Next-Level Terminal Games and Visuals – How Zig Powers and Accelerates a Hacker’s Dream Canvas, Adding SID Sound on Top
04:00 PM • Duration: 45 Min
MOVY is a terminal rendering engine written in Zig, designed to bring modern animation, compositing, and visual effects into retro-style textmode environments. Inspired by demoscene aesthetics, 80s computers, and a hacker’s dream of full control, movy creates a canvas of code-powered pixels—with no OpenGL, no GPU, just raw CPU-driven love.
But the engine didn’t start there. I began with a C++ project, experimenting with terminal sprites and effects. When I discovered Zig, everything changed. Zig’s expressive language features—tagged unions, comptime metaprogramming, custom allocators, and its incredibly powerful build system—accelerated development tenfold. I rewrote everything in Zig, and suddenly it wasn’t just more fun—it was faster, cleaner, and far more expressive.
Thanks to Zig’s seamless C/C++ integration, I was able to incorporate the ReSID MOS 6581/8580 sound chip emulator, turning it into a Zig library capable of generating authentic SID sound in real time. This now powers 1st Shot, our upcoming terminal bullet hell game, built entirely on movy.
In this talk, I’ll walk you through:
The architecture of movy: render surfaces, effect chains, pipelines, sprites, and animations
How Zig’s performance, memory control, and expressive design made it all possible and dramatically accelerated development
The joy of building a “dream canvas” from scratch
And finally, a live demo of 1st Shot—a terminal bullet hell game with SID music, rich visual effects, and layered explosions—set to debut at Zigtoberfest 2025!
Whether you’re into low-level graphics, retro design, or just love doing weird things with powerful tools, this talk sets out to light up your hacker heart <3
About Mario
Hi, I’m Mario Schallner, aka Mario64 / M64. I love low-level coding. I love pixels. I love making music on the Commodore 64, on Game Boys, and now with my M8 tracker. I’m passionate about the creative side of writing software—especially when the result becomes something beautiful to watch or listen to.
