looking back in time, as far back as i can remember, to what can be considered my very first hack

there was a reason i always let you be player one; armed with little more than a few 5.25” floppies, a text editor, and my imagination i somehow managed to discover how to make it impossible for a banana to ever hit player two, even when the velocity and angle were correct

with these tweaked bytes written to disk, and with great caution to avoid contact with anything magnetic, this modified version of GORILLAS.BAS would travel with me wherever i went. it was an easy way for player two to come out on top every time, no matter which computer we played the game on

who would have thought that such a small moment in time, an almost insignificant discovery in the grand scheme of things, would be the spark to ignite an obsession that would soon begin to devour the bulk of my time, interest, and dedication in life

this artwork commemorates the humble cathode ray tube, a gone but not quite forgotten iconic part of computing history. analogue display technology had many different points of failure and potential interference that affected the final projected image. back then no two screens were the same, and it felt like every machine you embraced had their own personality arising from their distinctive visual anomalies

controls

press [f] to enter fullscreen (recommended) press [s] to save the processed image at 1280x800 press [o] to save the original image at 1280x800 press [h] to save a high res 5120x3200 print-ready capture press [r] to start recording a 1280x800 video at 100Mbps (webm) press [r] again to stop recording, 30-60 sec max recording time

specs

emulated 80x25 characters at 8x16px each (640x400) 2x upscaled 1280x800 texture into webgl p5.js with custom shader / 25fps / 280 kb