Jan Vibe's Archive of graphical ditties... with videos

Anyone who was around RISC OS when magazines were a thing will remember Jan Vibe’s contributions to the Acorn magazines. He submitted small BASIC programs that produced really interesting and cute effects using just the BBC and RISC OS graphics operations. They were an inspiration to me, and I remember them fondly. I had wanted to use them to test RISC OS Pyromaniac’s graphics handling, but alas could not find them online…

A little while back, David Banks published a GitHub repository with Jan Vibe’s little graphical programs in ¹, recovered from the Drobe site. He’s subsequently updated it with pictures of the programs.

Excited by these, over the last month or so, I’ve been running them through RISC OS Pyromaniac to see that they work. Many fixes later, and I’ve produced video of many of them running – most do run just fine now.

I’ve created a branch which contains links to the videos alongside the screenshots of the programs which David created. If you go to…

https://github.com/gerph/jan_vibe_archive/tree/videos

… you’ll see the contents link to all the directories of programs. Many of the programs have videos that I have created to show how they develop (linked from the PNGs that David Banks had created). The ones I’ve recorded there should be the ones that definitely work, and were interesting. The videos have a maximum runtime of 2 minutes, so some cut off before completing – RISC OS Pyromaniac runs slower than a Classic system.

Because it’s running on a different system (macOS in my case), it’s been really easy to script the creation of the videos, and generate working MPEG 4 files. It’s also really simple to create SVGs of the programs too, although they won’t animate. I’ve only kept the one of those that I thought was nice, but it does look good…

https://jan-vibe-archive-videos.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/BAS06/dtree.svg

¹ https://github.com/hoglet67/jan_vibe_archive

Good to see these programs again. I spent many hours fascinated at some of the
amazing effects with simple but interesting BASIC code.

I could lose a few days looking at these (again) :-)

Memories and I can see me already looking at them again! :)

Thanks Charles

I love the the sample video which serves as an inspiring challenge to get creative.
Many thanks Charles