Hackaday Supercon 2019 Demoscene Badge Hack

I developed a demoscene demo for the 2019 Hackaday Supercon official badge.

A huge thanks to Jeroen Domburg (@Sprite_TM) for designing this badge, and props to everyone involved in bringing it to the masses. It was an absolutely captivating (and somewhat frustrating) experience digging into the RiscV softcore and its graphical capabilities. As soon as Jeroen mentioned 'copper', something stirred inside of me that hadn't been awoken since the hazy days and long nights of a misspent 16-bit youth.

Harkening back to my demoscene days (we were a small group with only 2 members, and not many more demos), I decided to try and make full use of the copper and 'hardware' sprites to shift some graphics around and make something eye-catchingly colorful. The result is almost like wearing an Amiga or and ST around your neck.

There were many late nights and pitfalls along the way. Some of which were 'quirks' with the badge, and many more that were my own stupid fault. The dev pipeline was good, but copying over USB to test every new change didn't really help me get to bed before midnight much and slowed me down significantly during the conference itself. With a bit more time and a giddy dose of youthful nostalgia I was more motivated than I have been in years, and I'm finally okay with the result.

There are still some oddities that I can't explain (glitches on the background image for example), and some that I can, but couldn't devise an adequate fix (copper sync with tile updates) so there's a bit of glitching here or there. I hope you can forgive me though, this IS only a conference badge after all.