Splash by Introspec
"Splash" comes in two versions: gigascreen (for use on real Spectrums connected to real 50Hz TVs/monitors) and multicolour interlace (no flickering even in emulators, but with some interlacing artefacts). In my tests on two 50Hz LCD monitors the gigascreen version produced absolutely no flicker. On fast (e.g. gaming) monitors with lower latency there may be some flicker, but given how stable the picture is on my monitor, I would be surprised if the flicker can really become a problem. For emulators the version with multicolour interlace is preferable. On the other hand, the interlaced versions have slightly better sound quality compared to gigascreen versions. The best sound quality is achieved on the classical Spectrums; Pentagons have the worst sound (sorry, Pentagon guys, cannot fix this one and stay in 1K). This intro would not exist if Hacker VBI had not sent me the link to the famous (infamous?) advert. Therefore, his contribution is absolutely essential. Also very important is the contribution by Diver/4D who believed I could do more. The music was composed by you-know-who, right? Otherwise, this intro was all done by myself, introspec. After writing a first draft of the intro, I got into (or perhaps initiated?) a slightly heated debate on Pouet, regarding whether one should or should not rely upon generic compressors in size-coding. Bluberry's, Gargaj's and Yzi's remarks, and especially Gasman's comment (about his music player in "Haiku") were great and definitely helped to make this intro better. Also, I showed early versions of the intro to several people, who shall remain unnamed here, but whose comments were extremely encouraging. Thank you, guys! In addition, I would like to thank everyone who keeps the platform going, esp. cool guys on all #z80 channels, WoS forum, tslabs.info and zx-pk.ru The key ingredient of this intro, the image of a splash, was compressed to 587 bytes using ZX7 compressor by Einar Saukas and decompressed using a compact 69 byte decompressor by Einar Saukas, Antonio Villena and Metalbrain. My tact alignment code, which was originally based upon Alone Coder's routine from the supplement to ZX-Guide #3, keeps mutating (by the way, do not borrow the mutation from this intro, it was severely cut down to fit into the size limit). I am also using a crazy arbitrary delay rotine, which I think I saw in the 512b intro by alx/bw, and variation of DOWN_HL by E.B. Golyakov from Nicron #125. The rest of the code is fully original. I will be happy to send the code to anyone interested (although reading size-optimised codes is not fun, in my personal opinion). My email is: zxintrospec@gmail.com Software used: SjASMPlus ver.1.07RC8 by Aprisobal, based on the SjASM by Sjoerd Mastijn; ZX7 compressor by Einar Saukas; Spectaculator ver.8.0 by Jonathan Needle; UnrealSpeccy ver.0.38.1 by SMT and other people who still keep it going; UnrealSpeccy modification by TS-Labs; ZXSpin ver.0.7 by Paul Dunn; Matlab 2010a by Mathworks; ZX Paintbrush ver.2.3.5 by Claus Jahn; Irfan View ver.4.30 by Irfan Skiljan; Far ver.2.0 by Eugene Roshal & FAR Group; various plug-ins for Far to work with ZX files by HalfElf; bintap ver.1.1 by infamous BLOOD, with modifications by Volker Bartheld; TRDtool ver.2.2 by Shiru; TRX2X ver.1.2 beta 2 by Alex Makeev; mktap ver.5 by Jan Bobrowski; TAP2TZX ver.0.12b; 7-zip ver.9.22 beta by Igor Pavlov.
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