Droject by Hysteria
Droject by Hysteria, 1995. Unreleased so far. Foreword by Sol, 2009: This demo was written for low-end 486 or high-end 386 machines, even though only 286 instruction set was used (as far as I know, anyway). It can be watched using DOSBOX 0.72 (15000 cycles, dynamic core), or more easily via youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s32dDVR0NdY I went to the same highschool with !Cube, and we took the same computing course - the one where they teach basics of Pascal. As part of the course, you had to write some kind of project. The most common one was one of those 'phone directory' things where you write records in file with fields for name, phone number, address, whatnot. We did a demo instead. This demo was never released, until now that is, as we didn't feel that it was good enough. Looking back, I think we were a bit stupid. Anyway, the demo was accompanied by 'documentation' and a bit of source code, both of which were horribly, horribly arrogantly worded. I must have been.. less likeable back then. Anyway, droject came up in a discussion, and I started to look for it in my backups, not finding it. Luckily Tonic had a copy, so I figured if we don't release this now, it's a goner. Fun facts: - Source code is heavily assembler-aided turbo pascal. - Proper speed seems to be around 15000 cycles in dosbox 0.72 dynamic core. - If you try to run the demo without audio, it is rather rude to you. - Uses a 75Hz timer (which messes up system clock on native-dos systems). - Lots and lots of stuff done in the timer interrupt in an unwise way including drawing of those horizontal lines (thus, even if the effect doesn't run in full speed, those lines do) and some palette effects. - Logo scaler used 10.6 fixed point math. - 3d math is 16.16 fixed point.. in the gouraud shaded cube at least. - Plasma has 8 sine curves. - IFS fractals and bouncing dots look ugly if run too fast. - The two sticks in the credit part apparently have 8 different filters. - About 5100 lines of code (not including mod player). - Music is 8-channel octalyzer MOD composed on an Atari-STE by !Cube. The ending part is a common "unlimited bobs" effect, i.e. uses N pages to flip through... except that we don't have enough memory for the N pages used here. Thus, a rather neat dithering is used - something I've never seen in any other demo. Same kind of dither was also used in the plasma part. I actually wrote tools to visually design the dither patterns.. Anyway, I hope you like the demo, even though you don't have the same kind of nostalgia about it as I do. =) Cheers, Sol
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