About Showroom

Future Proof

How it started

Back on 14th January, 2025, Goerp asked me if I'd do a pic for celebrating adding game n° 1,000 to BigBoxCollection.com and of course my PETSCII brain was triggered imediately.

Pic turned into an animation that then evolved into a — not yet released ;-) — full blown one-file demo. Tons of GFX were created over the next four months and this one here is one of the view that I just couldn't cram in.

With the Plain PETSCII Graphics Competition 2025, a chance to still have it see the light of day emerged and just few tweaks later, it was released.

But first things first. This one here is clearly a disk and not a tape. And what's up with the green box, huh?

The main idea was to green-screen various game labels onto the disk, so the green rectangle would be replaced with logos like games like Lemmings or Turrican.

It's a disk, because it's just easier to draw. Why it's here and not releases?

Well, it's a bit too dull for being a stand-alone release, so while it might have worked in a demo context — I also had red, green, yellow variants — it's just too simple and too blocky. It's still part of my "let's do various media"-bit though and therefor part of the tape's creation so to speak.

During a lunch break doodle, I've painted the following tape. Again, a placeholder for filling in various labels is in place for the demo.

Lacking any stages means, it was done within a single session and looking back, there isn't really much to a cassette anyway. With the label being a predefined size, the rest just followed its form and IIRC correctly, I only looked up a reference pic once for the placement of the various holes.

Later that day, the wheels got redefined and some more details — and grit, apparently, things have to look well-used in my PETSCII world — were added.

In a last tweak, some color changes were made and the files got saved in the demo folder.

According to file dates and discord messages, this all happend in mid February, 2025.

It's May now, and I'm head-over-heels in my one-file demo project arguing with myself which way to move forward: going multi-load (and thus adding a lot of overhead and maybe re-writes to the demo) or cutting content & corners for staying withing the size limit of an one-file demo. That's when the Plain PETSCII Graphics Competition 2025 got announced and with that, a opportunity for releasing cut content opened up and making my decision became way easier.

Up to this point, I've made dozens of game labels, but those are all reseved for the demo, so what else could be done for filling out the green box?

How about an ordinaly sticker label? Done. But what shall be written on it? Game titles? Nah,... oh, I know,... it's a backup!

The label itself is rather simple, but I'm happy I had enough space to add padding between the words and lines. Not sure if anyone really registers this details.

Conclusio

I really liked the tape's look when first pixeling it and it was quite a bummer having to cut it from the demo — in hinsight, it wouldn't have fit 100% anyway, but it might have been shown while loading additional data — but thanks to the compo, a way of sharing it nonetheless opened up.

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