What's the Speccy dreaming about?

equinox · April 2014

When I was a kid, and before I had much technical knowledge, I sometimes used to run random OUT x,y commands on my old grey +2 to try to produce interesting graphical crashes. Sometimes they could only be seen when you pressed the reset button (because of the "second screen" mode).

I've just run a few of them again and found a few hauntingly familiar patterns, which you can see here: http://aloneonline.net/speccy_dreams.png

Does anyone know what causes the crash patterns to look like this? Why the prevalence of blue and magenta, and why do the squares have that particular diagonal spacing?

Pegaz · April 2014

I remember these random crash effects with POKE, USR and other combination that I used from the ex-Yugoslavian magazine "Moj Mikro" 01/1985.
No need to translate, just try them, some of the examples are really effective. :)

http://retrospec.sgn.net/users/tomcat/yu/magshow.php?auto=&page=58&all=MMH_85_01

leespoons · April 2014

I think it's just bits of random junk from the ROM displaying on the screen. The diagonal spacing is because it's repeating the same 10 bytes for the attributes but the screen width is 32, so you get a pretty diagonal wrap-around effect.

My favourite one was RANDOMIZE USR 2301 (try it!) You could get a similar effect by trying to load Ghosts 'n' Goblins with the volume turned down too low :)

Muig · April 2014

I once typed in a very short program that was published in the letters page of one of the weekly computer magazines. I presume it was dumping parts of the memory to the screen in a loop.

The effect was hypnotic! Scrolling and swirling patterns. Since this lasted several minutes, the author even gave it a story: "You are driving through the forest", etc!

Wish I could find it.

What's the Speccy dreaming about?

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