Jeopardy by lightspeed
This is a FAQ. Some of the questions are those that we get asked when we show this demo to others, but mostly they are questions that we asked ourselves during the making of the demo. Q. What the hell is this? A. Jeopardy. Q. Gotcha. Who made it? A. Lightspeed. Beek and Pfister. Q. Not Green Grapes? A. Correct. Q. Why not Green Grapes? A. We decided that for one of our productions to be honestly labeled a "Green Grapes" production, we would need more members of Green Grapes to contribute to the project. For the next demo we intend to involve more of the group. In addition, since the rest of Green Grapes does not, as far as we know, share our personal agenda, we didn't think they would appreciate the message that the demo sends. Q. Was anyone other than Beek and Pfister involved? A. Yes, we used PMODE/W by Daredevil and Tran, and Midas by Sahara Surfers. Q. How did you folks come up with a name like Lightspeed? Was it a bad joke from the early versions of Foolish, when it was still a bunch of seperate .EXE files filled with QuickBasic demo effects and three mediocre .S3M files, collectively called Sodomy because it was the first word that popped into your sick little heads? A. You got it. Q. Well, how might I contact these fine demo makers? A. beek@cts.com Q. That would be Beek, right? A. That's right. Q. And I suppose Pfister is pfister@cts.com? A. Nope. pfister@connectnet.com Q. Who's the drummer? A. That's Rick Allen, the one-armed drummer from Def Leppard. Q. What, pray tell, inspired you to enlist Rick for the making of this demo? A. Well, Pfister's uncle Joe has always been a big fan of Def Leppard, but we never knew that he knew any of the members of the band personally. One day when he was visiting, Joe started talking about how well he knew them and specifically how much Rick, the drummer, liked demos. Apparently he was a big fan of old Space Pigs productions. So when Pfister told Joe we were making a demo, he got excited and called Rick up right away. By that time next week, Rick had rented a 3d model digitizer, and we spent a day digitizing him (and he was ticklish!). We haven't talked with Rick since, but Joe says he is eagerly awaiting the results. Q. Who's the guy at the end? A. "Wizard of Odds" ring a bell? "High Rollers"? How about... "Jeopardy"? It's Alex Trebek you fool! Alex Trebek!!! Q. Was the demo entered in any competitions? A. No, but it was publicly premiered on the 30 foot screen during a 3 hour demo marathon at the UCSD student theater, courtesy of God. Q. What kind of system does this demo require? A. It was written on a 486/33 with a Soundblaster 16, and is quite watchable on it. However, it will run smoother on a faster system. Q. Will the demo run under Windows 95? A. Most likely, yes. The original version didn't on Beek's computer and that's when Pfister put the warning in. But it worked on all the other machines it was tested on, and even the later versions worked on Beek's machine, so we considered taking the warning out. Then, we realized that it's cool to confuse and inconvenience people who run Win95 so we kept it in. Q. Before, you mentioned a "personal agenda". What did you mean by that? A. Well, we COULD say it was an homage to Alex Trebek, who just recently became a U.S. citizen, and that would be partially true. But there is a deeper, darker side to the Jeopardy story... It was seeded when someone on #trax (whose name is withheld because we don't remember it) started talking about how great DC5 demos were. We downloaded all of the DC5 demos available on ftp.cdrom.com, enjoyed them immensely, and soon forgot about them. Then one day, when we were sick of waiting for our previous demo, Foolish, to be rated and moved from the incoming directory, we asked someone we once saw talking about the /demos/incoming/demos/ directory to take a look at it. He said something a long the lines of "It's cute, but it's no Cack." Needless to say, we were intrigued. But when we looked on ftp.cdrom.com, Cack was nowhere to be found! We asked around, and a kind soul told us that Cack was developed by the DC5. After some more fruitless searching, Beek asked Dennis Courtney to send him a copy of Cack. He was denied. Angered, we downloaded the DC5 demos again, bent on revenge, searching for the place to strike. Hah! There was the perfect target: an intro by GD called Wheel of Fortune! A bit of research revealed that on the NBC schedule, the show right after Wheel of Fortune is Jeopardy! That was our chance for revenge! Q. You are a pair of truly sick individuals, you know that? A. Q. What was the demo created with? A. The code was written with Watcom C. The music was written in Impulse Tracker. The bitmapped graphics were created in a program written by Beek. The vector graphics were created in a program written by Pfister. Q. Why is the Jeopardy executable so much larger than the Foolish executable? A. The difference is that Jeopardy uses the 32-bit version of Midas, being coded in 32-bit Watcom C, and Foolish uses the much smaller 16-bit version, having been coded in 16-bit Borland C. Q. How big is the source code of Jeopardy? A. Not including tables and external libraries and such, about 19k and 950 lines. Q. What's all that yellow crap at the end? A. Do your research, my friend. I'm not giving any of those away. Q. I am finally content. A. Good for you.
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