2024 X-Mas Demo (Commodore PET)

It’s that time of the year, again…

Screenshot: silhouette of a moonlit forest and Santa's sledge flying accross the screen, rendered in blocky PETSII graphics.
1 REM ***** 2024 X-MAS DEMO ***** 2 REM HTTPS://WWW.MASSWERK.AT/PET 3 REM *************************** 4 SYS 1140

This year’s seasonal tribute: a PETSCII animation based on a popular cross-stitch pattern.
Users are kindly requested to imagine that trademark eerily fluttering 1950s UFO sound effect that I find hard to achieve on the PET’s “CB2” sound*.

>Emulation: run it online…

*) In case you were to ask, “What is CB2-sound?”
Well, the PET doesn’t feature sound, at all. But you can hook up a speaker to the output of a serial shift-register, creatively named “CB2”, which may be manipulated to output audible frequencies, sampling sound by a single bit at 1 MHz. This is CB2-sound.

Emulated hardcopy of the wiring diagram for CB2-sound on the Commodore PET
The famous wiring diagram for CB2-sound on the Commodore PET from the “Space Invaders” game. Later PETs included a built-in speaker, connected in the same fashion internally.

*****

The already tradional PET recreation of an animated screen of the 1982 Christmas Demo for the C64 has also received an update: it now fits into 4K of RAM and allows for easy updates, as the year is now stored in a dedicated variable at the very top of the BASIC program text.

Screenshot: an Advent arrangement with a candle in the middle featuring an animated flame in pure PETSCII graphics
100 REM PET 2001 - SEASON'S GREETINGS 110 REM NORBERT LANDSTEINER, 2017-2024 120 REM <WWW.MASSWERK.AT> 130 Y=2024:REM YEAR
(You may set Y to zero to omit the output of the year entirely.)

>Emulation: run it online…