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Abyss

Abyss by DrKappa (15/04/2001)
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History
========
This morning I was having a look at some old code of mine (things coded 4/5 years ago), and
I found an abandoned 256 byte project. This 256 byte intro should have been a simple mandelbrot
renderer and it was intended to take part of fidonet 256 byte intro compo. A couple of days
before the deadline, I found myself with a 311 bytes .com file, with no idea about how to
optimize it furtherly. The project was aborted and I decided to code another intro from scratch.
It was a mouse controlled bump mapping effect, and I was quite lucky because it took the first
place. :)
So, I decided to test my hardcoding attitude (if I ever had one.. :)) trying to complete the
unfinished 256-byte intro.
After a couple of hours I came out with a 164 byte renderer doing exactly the same things
the old 311 bytes .com file did. Then it was a simple refinement work (altough the intro
is quite rough) to add palette and zooming.

Disclaimer
===========
This intro (Abyss) can be freely distributed as long as this textfile is included.
Commercial use of Abyss without permission of the author is forbidden
(who the hell could make money out of it??).
So, if you want to distribute it for commercial purposes, ask me (dr.kappa@tiscalinet.it).
I'm not responsable for any kind of damage caused by the proper or improper use of this file.
If you fuck yourself it is a your own problem, baby...

Tech stuff
===========
Abyss has been mainly coded and tested on a P166MMX, while refinement work has
been done using a 1.2Ghz Athlon.
It runs fine in plain DOS and win95/98/2k.

Hardcoding notes
=================
In order to follow the original idea, this renderer has been coded using standard 80386/80387
instructions. The fractal is calculated using only FPU. Surely a fixed-point approach would
have been faster on older machines and could allow a shorter intro.
Video mode is a standard 13h, and the rendering area is 256x100. Colors used for rendering
are 96/64 (64 effective colors, but up to 96 interations per pixel).
On older machines Abyss doesn't run well. To use only 32/16 colors provides a big
speedup, but the resulting effect sux.

Greetz
=======
Everybody supporting demoscene...

			   .-.Abyss.-.2^8 Intro-.DrKappa.-.2001.-.
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