Original Flag Demo

The polygon flag consists of 240 dots!

The polygon flag consisted of 240 individually animated dots connected by 448 lines that form a total of 209 squares. Additional to that there are stars flying in the background with two different speeds, an Odiesoft logo is animated with vertical waves and a vertical software scroll text is taking up 1/5th of the screen at the bottom.

As you can see from these specifications this was a little too much for the poor old CPC and thus this demo was rather slow. The demo runs with 6 frames a second. But besides that I think it still looks nice.

Since it was one of my early demos which I wrote at a time where I didn't knew so much about speed optimization I think that I could have improved it a lot. For example the demo uses a regular LDIR to clear the whole screen. Clearing just parts of the screen or using the stack pointer to clear the screen would have improved the speed a little.

Also the vertical software scroller wasn't very well written. With some simple optimization tricks or a hardware scrolling with a split screen I surely could have saved some calculation time as well. And using a direct addressing sprite routine for the Odiesoft logo would probably have been enough to speed up this demo to 12 or 25 frames a second.

Anyway. After I realized that using vector graphics to create the Flag demo wasn't good enough I came up with the idea for the flag using "filled polygons" (which were just some sprites, and not real vector objects). This demo looked a lot better and was also released as most of you know very well.

The polygon flag was never released. I used it one or two times to write letters to some friends and impress them with this program - that's what I call an elaborate ghost writer...