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Zappy / HC information 4 glöps

• general:
• level: user
• personal:
• first name: Pierre
• last name: Terdiman

• demo Atari ST Blood by Holocaust [web]
• An initial version of the "Keops Game" actually existed at some point, but I have no idea if or where the source code survived. It was supposed to be a remake of "Jetpac", where you had to kill small "Keops" (the ball with a grin) instead of aliens, and collect "dragon balls" instead of spaceship elements. We never found the motivation to finish it, but we had pretty much all the graphics we needed.
  
  In the first fullscreen at the end of disk 1, you can see a weird flickering in the bottom border. I think it's the remaining CPU time being drawn. We never ever saw that on our ST monitors, apparently they couldn't display as many lines as other monitors out there :) There's a similar bug in the "giant dragonball" in the beginning. We just never saw that at home.
  
  The second fullscreen is vaguely inspired from an Amiga demo, can't remember which one... Maybe Anarchy's Krest Mass Leftovers?
• isokadded on the 2007-09-20 16:44:37
• demo Atari ST Japtro by Holocaust [web]
• BTW you get a small starfield screen when booting disk 2, 3 or 4 (each one with a different music).
  
  The french samples are from "Laspales & Chevallier" but I don't remember exactly what they said.
  
  The sample at the end of the "Keops & Severine" cartoon is from Steve Vai's "Sex & Religion" album.
  
  The fullscreen pics in the intro (that are completely skipped on some STs) are originally from a Cat's Eye / City Hunter art-book, and drawing them with Degas Elite, multiple palettes - and no mouse! - was a major pain in the butt.
• isokadded on the 2007-09-20 16:26:11
• demo Atari ST Choice Of Gods by Holocaust [web]
• Also, the title comes from a Clifford D. Simak novel.
  
  http://www.geocities.com/fantasticreviews/choice_of_gods.htm
  
• isokadded on the 2007-09-20 16:13:47
• demo Atari ST Rising Force by Holocaust [web]
• Sorry about this Evil, but when you post a comment for the first time on a demo you -have- to vote, as far as I can see :)
  
  I will always remember that day at the CSC2, when I was trying to make everything work before the deadline. I fought a mysterious crash pretty much during the whole party, only to find it a little -after- the demo show had started. I was almost the only guy left in the big room, while everybody else had moved down to the smaller room where demos were projected on a big screen. Finding that bug at this moment, after days of vain efforts... it was unreal. Like the worst Murphy's Law ever. I managed to burn everything to disk, cursing like a mad man in front of the ST, running like hell down the stairs with the stupid disk in my hand... I didn't even had time to check it actually worked (I started to run the second the last sector had been written), but it did! We didn't win (too late!) but it was the first time one of our demos was shown on a big screen, and the feeling was extraordinary, especially after that day (days?) of insane work. I will never forget that day :)
  
  Also, for those who didn't know, the title is obviously borrowed from Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force album. We were fans at the time...
• isokadded on the 2007-09-20 16:11:28
• demo Atari ST Choice Of Gods by Holocaust [web]
• This demo has never been finished, as written in the small menu. Too many people, too much trouble: we just put whatever we had produced since ~1989 on 2 disks, and called it a day. I just wanted it out, out, out and done, I was ready to stop demos completely after this. But people liked it so much and sent so many nice messages (on RTEL...) that it motivated us to continue a bit anyway.
  
  Quality is certainly inegal between screens, but those were our first attempts at demomaking. IIRC the first TCB or Equinox demos weren't that great either :)
• rulezadded on the 2007-09-20 15:54:07
• demo Atari ST Rising Force by Holocaust [web]
• >Too bad design and graphics were not as good as the code ;)
  
  Hey, not too bad for "programmer's art" :)
  
  
  
• rulezadded on the 2007-09-19 17:58:30
• demo Atari ST Japtro by Holocaust [web]
• >This demo used to work with SainT
  
  I was puzzled to find out that it even worked "a little bit" on an emulator. This thing worked flawlessly on Elric's machine and mine, but after releasing it we saw that it didn't work on a lot of real STs. We never bothered investigating why - we were already too busy working on "Blood" - but I'm not too surprised. We had a lot of troubles with this one. Everything was put together basically in 4 days before the party, writing half of the demo in the process, and it has probably been the most insane week of my life. At some point we lost the source code for the intro and the only remaining trace of it was a binary version already dumped to disk in its "final form" (we needed to do that to simply test the thing, as the final intro consumed too much memory and IIRC couldn't be ran with Devpack in the background). But we didn't give up on it and that unfinished-but-not-too-bad intro is still what you can see today. IIRC we ended up patching the decompressed code to take back control and continue the demo somehow, but that week was full of insane issues / hacks / tricks like this, it's a miracle this demo got released.
  
  
• rulezadded on the 2007-09-19 17:55:56
• demo Atari ST Blood by Holocaust [web]
• Thanks guys :) We didn't have much design for two main reasons:
  a) at the time of Blood we were only really 2 coders with no artist, no sound guy, and not much connections in "the scene" (although the brilliant contributions from Mic/Dune helped a bit)
  b) well... we didn't really care about design anyway. It was really by-coders-for-coders, and that's it.
  
• rulezadded on the 2007-09-19 17:40:40