Some impressions from the Edison 2026 party. Text by Marcus Dicander, photos by Smaugur/Nukleus.
“When I was out of requests I played some music from Castlevania…”
At Edison 2026 “Hold your horses, release your prods!”, once again on ship M/S Borgila @ Söder Mälarstrand in Stockholm/Sweden (17/7 – 19/7), Marcus boozed up the party atmosphere with his skills behind the piano and later in live coding the TIC-80. Read about these two events he share with the Diskmag readers. Me, Smaugur being present at this party just loved both. Just in case you missed it, here’s our party report from 2025.
Performing Piano on Edison
On Friday night there was a graphics duel where I was performing piano. Before each duel I asked the participants what they wanted to hear, but I said that the chances that I could play it are far higher if they picked something from demoscene music or video game music from the 80s or 90s.
Frost asked me to play Shadow of the Beast, and I played the intro, menu music and the first in game music as well as the little-known well music. I tried to improvise Oberon’s revenge, but this song the weakest performance from my side.
I think Zavie asked for Prince of Persia, The Secret of Monkey Island and Mega Man 2. All of these are requests that I have heard before, but Mega Man 2, especially Dr Wily:s first stage is the only one I am comfortable playing. The other two were more improvised and shakier.
Other requests I remember from contests were A Final Hyperbase by Firefox-Tip from Phenomena Enigma and Turrican 2 by Chris Hülsbeck. Those are some of my favourite songs on the Amiga, so they naturally worked out better.
One of the participants requested Pinball Dreams, the legendary Amiga soundtrack by Blaizer from The Silents. I played the Nightmare Track. Come to think of it, that track also features parts of Toccata and Fugue by Bach so perhaps that also counts as video game music now.
When I was out of requests I played some music from Castlevania, namely Vampire Killer by Satoe Terashima and Wicked Child by Kinuyo Yamashita.
Another classic that I always play is Koji Kondos Legend of Zelda overworld and underworld music. I also remember playing Snake Rattle ‘n’ roll, from David Wise on Rare. The level 4 music is one of my favourite NES soundtracks.
Somewhere along the line I slipped in Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu, which you may count as a classical piece of music, but the first time I remember hearing it was from an arcade machine on a boat heading to England when I was a kid. I picked up parts of the song by the ear and played it to another pianist who told me it was Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu. Many years later I asked in a gaming forum what arcade game has Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu and a regular member there answered that it was Megablast (1989) from Taito.
Zavie ended up winning the whole thing and I remember he very kindly said that he liked that it sounded like I was arranging the music on the spot as I played it which often was the case. I have only heard many of these songs and not played them before.
The TIC-80 Byte Battle
TIC-80 and fantasy consoles is one of the most ingenious things to come out of the demoscene. TIC-80 Battle duels: It starts at minute 11:45 in the video, Fun thing, can you spot me (Smaugur^nls) there? Talking about the future of the Amiga with Marcus.
As one of the many people who grew up in the 80: s with Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Amiga 500 and 1200 as my first three computers. I often long back to the times of juggling with limited resources and having the system choose the language for me (like basic on the ZX Spectrum and C64) so there is an even playing field and the Edison Demo party adds a 20 minute constraint on top of that it bans sprites and adds a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) for the DJ music to make it similar to the Shader Showdown with Shadertoy contest you can see at the Revision demo party.
Throughout the contest, awesome scene-friendly music was played by DJ Hakushi.
Semifinal 1 Marcus vs Njursten
The interesting plot twist here was that the computer screens were swapped above the participants, so my effect was above Njursten and his was above mine.
My strategy going in was to start out with setting up for polar coordinates, going through all pixels one by one and basically just running a very slow pixel shader on them. To get extra retro feel and slightly break out of the constraints of the TIC80: s limited colour palette I added a copper-style background with the BDR-function. This function is run once per scanline and allows more than the standard 16 colours on screen. The colour registers are located at address starting at 0x3FC0 for the red component, green and blue follow next. For you fans of the Amiga game catalogue, I remember FC because it is short for Full Contact, a fighting game with code by Megaman of Phenomena fame and the brilliant menu song “The mystics Dream” by Firefox/Phenomena, also the first song on Phenomenas music disc Music Dream 2. Anyway, back to the contest:
I started with making a circle, by just looking at the distance from the center and colouring it differently. Secondly, I cycled the non-background colours around the circle by dividing the angle in polar coordinates by the palette and then added extra length to the bars with the FFT-function provided by the organizers. The programming teacher in me insisted that the distance function be its own function and then to my surprise after 10 minutes I had a functional effect, albeit not a very fun one. I tried adding some sinusoidal functions to it to make it more interesting, but I ended up removing them. I also started an idea of having extra effects on top of it, but I ended up abandoning that part also.
On the other screen Njursten did a far more impressive effect than mine. (see TIC-80 link down below for full compo) He started out like me, cycling through the pixels, the slow pixelshader approach and converting to polar coordinates but then he added a twirling effect that was much more impressive than my plain piechart and made the twirling pattern dance to the music with fft. He also added a distortion lens effect on top of an already cool looking effect. Congratulations Njursten! A well-deserved win!
Semifinal 2
In the second semifinal, team fsfreak (with two people!) was up against Jan. Interestingly, fsfreak also did an Amiga-style sky gradient, but this one was red, not blue. On top of this they added some rotating Bresenham lines painting a moiré pattern looking like a search light and a static text that confusingly was called “scrolltext” in the source code. Probably an abandoned idea to have it scroll as well.
Jan did something more interesting aesthetically with two separately scrolling layers. One layer of tilted colorcycling bars and coloured dots above it. This was the better effect, and it won this battle.
Finals
In the final Njursten went for rotating bars in separated screens. Once more polar coordinates but now we saw modulo added to get separate screens and as extra flair on top of it he had three triangles close to each other rotate and move over the pixelshader-style effect in the background.
Jan on the right went for a waterfall style scroller of sound history as told by the FFT, scrolling smoothly.
Njursten won the finals as well, same winner as last year.
Thanks to Marcus Dicander for the party report and Smaugur of Nukleus for the photos!
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