Opticron: Tome of the Impossible by Craw Productions :: nfo

Opticron: Tome of the Impossible by Craw Productions

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╚╛ O P T I C R O N : ╘╝

╔╕ Tome of the Impossible ╒╗
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-1 S T P L A C E W I N N E R-
of the 100K+ demo competition
at the North American International Democompo (NAID)

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│ BASIC INFORMATION │
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This is an IBM PC compatible DOS system graphic and digital sound
demonstration. It is freeware, and cannot be distributed for any profit
whatsoever or may not be altered in any way, unless direct permission by the
creators is given. We are also not responsible for any damages directly
related to this program. You are using this at your own risk, although one
can wonder how this could possibly cause any harm...

Here are the specs needed to run this program:
-A 386 or higher computer. (486DX+ recommended)
-1.5 megabytes of disk space.
-Any version of DOS above 2.11.
-About 590 K of conventional memory.
(If you're using a Sound Blaster compatible,
you require about 610K instead)
-To hear music, either a:
Gravis Ultrasound (512K), or a
Sound Blaster / Sound Blaster Pro / SB16
compatible card.
-Approximately 6.5 minutes of spare time.

Here are also some command line parameters available:
-"Sx" Choose a sound card, where x can be:
0 - No sound
1 - Gravis Ultrasound
2 - A Sound Blaster compatible
-"Vx" Set volume, and x can be any number between
0 and 64. (32 is the default)
-"Mx" Set mixing rate, where x is the rate in Hz.
(The default is 22 KHz and this only applies
to Sound Blaster sound cards. WARNING:
Do set set the mixing rate AFTER setting the
card with the "s" command)
-"L" With this, the demo will loop indefinitely.
-"?" Will list out your command line options.

Example: "Opticron s1 v16"
-This will run the demo with the Gravis Ultrasound as the
chosen sound card and a volume of 16 units (25%).

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│ SOME COMMENTS │
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All the code, graphics and music in this demo are original; none are
rips or stolen fragments from an outside source. This excludes the digital
samples used for the background song, Yume, which are indeed "stolen".
You may call us what you like, but the lack of any sampling equipment has
forced us to take some samples without asking the creators, of which we don't
always know who they are. Sorry if you recognize any to be your own!

Also, every effect (except for the sparkles when Opticron's pages
turn over) are done in real time. There are no pre-calculations, save cosine
and sine tables, and there are no animations contained in the demonstration.

We would like to give a special thanks to Jon Merkel (ShadowLord)
for providing us with a temporary working SB/SBpro/SB16 sound player.

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│ N A I D │
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"Opticron: Tome of the Impossible" was originally a simple demo not
meant to be entered into any democompo or party, but since we started hearing
things about NAID (North American International Democontest) we decided to
give it a try and submit it to the contest. We also chose to attend NAID,
which was only two hours away by car in Montreal, especially because it was
the first competition of its kind in North America.
To our great excitement, Opticron won 1st in the demo competition
and LakEEE brought home a 3rd and a public's choice award in the graphics
division for "Stone Tears", an MCGA pcx that is also displayed at the
beginning of the Opticron demo. Thanks a million to all the people who
supported us!

We met many cool guys (and girl :) that were into the demoscene at
NAID, and finally I personally (LakEEE) got to match faces and handles to the
real person. I'd like to greet a handful of people that were especially
prominent in my mind: In no particular order, of course...

Andrew M. (Mental Floss) IOR
Necros The Veritech Knight
Eric (Midnight Sun) Miss Saigon
Bryan and Steve (Spud) Epeius
Basehead Mosaic
All the guys of DCB Fornax
Mr. Khan

Of course, the guys of Sentience that gave us a most helpful
vehicle boost after NAID... :)

And any others I missed, please. I can't seem to remember names...

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│ ABOUT THIS DEMO... │
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As you may or may not have noticed, there is a growing trend in the
PC demo scene to make demos with a theme. I personally look at this with
good hope, because it is my strong belief that demos should evolve into what
would be called "cinematic presentations" with much more movie like
characteristics and interesting themes. The thing is, these sort of demos
would still need to have real time effects, otherwise people would simply
store huge animations with matching music and that would be that. When we
first started creating Opticron, I saw this as our biggest challenge:
Adhereing the our overall theme while still making non-animated effects that
would keeps one's attention.
Hopefully you'll believe that we've succeeded in doing this. Our
basic theme in Opticron is, as you may know if you've seen the demo, a book
of optical illusions. Every page within this magical book contains a moving
impossibility, an illusion of reality.
Although the routines that make up each effect are rather simple and
basic even (i.e. simple 3d system polygons, texture mapping... etc.), we hope
you note the 'genuineness' of each effect as a whole, being an optical
illusion and all, which hasn't been done too often in demos. I'll just say
that thinking of over 10 impossible and not to mention moving abstract figues
was quite, quite difficult. But we finally got it done, through lots of
painstaking work, and here it is...

Signed, Kenji Toyooka - "LakEEE"
of Craw Productions.

March 21st, 1995
revised on
April 22nd, 1995

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