Very happy to announce the winners of our demoscene competition! 🏆
We had some amazing entries - check out what can be done in just a few square microns of silicon!
https://tinytapeout.com/competitions/demoscene-tt08-winners/
Thanks again to our judges and participants!
@BrunoLevy01 Thanks Bruno! I wasn't so sure -- there were many great entries!
@ste It's a great hobby, but yes, a tad time consuming ;) Kids loved seeing all the demos and following the adventure though!
5/5 A couple additional notes.
'WhyNot?' was done the last day before deadline during coffee breaks and at night (but starting from Warp). It has a couple egregious bugs I'll talk about in an upcoming write-up :).
Both designs are written in my own HDL, Silice, so its also a huge milestone there!
4/5 So congratulations to everyone and thanks to #TinyTapeout for making all of this possible!! I would never have imagined doing a (winning) demoscene entry in 2026 on actual ASIC. This is beyond wild. Last I was involved in the demoscene was (iirc) 1999, and I dearly miss these days, TT makes all the fun come back!
3/5 All demos feature innovative approaches for graphics and music, with original design decisions. Also there is no 'small demo' here. Many entries are first time #Verilog design and certainly first time in #ASIC! Even the simplest display or music is already a great achievement.
All demos thx to @bitluni
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9BhSaqL7jg
2/5 It's amazing to win 1st place in these categories, but I want to outline how impressive and creative all the demos are. I worked on Warp in my little corner (during summer vacation, thinking on the beach, implementing under the stars :) ) and when I discovered what the community had been up to I was blown away (and realized the competition level was going to be high!).
All winning entries: https://tinytapeout.com/competitions/demoscene-tt08-winners/
1/5 My two demos, Warp and WhyNot? won 1st place in 'Graphics' (Warp) and 1st place in 'Best for size' and 'Single tile' (WhyNot?) at the #TinyTapeout tt08 demo competition. Huge thanks to the jury for the recognition. This means a lot to me, I started hardware design from scratch in 2018, and this turned into a big adventure.
Update to the write-up with more details on the tunnel texturing itself and its multiple layers, with animated gifs and a ShaderToy!
My PhD student Abhishek Madan is getting ready to graduate and he’s looking for a postdoc or industry position. Checkout his website www.dgp.toronto.edu/~amadan/
He’s been an amazing student , basically does all his research by himself. Fantastic math and implementation acumen.
Abhishek Madan
How can you fit a retro tunnel effect with a sound track in 161x225 μm of silicon? Checkout my detailed write up on making a demo entry to the #TinyTapeout tt08 competition: https://github.com/sylefeb/tt08-compo-entry/blob/main/docs/info.md
3/3) You too can make it, it is not easy, but not as hard as you might think,
checkout #TinyTapeout here:
2/3) Amazingly my two entries work: 'Warp' and 'WhyNot' ; Warp is my entry to the demoscene competition and 'WhyNot' was a crazy "let's do it in one day" last
minute entry. Both work on actual ASIC!! How cool is that??
Preview of Warp: https://youtu.be/ELOYGwZgHnw
1/3) Wow, TT08 #TinyTapeout including all demoscene entries landed and I had no clue, imagine my surprise discovering all the fantastic demos (see below, thx bitluni!) on actual hardware. Kudos to all contributors and the team!!
Optimizing the dmc-1 GPU (https://github.com/sylefeb/tinygpus): it turns out that I'm often showing big pixels on screen (hey, this is a 199x GPU on a 640x480 HDMI !!). So to cut some cycles I'm playing with the simple idea that if the next fetched texel is the same as before (same uv) let's reuse it! This cuts from 13 cycles down to 6 cycles, not too bad! (reminder: texels are fetched from QPSRAM with a 13 cycles random access @50 MHz). Maybe a full cache will come next? Well, no BRAM left on the up5k!
@Mendy ... The note in the page made me realize the const variant existed, and saved the day :) I don't know if that is according to spec or if this was a (temporary?) issue, but it seems odd to me this would not trigger and error and silently return a zeroed out mapping.
@Mendy Hi - I was referring to the part captured below. I thought there was only the non const version (wgpuBufferGetMappedRange) but in fact I had to use wgpuBufferGetConstMappedRange for the mapping to succeed (that is, not return a buffer filled with zeros). This was only in Emscripten, in Javascript the non const version worked (iirc)...
On Monday Surfer turns 3 and yesterday we released v0.5.0 featuring the long awaited analog rendering 🎉
There are of course a bunch of other improvements that you can read more about in the change log
Massive thanks to Roman Popov for the analog drawing feature!
@ghalfacree Fantastic, getting vibes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortville_Manor (had speech synthesis on CPC 6128!)
This project's aces: Todd Stidham designed an open-hardware sound-effect board capable of speech synthesis, then used it to make a voltmeter that sounds like it's panicking the higher the voltage gets...
