I have a YouTube channel called “stupidrubbish” where I put bits and pieces of video I’ve created as and when I get the chance.
The channel’s name “stupidrubbish” comes from the rather unaffectionate term my wife uses to refer to television presentation. Her usual question would be “Are you working or are you doing stupid rubbish?”. The answer would often be “Both.” In Hungarian, the term translates to “hülye szemét” and sounds even ruder than it does in English.
Amazingly, although it contains all sorts of bits and pieces I’ve poured my heart and soul into getting as accurate as possible, the most popular video on the channel is something I very nearly didn’t upload at all, and did nearly 25 years ago. It was my first attempt to recreate some presentation on a computer and it was not done in Flash, or even on a PC. It was done on a BBC Master 128 computer in 1986, written in BBC BASIC and was the ATV colour zoom logo.
I hadn’t seen an ATV logo in years in 1986, and wondered whether I would ever see one again. You can see from the animation that I couldn’t really remember what the logo looked like, or even what happened in the animation, but I suppose it all adds to the charm. I planned the lightspots and the logo out on graph paper using a pencil and pair of compasses.
To draw the logo I used the Acorn Graphics Extension ROM (GXR) arcs (the GXR extensions were included in the Master by default), a GXR custom fill pattern and screen memory bank switching in order to animate the thing. I also used GCOL1 for mixing the colours using a bitwise AND in the lightspots and palette switching to allow me to animate on bits of the logo without having to wait to draw them.
A number of commenters expressed interest in the code, so here it is:
If you want to run the code, why not pop along to BBCMicro.com, where you can get hold of a BBC Emulator to try this out for yourself.
If you run the code in an emulator (or on a real BBC Master 128) you’ll notice I took a few liberties with the timings when I was editing the video together to upload to YouTube!
Hopefully I’ve got a bit better at recreating the ATV logo since then. A more recent attempt, in Macromedia Flash 8, is here:
Would I be correct in guessing the stars of Stop Look Listen to be junior Jefferys?
Yes, they are indeed. I've found they're rather effective as Playschool presenters as they make a mean envelope from a piece of A4 but my youngest really wants be another Nancy Kominsky.
Almost works on BBC BASIC for Windows as well (but there's only one screen bank), if you fix all the double-bars and remove the HIMEM=&3000 statements. (HIMEM *is* at &3000 after MODE 2 anyway, why set it manually?)
I'm quite pleased that http://mdfs.net/Software/Video/VTClock only required two hardware-specific cludges removed to get it running on anything that can run BBC BASIC 😉