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*                                                                             *
*   Demo:   Wishing Well       Type:    Amstrad CPC Emulator DSK File         *
*   Author: Odiesoft           Webpage: http://www.odiesoft.de                *
*   Size:   1 * 194816 Bytes   Date:    16. May 2003                          *
*   File:   Odiesoft Demos - Wishing Well (1992).dsk                          *
*                                                                             *
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Title: Wishing Well
Year:  1992


When the Acorn Archimedes was announced in 1987 it rocked the homecomputer
world! It was assumed, that a computer that was able to animate rendered balls
in realtime in BASIC had to conquer the computer market by storm!

First of all it turned out that the rendered balls weren't animated in realtime.
They were just pictures that were displayed by a BASIC program (so the BASIC
part was true about the story).

And unfortunately it also didn't conquer the computer market by storm due to too
litte advertisement and publicity and also because of the highly limited
availabilty of the Archimedes on mainland Europe.

Another limitation of the Archimedes was the fact that the Acorn didn't allow
for third-party hardware development and distribution. The Archimedes and all
its hardware had to be bought from Acorn to the prices Acorn dictated. Therefore
everything connected to the Acorn was very expensive compared to the growing PC
market.

Anyway, I bought a used Acorn A310 in 1989 and first of all spent a lot of time
playing vector graphics games and others. One of those other games was called
"Cataclysm". 

The story of the game went something like that you play a worker who has to
redirect water, acid or other substance through a pipe system, so that the fluid
just went to the designated sinks and tanks instead of going through the whole
system and inflicting damage on wetness sensitive machinery. The fluid was
displayed by thousands of bytes that came out of a pipe and were running down
the screen and filled any gap they've come over.

I found this particular idea appealing and liked the way the water was being
displayed. Even though animating hundredth or thousands of individuals bytes on
the screen would take up a lot of calculation time I tried to create a CPC
conversion of this idea. 

This was how I had created the Wishing Well, even though I didn't really call it
this way at first. Thriller invented the name when he had to integrate this part
into "The Revenge Demo", since I had always called this program just
"water.bin"...

It turned out that most people liked the 'Wishing Well' a lot and some even
spent hours trying to get this or that basin to overflow. Marabu once told me
that he has the feeling that the Wishing Well had some kind of hypnotic
pacifying effect.

This demo also became part of the SYSCRASH asc production: "GOS Party 4 - The
Revenge Demo" (Side 1, Part 6) since I lacked the motivation to create a mega
demo myself.


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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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