About Showroom

Hyperdrive Monkey

How it started

Opend a old .pe file and even though it was a PETSCII, the mode was set to multicolor. Of course, the picutre didn't look like anything but the charset had some neat variations in it that caught my eye. With that, I started fooling around trying to get a dithered transition using grey tones for the additional multicolor values.

Here's what I ended up with after a couple of minutes:

Intrigued by the opened up possibilities, the question if MC PETSCII would still be considered PETSCII came up and guess what, there's mupltiple views, but read-up yourself in this thread from 2022 over at CSDb.dk. "It's up to the compo team" is good enough for me, so trying a MC PETSCII is greenlit.

Also, there's a MC PETSCII release dubbed Winter Abstraction linked, which isn't really matching what's in my mind, but at least there are MC PETSCII pics already out there.

(While writing these words, I've stumbled upon another noteworthy release, but let's keep it chronologically.)

There's a couple of steps missing here, but I just got into the flow right away while trying out color combinations, so, sorry for starting up with a quite advanced pic here.

Similar to the first doodle, I stuck to using greys in the MC spots allowing to brighten/darken the six available colors.

The pic itself came out of nowhere really, but I knew I wanted a pure PETSCII border of sorts and a dithered looking main element for creating a contrast. I think I thought the MC chars would give up a more hi-res vibe and to enhance this, the pure PETSCII chars had to be to incorporate the blocky 4px chunks.

Another spark was reserving the colors for the pure PETSCII chars, except for little highlights. It's also sprinked in for the stars and the offset looking static, which I really liked.

Not sure if it's the sci-fi vibe or something else, but my Space Monkey made a return while tweaking the face. He is definitely scared, being sent through space and time at lightspeed, not knowing where to end up and why. His clenched teeth says it all, right?

The pyramid helmet didn't really work from the get-go, but I've kept it as a place holder. The next few pics are showing its transformation into a rainbowy diamond.

Ah, better. Much, much better.

Another important change here is updating the two MC colors from grey to brown [insert a C64 color joke here yourself]. Idea behind this was, a) it's a monkey and b) brown isn't part of the limited MC palette available, so it's kind of a very, very, very simple show off.

At this point in time, I've shared my pic with the folks at F4CG HQ and my plan to get in touch with the org team of Pågadata 2024 who have just announced a PETSCII compo. Just need to get an OK for remote entries allowed and my MC PETSCII being seen as valid for the compo. Got an "OK" for both from z-nexx :-)

Also, this one here marks my first release under the F4CG banner. Sure, it's a solo work but having folks around with whom I can share WIP stuff is fantastic. Hope it won't end up near the bottom like my last monkey did ;-)

Final tweaks

The stars in the background are neat, but the GFX definitely needs some clean-up. Also, it's all mirrored, which at first looked great but grew old quickly. Time for fooling around with the dash used in the middle:

Jep, that's more like it. More, subtly colors too. The backdrop's still mirrored but two-times now allowing for a wave of color.

Next, cleaning up the diamond. Let's highlight the sad monkey by giving him more space... while being all alone in hyperspace... no wonder he's tearing up again.

And last but not least, one more little tweaks by inverting some lines that I've ignored so far.

And done!

Exported to .prg, a .gif with the workstages composed and off it goes by e-mail to Pågadata 2024. What's left is having to wait for almost a whole week until it's minute on the big screen.

Conclusion

Definitely a fun mode to work with and while the limited color palette was intimidating at first, I still managed to splash all the colors available around. All in all, there's a lot of unexplored possibilities here.

While I'm not sure if it will stirr up another "is it PETSCII?" discussion, I do hope that other PETSCII heads might get motivated giving it a try.

Post party notes

What a crazy PETSCII compo. So many unique styles & themes and it just got better and better with each pic shown (here's all of them side by side via c64gfx.com).

Still happy that my MC PETSCII pix was allowed and thanks for the cheering during the party :-)

Here's a snippet from the party:

Addendum

Oh, almost forgot. I mentioned that I've stumbled upon another MC PETSCII while writing this post. Well, turns out that F4CG's Smasher made a MC PETCII logo back in 2017! Not sure if it's a verified "first" (MC PETSCII isn't mentioned in the list of firsts over at Recollection), but the entry's comments suggest so. Congrats!

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