psychedelia syndrome

Psychedelia was the first ever interactive 'light synthesizer'. It was written for the Commodore 64 by Jeff Minter and published by Llamasoft in 1984.

psychedelia syndrome is a book-length exploration of the assembly code behind the game and an atlas of the pixels and effects it generated. It should appeal to anyone with an interest in computers, old or new, and provide interesting insights into how 40-year old software produced appealing graphical displays. The book consists of many pretty pictures and a complete, academic-style commentary on the code for all editions of Psychedelia on the Commodore 64 plus a bonus section covering Colourspace on the Atari 400/800.

You can download and read the book here. A dual-page view in your PDF reader is recommended to aid viewing code and commentary side-by-side.

If you'd like to read a hard copy instead you can get the current version from Amazon at a very reasonable price.

The electronic edition is free, but if you like it you can gift what you want.

a peek inside

unauthorized sequel

I had a bit of fun and made a kind of variation on Psychedelia . It's called ΨII.

It has a simple objective: reach every part of the screen with the assigned pattern. You receive points for every tile you fill and lose points every time you fill the same tile more than once. If you click on the video below, you should be able to give it a quick go, using CTRL to fire and the arrow keys for moving around. It's quite soothing.

more peeking

source & more

Find out more about the making of this book at its github repository.

you may also like

IRIDIS ALPHA THEORY , a book length treatment of Iridis Alpha that goes into the game's mechanics in just about the same insane level of detail as this one.