Forever 2002 Report written by Aki (as Factor6)
On the 15., 16., and 17.03.2002 has been held another well known 8-bit computer related demoparty caled FOREVER 2002. It was the third fans' meeting of all 8-bit computers. I was asked by some people to write a party report and to be critic. So people, I'll try to do my best now! :-)
On Friday, 15th, 5:00am I woke up, took a bag full of hardware and wanted to leave my home to catch a train. My friend Shimi phoned me that he has a car lift by his daddy and offered they can take me to the train station, which is quite far from my home. I accepted it because it gave me more time to decide which hardware I can leave at home. I wanted to take my Speccy 128 with MB02+ disk system and the Amstrad CPC 6128 as well, which I wanted to show at the party, because there is also a small scene and demos on it by the way. I took both computers at last, but by bag was heavy like never before. I have now a good experience and I won't be taking so much stuff to further parties.
Shimi and his dad came at about 5:55am and gave me a lift to the station as we had agreed. Shimi helped me with power supplies (I had to take 3 PSUs! Speccy's, MB02's and CPC's - heavy like shit). The train arrived at 6:24am, we had a lot of time. The journey was OK and at about 1:00pm we successfully came to Uhersy Brod, the city on the very east part of the Czech Republic.
We met TDM/H-Prg+K3L here and together got into a bus to the town of Trencin, which is only about 50km far from here. The bus was full, we had to stand but everything was OK at the CZ/SK border. The customs were so lazy to get into the bus so we had to get out and give them our passports. They didn't check the bus cargo area, so everything was fast. At about 3:00pm we arrived to Trencin and we regretted that we didn't took a local bus, because the partyplace wasn't near to the main bus station.
After an hour we successfully found the party place, which was near the first Forever place.
Wow, what a cool place! Yes, the room was really perfect and it was the best place since the first Forever. A big room with a platform with tables occupied by organizers and a big 'pier jetty' which was perhaps normally used for fashion shows :) and of course bigscreen above the platform. The people used the jetty as a big and comfortable table for their hardware :) When we came, I recognized our (Speccy) organizing section in the right corner of the platform. We said hello and I asked Pol/Phantasy if there are some other Speccy people, but none of them arrived yet. So we started to unpack our hardware and observe the whole hall. There were lots of C64 people and also some Atari fans, namely XI/Satantronic, whom I recognized. Then Hellboj/H-Prg+Phantasy came and he said that Poles will come by car and that Yerzmyey/H-Prg is sick and won't come. What a pity! But never mind! We will think about you, Yerz! :-) Then some more people arrived to the party, like my C64 friends PCH/Unreal, Sad/Padua with his nice girlfriend and Ceti/Anubis. Too bad that there weren't other Anubis members. Red Redby, the leader of Anubis, stayed sick at home :(
We observed the party hall, talked with friends and also tried to make a funny note in a text editor on an Atari 800XL which was used especially for this task, with a sign 'Realtime Text' on the top of the monitor :) We typed really cool and crazy text. I think they were printing the texts and got the papers stucked onto doors and walls for all party people to read. After a while Gasman/RA^H-Prg finally came (from Britain - WOW!) and brought his cool new laptop for emulating Speccy of course. Also LCD/Phantasy from Austria brought his new Sprinter - a really cool russian Speccy clone with colorful graphics modes, 4megs of RAM, a harddrive and stuff. After setting up everyhing he started to show what Sprinter can do and we were really impressed: 'Is this a Speccy?' we were asking watching really fast and smooth fullscreen doom-like engine with about 256colors per pixel. Ehh, I must get one, too! And it can run in Pentagon mode so this is a Speccy of my dreams! Sadly, LCD's Sprinter didn't have a suitable connector for connection with the party projector, they tried to take off the picture right from a monitor through a video camera, but the result wasn't satisfying. I have to mention that when we came there were several power interrupts, but it had been repaired immediately.
At last, the Poles came. Karolina and Lukasz, Yerzmyey's sister and brother. No Yerzmyey, but still cool! That time we were in a near local pub together with Gasman, Baze/|||, TDM, Shimi and Ellvis/ZT, Poles came after a while with Hellboj (who is Czech) so the fun went on! We were boozing like shit, exploring Gasman's English coins, talking about everything and after lotsa beers (and one Polish - thanks Lukasz!) we went back to the party place. People went to sleep and I stayed talking with Gasman till about 3:30am! Then I unrolled my sleeping bag and got lied under the desk, which wasn't quite comfortable. And fuck off C64 (or Atari) people in the morning - they played some shitty disco CD very loud for the whole night!
After that I recognized it's about 9am so I woke up and tried to eat something. I had a big headache from that Slovak beer (or was is a Czech one? I don't remember :-) Shimi told me that I could sleep in a more comfortable sleeping room, but I didn't know about it before. Around 11am came Omega, his big brotha Jaxon Hollis, P0ke, diZZy and Dron/K3L! They observed the party like we did a day before and were really impressed by a C64 and Atari demoshows, because people from other scenes usually don't know each other computers and their capabilities. Then Binna with her boyfriend came as well as Hood/Crazytronic. I made a ZX picture entry for a realtime compo. TDM was also coding some effect on his Speccy 48k with ZX Microdrive. But we were hungry so we got off and went to the city for a lunch. Gasman wanted to try 'halusky', a Slovak speciality, but I warned him of eating it a day before, and I think he didn't like it as well as I did a year before (if this is a mistake, let me correct, Gasman, but you seemed to be disgusted ;-). Then we returned to the partyplace.
I showed some CPC stuff to Omega and PokeStudio and they liked it! Especially interesting is the second part of Backtro by Overflow, where is a SID-sound music for AY soundchip, converted probably from the Atari ST. Well it's not a real C64's SID, only an effect which is called SID because it sounds like that. We want to make such player on a Speccy and it couldn't be hard to transfer the code, because CPC has the same CPU like Speccy. I made acquainted Hood with PCH/Unreal, because he has a long time experience with SID programming. I think Hood likes it, although C64 music editors are pretty complicated and you have to know something about the hardware when trying to compose music. I must say that the situation on the Speccy is the best, because composing for AY/YM soundchip is easy and there exist lots of comfortable editors which came from Amiga's Sound/Protracker style. I also heard that Atari's POKEY has limitations, low range of frequency spectrum or something like that, so it is probably harder to make a music on that than on Speccy. Speccy's sound simply rules, although it has not too many possibilities like the SID, for example. But back to the track. When did I finish?
Okay, let's move and take a look at the compos. They were separated to three independent ones as usual - an Atari, a C64 and a Spectrum one, each of them had four categories like Music, Graphics, 1k Intro and Demo.
The organizers started with a C64 music compo and here the first problem appeared: There were too many entries (as I remember, about 33 C64 musics) so people were really bored and voted randomly. This was because organizers allowed two entries per author for each compo, so people did lots of stuff and it took over an hour to finish C64 music compo. Next was the Speccy with 22 musics (still too many) and the last Atari with 3 or 4 entries. I really love a C64 tune called 'I'm Back!' by Shape/Onslaught. Cool work!!! The best ones in the Spectrum music were TDM/H-Prg, X-agon/Phantasy or Gasman, especially X-agon did a cool job with his tune 'I am fine'. Atari music compo was small, but cool and the best tune was Raster's stereo music called 'Two years ago'.
Then the gfx compo followed and there were brilliant pieces on each platform as well. I only mention a ZX picture by Diver/4th Dimension which won the ZX gfx compo. In the intro compo nothing special, nice intros on the C64, very good Atari intro by Raster and some intros on the Speccy, the best one probably by SerzhSoft, like usually ;-)
This year, a new event was introduced - the Wild compo, where you can present everything you want recorded on a videotape. There were two entries, one from a C64 guy called Bigfoot, presenting a nice animation of Tom&Jerry cartoon movie played on a real C64 and the second one was by Gasman. It was a mouth remake of well known song from the game One Man And His Droid and it really roxx!
Finally, a main event of all parties was here. The Demo Compo. On the C64 there were 2 demos as I remember. I liked the one by Lord Hypnos/Padua, which was really nice. On the Speccy, there were 7 entries! Some crap oldschool demos, a 'Dupa Biskupa and Mrtka z Krtka' coded in Basic, but with cool music by TDM, a demo by me called 'Reject', '_laya' by Baze/|||, a demo by German group The Unbelievables and some more. But the really biggest success had the one and only Atari entry. The demo called 'Self Demo' by Raster simply kixx the asses!!! Perfect demo with superb idea, runable on standard 64k Atari 800. Raster is getting better and better year by year, I'm looking forward what will he prepare for us next year :-)
Well, that was about compos. I have to mention that all party was moderated by Wotnau/DMAgic (in Speccy corner he's called Jumping Jack) and nice native C64 titles on the bigscreen performed by CreamD/DMAgic. An Atari compo engine was programmed by Raster (who else ;-). I must critise ZX organizers for making a poor music and gfx presenting engines, but they still didn't release the Speccy stuff so maybe Pol/Pht is working on it. You know, last year there were cool gfx and msx players but this year nothing, it seemed to be prepared in a hurry. After all, I think the all organizing sections did good job, the projector was really superb and bigscreen was really big, picture was sharp and sound was really the best like never before on Forever party.
Next day, sunday morning, alarm on my cellphone is beeping and I hate it! We must leave for the bus back home. We are saying goodbye to all known sceners and people, I must pack my hardware back and it is not easy. I am caught by an Atari freak Zdenek Burian, because he's interested in the Speccy emulation. Cool! I go to his corned and explain which emulator is the best, how to load a program and so on, but after a while my friend Shimi knocks on my shoulder saying we have to go, so I give my e-mail to Zdenek and we go. We wanted to go by a local bus, but no bus is going this morning time, so we go the long way to the main bus station in the city on foot. The bus arrives on time, it's half empty.. OK. No problems at the border. We say goodbye to TDM in Uhersky Brodand wait for our train. In the next train we're meeting Dron/K3L, who left the party a day before.
We're talking about Speccy and life, etc. After about 9 hour trip we successfully came home, tired and hungry. I'm connecting to Internet to download some party stuff, but it's too soon, of course. Cool party. The main for major 8-bit platforms, all western and eastern sceners can meet here. I'm really looking forward to the next year!
You can download the most of the stuff (Atari & C64) from www.forever.studiostyle.sk, www.c64.sk, atari.satantronic.org, and look at the full results on www.4everparty.host.sk Speccy stuff coming soon I hope... Something available for download is on Gasman's site www.zxdemo.org. You can check these sites for some cool photos as well (and more of them will come)!
At last thanks to Pol/Pht, Mike/ZT and cvm/ZT for his big TV set :), Ellvis/ZT, Wontau/DMAgic, CreamD/DMAgic, XI/Satantronic and others. Greetings to all readers of this, especially SE staff and all in the Raww Arse, FBI/UVS (Why didn't you come?), Zito/Reason+Scarab+100%, all Jurassic Pack and Subliminal Extacy readers and other cool people!
30.03.2002
Factor6/Phantasy+K3L [on ZX]
/Anubis+Phantasy [on C64]
/Reason[on Amiga]
(R.I.P. Factor6 -> Aki since 2018)
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