“Logo Week”: More Fun Over at /r/RetroBattlestations

A few weeks ago I posted about the fun to be had over at Reddit’s /r/retrobattlestations. It was BASIC Week and I tackled it with an Atari ST and a few Apple IIs. After that came Spooky Week, and this weekend marked the end of Logo Week. For Logo Week, I grabbed Commodore’s Amiga Logo, installed it on my trusty Amiga 1000, and had a little bit of seasonal programming fun.

I’ll preface this by mentioning that my first experience with Logo was using TI LOGO II on my TI-99/4A back in 1983. The next time I encountered it was in an AP Computer Science class in my junior year of high school … a long time ago.

Logo Week involved getting Feurzeig and Papert’s Logo programming language running on vintage hardware and using a couple of provided procedures to render out a few autumn leaves via “turtle graphics.” Real hardware required — no emulators allowed. For this one, I decided to render the Amiga 1000 upon which I was programming my entry, and rending the leaves upon the rendered Amiga’s CRT. It’s like Amiga^2 or Inception or something. Anyway, I had lots of fun at every step.

Here you see a photo of the final product and a video of my Logo code doing its thing. (Here’s my entry post.) I chose to use the Amiga’s hi-res interlaced screenmode (640×400 pixels) at 16 colors. Unfortunately, both the photo and the video suffer from capturing an interlaced CRT display with a digital video camera. More or less every other scan line is missed (more evident in the video). I should post an actual screenshot. At any rate, rest assured — it looks nicer in person.

Of course, everything is a good bit nicer when you’re sitting in front of an Amiga 1000, isn’t it?