was a pretty cool system.
It's a pretty cool system.
It seems that there is a pretty big,
a Atari ST,
or at least there was a pretty big,
a Atari ST demo ST,
and I didn't know that at the time.
And I know that probably was the most full layer
of the demo ST,
far earlier than I am now.
Did the Atari have a disk drive?
Oh, yeah.
I had a 3.5 floppy inch disk drive,
720 K,
as far as I remember,
had a 68K,
so 16-bit processor,
same processor that is in the Nintendo.
I'm sorry,
in the Sega Genesis,
same processor,
and the GI92,
and 89 processors,
same processor that is in a lot of,
a lot of systems,
design, and stuff.
It had a right-powerful processor,
had a cheap sound chip,
but that was okay,
because the processor was pretty good,
and you can produce them down that way.
It had GUI,
the first computer that I have seen with the GUI,
not to unlike Mac OS at the time,
I imagine.
I don't know,
it's a pretty full sphere.
Wasn't it backwards compatible
with like the older Atari's?
Or...
Not the 8-bit Atari computers.
There was no backward abilities,
or had abilities,
as far as I know of,
but...
Because there was a gaming console
after the 2600,
I think it was the Atari 5200?
Yeah, the Atari 5200.
Actually, I just sold one of those.
I used that too for it,
or it was a...
But that wasn't compatible
with the Atari 8-bit computers.
You know, I should think it was.
I think I used the POG chip,
and used a lot of the same hardware.
I forget what a Atari computer
it is most compatible with,
but there's a particular model
that is like pretty much just like that.
I didn't really...
didn't really have the Atari computers.
I don't...
not too familiar with those,
but the...
I hear the 5200 was very similar
to one of their computer life.
Then our second home computer
was a Commodore 64,
and it had the disk drive,
and it was...
I mean, the disk drive was slow.
It could actually take 10 minutes
to load up a program.
It was horrible.
We had a...
Yeah, we had a Commodore 64 too,
and there's this game that we used to play,
called the loader root,
and our disk drive
we had to hold it together
with the pliers.
Whenever we would switch screens,
like you can't be your hand
waiting for the screen to change,
so I'll load it with this.
It's fun being nostalgic, huh?
There's a lot of...
Amazing how quickly computers change,
and the nostalgia of old computers
is never lost on anyone
who's experienced them
because they have changed so much.
It's not like,
oh, we have this cell phone,
and now we have this cell phone,
and it's like,
now things are completely different.
But growing up though,
you'd like to see the system
and like,
how can anything get any better than this?
Yeah, yeah.
I remember seeing Doom,
and I'm like,
oh my god,
it's like I'm watching a movie,
holy shit,
and how to watch Doom,
and it looks horrible.
Yeah, it's awful.
It's amazing to realize that.
You have a Doom game,
or anything like that?
Yeah, I think I still have them somewhere.
Yeah, I'm having other,
like, you got the computers together
and played Doom with your friends.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, we used to play the modem too.
Wow, what about them too?
Yeah, we used to do them over the modem.
What's the...
did you ever play multiplayer games,
or was it just the deathmatch between two players?
We would just play like a two player,
like team.
Okay.
Any more than that,
it would just slow down too much,
you know,
over the phone line.
I mean, it was pretty reliable,
I think it was 14.4K modem.
Yeah, it's not much for Doom,
as far as the data that's sent for Doom.
Maybe it's kind of darky,
sort of spitting our inner facts,
but just kind of is an interesting sign note.
A lot of the communication that was sent back and forth in Doom,
if you just played with modems,
it was just the controller information.
Each computer was playing multiplayer games,
and it's just like you had separate keyboards, right?
So...
Seeing if you ever want to join in on another round table,
or join in on a round table,
you're more than welcome to to call in any time.
Yeah, I'll keep in mind.
I think I actually blocked and blocked
at doing our own table on this sci-fi movie.
Should we say goodbye and stop this
before we can't hear each other anymore?
Yeah, we probably should.
Is there anything else that you're interested in hearing about perhaps?
Well, I think we covered a lot,
and we've been talking for over 40 minutes,
and the connection's kind of getting kind of crappy right now,
so we should probably hand it before we could disconnect it.
Yeah, I don't know how much you are hearing this edited audience
in the future,
but it sounds pretty horrible.
So, thank you.
I appreciate it.
And get ready for life.
For life.
Thank you.
And I'll talk to you later.
All right, you take care.
Thanks.
Bye-bye.
All right, another TIT radio in the can.
This is Terry once again from The Juice Penguin.
Two weeks ago, I think it was two weeks ago,
that the instant requests for a country song went over so well,
I'm going to play another one.
This is a song by Bradley West called Slow Train.
Slow Train.
Coming down that freedom track.
Slow Train.
Coming on down that freedom track.
Don't need money in your sack.
Bence a suit on your back.
Ride the slow train.
Slow Train.
Slow Train.
All God's children ride for free.
Slow Train.
God's children get to ride for free.
Don't need no state electricity or a college BHD.
Ride the slow train.
Slow Train.
I'm on up while we still can.
Slow Train.
Let's hop on board while we still can.
Just call on the name of the sitter's only friend.
Ride the slow train.
I'm on right now.
I'm on right now.
I'm on right now.
I'm on right now.
Slow Train.
My heart's slow coming out the stack.
Slow Train.
My heart's slow coming out that stack.
And down the history track.
Ain't never coming back.
I'm on the slow train.
Slow Train.
Coming down that freedom track.
Slow Train.
Coming on down that freedom track.
Don't need no bread in your sack.
Ride the slow train.
Yeah, don't need no bread.
Theology or fame.
Ride the slow train.
Slow Train.
Slow Train.
Slow Train.
Ride that slow train.
Thank you for listening to Hack with Public Radio.
HPR is sponsored by Carol.net.
So head on over to C-A-R-O dot A-C for all of those things.
Thanks for watching.