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*                                                                             *
*   Demo:   Demo 1             Type:    Amstrad CPC Emulator DSK File         *
*   Author: Odiesoft           Webpage: http://www.odiesoft.de                *
*   Size:   1 * 194816 Bytes   Date:    17. February 2003                     *
*   File:   Odiesoft Demos - Demo 1 (1991).dsk                                *
*                                                                             *
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Title: Demo 1
Year:  1991


This was intended to become the second part for my first big megademo on the
Amstrad CPC. This effect was very common at that time and I hadn't seen a good
implementation of it on the CPC. So I took it on to be the first CPC coder to
create this "ball-snake" effect.

This animation is basically just a flipping of screens where the balls are
slightly moved into a certain direction. The trick that makes this animation
believable as a continuous motion is to use more than just two different
screens.

Since the CPC isn't blessed with much memory it is hard to save enough memory to
be able to use three screens. So the CPC demos using this effect at that time
were just flipping between two screens.

I managed to put the ball graphics, the sound, the program, eight different
snake-forms and some scroll text into 16 kilobyte of memory, so that I had 48
kilobytes free for the animation, i. e. three different screens. So balls in
this demo look like they are performing a continuous motion.

I admit, some of the eight different waveforms I've created don't look this
good. The problem with these forms was, that they needed to have a definite
start and an end point. The animation program wasn't able to create a form where
the head of the snake moves around endlessly with the tail trailing behind.

And since I was happy with having created this effect in the first place I
wasn't in the mood to spent this much more time on programming better
waveforms.

This was often my problem at that time: I had created the program and proved
that it was possible, but then I didn't had the time or the joy to create a nice
graphic surface or frame around the demo...

For a long time in a lot of French demos it was the other way around: cool
graphics and fonts, but boring effects - just a bunch of hardware scrollers,
wobble effects or color bars. But in the past couple of years this has changed a
lot. Now the remaining French CPC freaks create cool demos with cool graphics...

Back to this demo: As stated above this was supposed to be one of many parts in
a planned Odiesoft Megademo in 1991. But unfortunately I didn't release this
Megademo or any other (in 1994/ 95 I wanted to release a Megademo called
"Dangerous", but never did...). And some years later I thought that this effect
wasn't good enough anymore to be released bearing my alias.

Since I didn't wanted to withold this demo from the CPC audience I finally hid
this demo in the updated Shining Christmas Party Demo (the one with the vertical
color bars) in the Divine Megademo. To access it you have to press "CTRL",
"SHIFT", "CAPS LOCK", "TAB" and "ESC" at the same time.

I never really thought about a proper name for this demo or the effect. So I
named my demos in the order they were written, therefore this was just called
"Demo 1" (after "Demo 0" which I later called "Tetris sound demo", because it
featured the Sound ripped from the Amstrad game Tetris).

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*                                                                             *
* This program can be distributed freely and without the need of a written    *
* of a written permission by Odiesoft, as long as it is distributed free of   *
* charge!                                                                     *
*                                                                             *
* If you had to pay for this, you've been ripped off!                         *
*                                                                             *
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