Megademo Intro

Yours truely introduces his latest demo...

It was one of my first fullscreen demos and I tried to use this extended screen space to display an overlarge font. So I used the idea of a ball drawing some text on the screen like I have seen many times before in other demos.

Since I wanted to use screen mode 1 so that the ball wouldn't look so bulky I had just 4 colours available. Also in mode 1 there are for pixels in each byte and since the ball was only able to move byte by byte this meant that with every horizontal movement it would advance four pixels.

The "Ball-pen" is painting incessantly...

So in the end the overlarge text looked bulky, not because the ball wasn't detailed enough, but because it was only able to move in a very big grid.

I've created an overscreen editor with which I was able to draw the text. So I didn't use an iteration routine to collect two different points on the screen with the balls. Instead I painted every single ball using the cursor keys and space.

Unfortunately by using this method to store the individual points of the oversize font the available memory ran out very soon. So there was just enoug memory left for a few text-screens. Nothing more than a "This is Odiesoft presenting in 1991 Megademo" and a some greetings to the few people I had contact with in 1991.

1991 - this was a long time ago!

The scrolling text on the bottom part of the screen was also a premiere for me. For the first time I was really using color bars to extend the limited color palette of the CPC in Mode 1. In the scrolltext two slightly shifted sets of color bars define the color within the characters and on the small border around the characters. Thus the characters look more interesting then just plain characters with color bars.

Since I wanted to do some more than just display an oversize text and a scrolltext I had the idea to add a pipe and a ditch to the screen and have the scrolltext come out of the pipe and later fall into the ditch.

I've invested some time to have the characters come out of the pipe and grow in size while they are exiting from the pipe. Later, when they fall in the ditch, parts of the characters brake off and fall into the ditch individually.

Unfortunately you don't really see all that in the demo since the scrolltext moves so fast, that you don't really have time to pay attention to the other effects in this demo. The pipe itself is also enhanced with additional colors to make it look more realistic and threedimensional.

For the music I ripped the sound out of the Amstrad CPC version of Tetris and inserted it into the demo. With the keys from 1 to 3 you can change the sound being played.

My first big Megademo... or not?

As with the other parts for this Megademo this introduction also didn't make it into an official Odiesoft publication. I didn't get to write any additional parts besides the first three and when I wanted to release a Megademo some years later I thought that the first three parts weren't this good anymore.