The Long Road to FOReVER

The Long Road to FOReVER by LaesQ/PDZ

So March is the month that should be in every Speccy scener's calendar as one of the best. Why March? FOReVER, that's why!

For the third year running, I headed off to this party. The journey started with an overnight stop near Heathrow, because a 9am flight from Bristol translates to a 4:30am alarm, and I'm generally opposed to participating in mornings quite that enthusiastically.

The next morning I emerged at the comparatively luxurious hour of 6am and made my way to Heathrow. Everything at the airport went suspiciously smoothly, to the point where I was sitting down to breakfast by 8am. The gate was called at 8:25am, and from that point events unfolded with remarkable efficiency. Before I knew it, I was hurtling down the runway and on my way to Austria.

After the 2h15m flight was over we'd landed at Vienna airport. I didn't have any baggage in the hold, so everything was pretty speedy getting to arrivals. Lordcoxis and Mr. Spiv were waiting for me in a bar (surprise, surprise) in the terminal. We collected the hire car, during which Lordcoxis attempted to charm the lady at the rental desk. He got a handshake, but sadly no phone number. The final challenge was deciding who got to ride shotgun. Mr. Spiv suggested rock, paper, scissors, promptly lost, and spent the next few minutes regretting his own idea.

Fortunately, the back seats turned out to be perfectly comfortable for him.

Once we were in the car we had to find our way to Trnava where we'd booked into the Holiday Inn there. The journey wasn't too bad as Lordcoxis had kindly decided to do all the driving. It was pissing down so we had to drive sensibly rather than adopting the traditional BMW driver approach of treating speed limits as helpful suggestions. We passed through the border to Slovakia with no issues which is quite a surprise as I'm sure Lordcoxis must have previous offences in the country, just ask him about his run-in with the Slovak police lady from 2024.

About 75 minutes later we arrived at the Holiday Inn. The hotel was absolutely baking, with our room sitting at a tropical 25C even with the air conditioning running flat out. Having no desire to slowly roast to death indoors, we dumped our bags and headed straight out for lunch. Stretching from Trnava to Sucha nad Parnou is a long, straight road that seems to go on forever. After three years of visits, it's become known as the long road to FOReVER.

Sucha nad Parnou is a sleepy little village northwest of Trnava, making it perhaps the last place you'd expect a demoscene party to take place. Even better, it's home to the excellent Sramek restaurant which I'd highly recommend! As we'd worked up an appetite on the drive, it was the obvious choice for lunch.

By the time we arrived, the party was already in full swing and the retro hardware was out in force. I got busy with some final tweaks to my music compo entry, while FOReVER newcomer Mr. Spiv set up his +3 and MB03+. He marvelled that the floppy drive had survived its flight from Finland without requiring emergency surgery at the party. Now Lordcoxis decided to do what he always does, head off to find free beer and get chatting with other sceners who do likewise.

Friday evening saw Aki/LFG presenting a C64 demoshow followed by Mike/ZT giving a talk on ZX D/A sample music using a popular 3 channel D/A interface. This was very interesting for me being as I'm a ZX musician and hardware enthusiast. Mike played many tracks including some beeper conversions, MQM 5 tracks and then some other 3 channel mod conversions. I enjoyed it a lot - good work Mike!

After the demoshow and ZX D/A talk we decided to head and get dinner at Sramek but we had a problem. Six people, one car, not enough seats! Zilog and Mr. Spiv decided to walk, occasionally breaking into a run to avoid becoming Slovakian ice sculptures.

The food was excellent, getting back was trickier. Nobody wanted to walk, nobody wanted to go in the boot, and rock-paper-scissors had already claimed one victim that day. In the end, I volunteered for boot duty. Two minutes in the boot wasn't so bad.

That said, it's someone else's turn next year!

As the evening progressed, Baze/3SC spent the evening broadening Mr. Spiv's cultural horizons, one shot at a time. When it came time to head back to the hotel, Mr. Spiv was looking a little worse for wear. The combination of alcohol and a day that had started at silly o'clock probably hadn't helped. Back at the hotel Lordcoxis wanted to join another party going on there, but we decided we'd pushed our luck far enough for one day. Besides, Mr. Spiv looked moments away from falling asleep where he stood.

Saturday was compo day. Over breakfast we decided to immortalise the Sramek incident by entering the ZX 1K compo. Lordcoxis lent me his mouse so I could do the graphics, while Mr. Spiv was voluntold to write the code. Somehow, what started as a terrible joke slowly turned into an actual compo entry.

We needed to get some lunch so we went to Sramek yet again. Did I say this place does great food? We tried to make our lunch brief as I wanted to get back for the PentEvo showcase, but our timing was impeccable: we arrived just in time to miss the entire presentation. After this was the Bit Magazine talk which wasn't in English, so I continued working on the graphics for our 1K intro. This was then followed by the entrance fee paying ceremony, which always takes a while. As Mr. Spiv was still busy coding the intro, Lordcoxis decided it would be better to pay Mr. Spiv's entry fee so he didn't lose valuable time queuing to pay. This was a great idea and the party organisers allowed us to do this (they're great people!).

Next it was compo time! Mr. Spiv was still furiously coding away, but he continued as if the deadline was merely a polite suggestion. We were treated to a feast of Atari, C64, ZX Spectrum and other 8 bit machines graphics, musics, 1K intros and demos! Not to mention the wild compo too! Luckily, a few technical delays during the compos gave Mr. Spiv some bonus development time. For once, somebody else's problems were working in our favour.

When the ZX music compo was complete, it was time to hand in our 1k entry which was about 90% complete. We may have set a new FOReVER record for latest compo submission, although disappointingly there wasn't a prize for that. Considering the ridiculous timescale and our habit of giving him new ideas every five minutes, Mr. Spiv did an incredible job getting it complete enough to submit.

With the compos over, it was finally time for dinner. We headed to Sramek, the home of excellent food and, according to Hellboj, excellent beer. Unfortunately we missed the Wotnau quiz, but full stomachs beat trivia every time.

After dinner, Mike/ZT demonstrated a Sizif running @ 7MHz, where BASIC ran at a decent speed. Then David/DR and Mike showed us Towdie, Twilight (by Ultrasoft) and Il Nome della Rosa (by Perpetum) on a Didaktik Gama. The graphics were incredible and I was really impressed by the sheer amount of graphics and colour used in these games! Unfortunately, the games were in Slovak but Mike provided a live translation for us. By then we were all running out of steam, so we called it a night and headed back to the hotel.

Sunday was the prize giving ceremony. My music entry landed second place, while our 1K intro bravely defended the bottom spot.

Given it was up against entries that had clearly received more than a few frantic hours of work, I still count it as a victory.

After saying our goodbyes, we made one last visit to Sramek for a farewell meal. Gasman joined us before we dropped him off at Trnava train station and set course for Vienna airport. We were all thoroughly exhausted, but heading home with full stomachs, great memories, and the reminder that FOReVER is as much about the people as the computers.

Will we be back next year? Almost certainly. If Sramek is still serving food and beer and FOReVER is still delivering 8-bit demoscene awesomeness, I'd say the odds are pretty good ;)