HEXUS and ATI present - Assembly 05
To get to the root of what Assembly is all about, you have to go back years and years. (cue wobbly visual effects). Let’s timewarp back to the late 80s, mullets have (thankfully) gone out of fashion and the Amiga and Atari ST are still battling it out to be the home computer kings. The humble PC is just starting to make its way into the home in the form of the 286, or if you were minted, the 386 with astonishing clocks speeds of 10MHz for the 286 and up to 33MHz for the 386 and of course, a whopping 2 or 4 Mb of memory, shared with the video of course…. Ahh, I miss those days of DOS…
Anyway, around this time there were a bunch of guys mucking around writing programs and demos in machine code and assembly languages. With the comparatively tiny amount of system memory actually available to use, programmers focused on optimizing code as much as possible to be able to achieve as much as possible using as few resources as they could. Of course, what with programmers being a feisty lot, friendly rivalries soon sprung up as to who could get the most out of the smallest memory use… and so, in 1992, a couple of these uber-geeks organized a meet in a school in Kauniainen, Finland to compare their work and have a bit of a competition with each other. This was to set the stage for Assembly, arguably now the largest meeting of computer fans this side of the Atlantic.
Each year, loads of progammers would try every trick in the book to get as much as possible out of their programs whilst using as little memory as possible. Why not take a look at last year's winner? Prepare to be stunned by what someone can do with just 4kb of memory. Oh, and before you cry out that the file is not 4kb, it's wrapped up as an .exe, so there!
Lot of gamers, yesterday.Held in Helsinki, Finland, Assembly is the culmination of 14 years of growth which has seen the event grow from a few dozen guys to nearly 5,000 programmers and users filling an ice hockey arena for everything for games and hardware demos to four day LAN fests and even the Nordic rounds of the World Cyber Games pulling attendees from all over Europe, USA, South Africa, Japan and even Australia. Not bad for it’s humble beginnings in that school, eh?
This year has seen Assembly at its biggest yet with competitions all over the place for everything from gaming through to programming. In fact, there were over 20 different competitions held over the four days of the event, from the pros battling out for the WCG regionals with a view to the finals in Singapore in November through to the less illustrious, but frankly far more stunning, music, programming, animation and graphics competitions which are at the heart of what Assembly is all about.
ATI teasing gamers with their wares.Over the years Assembly has grown to from a handful of guys in a room to a simply massive event on a scale that has to be seen to be believed. This year’s event, as with the previous 6 events, was held in Hartwall Areena in Helsinki, a huge ice hockey arena. This allowed space for over 3,000 gamers to hook up for the LAN party as well as the WCG players and the single day attendees hooking into the wireless network. To give you an idea of the size, this year there was over US$70,000 up for grabs in CASH prizes and US$100,000 worth of hardware up for grabs!
Of course, an event this big is going to attract big sponsors, chief amongst these were ATI and ASUSTeK with ATI proudly showing off Crossfire to the masses as well as to the swarm of developers and other techie-type people at the event. It has to be said that Assembly isn’t just a LAN party, it’s a far more technical event than most other LANs, with developers, coders, publishers and hardware manufacturers all meeting up to swap ideas, rub shoulders and gingerly step over the sleeping forms of gamers recovering from 36 hour CS:Source sessions.
With so much going on and flights to Helsinki costing less than £150, it looks like Assembly 06 could be one for the serious LANners calendar. You can see more of Assembly 05 with our exclusive pictures and video coverage, as well a Video Interview with Jussi Laakkonen, Assembly's Event Director and Business Development Director of Bugbear Entertainment all courtesy of ATI, so click the links!
