Matt Venn Blends the Old and the New, Launches the Tiny Tapeout Demoscene Contest

Matt Venn has announced a new competition that blends the demoscene with the free and open source silicon scene — by inviting competitors to design a demo in hardware, for production on the next Tiny Tapeout shuttle.

"The home computer demoscene has resulted in some amazing feats of hacking and pushing hardware to its limits," Venn explains of the contest. "The Tiny Tapeout demoscene competition sticks to the same audio/visual output format, but instead of using an existing computer, you create your own ASIC [Application Specific Integrated Circuit] hardware!"

Most commonly associated with home computers of the 1980s and 1990s, and in particular Commodore's Amiga range, the demoscene sees coders work to coax increasingly impressive audio and video out of resource-constrained hardware. Tiny Tapeout, meanwhile, allows chip designers old and new to create their own hardware and have it produced on a multi-project chip for a very low cost. Venn's latest idea? Bringing the two scenes together.

Rather than writing a demo in software for an existing hardware platform, entrants are asked to create a demo in hardware — taking up no more than two "tiles" on the chip's layout. Each design will be able to output video using a VGA PMOD add-on for the chip's evaluation board, with audio available on another PMOD expansion.

Building a demoscene-worthy creation as an ASIC in just two Tiny Tapeout tiles is a challenge, but achievable — and with one tile available free of charge to entrants, there's incentive to squeeze the size down still further. A panel of judges will award prizes based on categories including best soundtrack, best graphics, "most impressive for the size," and "rulebreaker" — the latter for designs that exceed two tiles in size, or need the help of a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller to run.

More information on the competition, including instructions for entering, is available on the Tiny Tapeout website.