akbasic/examples/megademo/README.md

# AKLABS MEGADEMO '85

A demoscene production for akbasic, written as if it were 1985 and this dialect were
the machine under the tree. Code and FX by Tachikoma, dedicated to GameCube,
megagreetz to starfort.

```sh
./build-akgl/basic examples/megademo/megademo.bas
```

Q or ESC quits. Six scenes: a title card, a Lissajous braid, a spinning wireframe
cube and octahedron — which drift together, ignite a pulsing origin point strobing
the next scene's colours, swallow the camera as the perspective scale outgrows the
window, and split that origin into the first two raster bars — then the raster
bars proper, the sprite bank going supernova — the letters fall into the middle, a
fireball throws them at the walls, and a black hole drags everything back into the
centre as the transition out — and a finale that composes all of it. A sawtooth
chiptune in A minor throughout, with a noise drum break, if a SID answers.

## What it leans on

This is a tour of the interpreter's edges, on purpose:

- **No `RND`** — it carries Chapter 17's LCG, seeded from `TI#`.
- **No palette writes** — the "colour cycle" on the logo is an honest redraw of the
  same strokes in the next colour, and the raster bars are erased and redrawn two
  scanlines at a time. The palette is sixteen fixed colours and the demo says so on
  screen.
- **Eight sprites** — so the lettering *is* the sprite bank. Each letter of GAMECUBE
  is drawn with the stroke font from `examples/breakout`, captured with `SSHAPE`,
  installed with `SPRSAV`, and tinted with `SPRITE`.
- **`SOLID` walls and `COLLISION 2`** — the supernova registers four rectangles and
  reverses a bearing per `RCOLLISION(n, 7)`. The interpreter does the physics;
  BASIC does one subtraction. The letters leave the blast on `MOVSPR`'s continuous
  form, eight bearings fanned evenly around the compass.
- **The black hole is `RSPPOS` plus one rotation** — read each letter's position
  back, rotate the offset from centre, shrink it by 0.86, put it there. Thirty-four
  frames later everything is in the middle. The screen goes with it: an iris of
  collapsing black `CIRCLE`s, which works because the drawing verbs clip silently
  at the window edge — a fireball and an iris can both start bigger than the
  screen.
- **The camera is a multiplier** — the wireframe zoom-through is nothing but the
  perspective scale growing fourteen percent a frame until the solids' edges leave
  the window, which the silent clipping permits. The pulsing origin point strobes
  through the bar ramp table because it *is* the next scene: it splits, rides the
  Y axis to the band edges, and stretches into the first two raster bars in place.
- **3D with no matrices** — the wireframe scene rotates fourteen pooled vertices
  through two composed axis rotations and a perspective divide, all of it `SIN`,
  `COS` and one division, with the float kept on the left of every product because
  the left operand decides the arithmetic. Erase is the raster bars' trick: redraw
  the previous frame's twenty-four edges in black.
- **`PLAY` is one queue** — every note holds it for its length and the whole batch
  plays on one instrument, so three `V` tracks come out end to end, not layered. The
  soundtrack is therefore beeper music, the way single-channel tracker tunes were
  written: sixteenths that take turns being the kick (an `O1` root), the pumping bass
  (`O2`/`O3` octaves) and the rolling arpeggio (`O4` and up), two alternating
  eight-beat batches — Am F C G, then Am F Dm E with the G sharp — and every third
  batch a bar of noise drums. Noise is real: `ENVELOPE`'s sixth argument is a
  waveform, 0 to 3, which Chapter 7 forgot to mention. Voice 1 carries the tune so
  the collision blips (voice 2) and scene sweeps (voice 3) never steal its channel.

It also probes for its hardware like a proper boot loader, with one `TRAP` per
device: no graphics refuses by name and exits, no audio mutes the soundtrack, no
text grid drops the status row, and a host that never sets the clock — which is
exactly what `tools/screenshot.c` is — renders each scene as a still and leaves the
finale as the picture. The same file runs everywhere; nothing hangs.

## The ones that bit

**A scalar first assigned inside a `GOSUB` dies with that call's scope.** The first
cut computed text centring in a subroutine and read the result after `RETURN`; every
line of text rendered flush left, because the variable read back as a fresh zero.
Reads climb the scope chain, so a nested subroutine can *use* your globals — but a
write to a name that exists nowhere creates it in the current scope, and the scope
is not coming back. That is why Chapter 18's listings predeclare.

**Then the predeclaring bit back.** The obvious lesson — predeclare everything — ran
the 128-slot variable pool dry the moment the wireframes arrived: `Maximum runtime
variables reached`. A predeclared scratch variable occupies a slot forever; a scoped
one gives its slot back at `RETURN`. So the rule is narrower than it first looks:
predeclare a subroutine's *outputs* and nothing else. This program predeclares four.

**And the raster wait strangled the SID.** The `VSYNC` label used to spin on `TI#`
until the jiffy turned — romantic, and fatal. The host releases at most one queued
`PLAY` note per frame, and a frame of 256 *executed* spin statements is slow enough
to drop the release rate below the tune's fifteen notes a second. The queue never
reclaims slots until it drains completely, so the backlog compounded quietly for two
scenes and then `PLAY queue is full` killed the show. `VSYNC` now sleeps a frame —
`SLEEP` holds at no per-step cost — and `TUNE` traps the overflow on hosts slower
than this one, dropping a bar instead of the whole demo. `TODO.md` §4 carries the
measurement.

## What it wanted and could not have

Recorded properly in `TODO.md` §4, "What a demoscene program wanted and could not
have": `RND` as a real function, palette writes, `GSHAPE` XOR stamping, a way to ask
whether `PLAY` has drained, per-voice `PLAY` queues so three voices can actually
sound together, and a frame-edge wait that is not a busy loop. None of them blocked
the demo; all of them left a routine behind that every future game will carry too.