Megademo

My view on Megademos has to start with a ‘Wow, I never knew my Sam could do that!’ when I see some new effect running on the SAM, then quickly changes to ‘Oooh, interesting, I wonder how they did that?’ by trying to figure out how the effects are done!

Demos always have a place for coders, for trying new coding techniques and coming up with solutions for challenging problems, and from what I’ve seen recently on something that’s currently unreleased it blew my socks off with an array of dazzling effects - a massive round of applause to the coder out there…!

I’ve not coded a demo since copying the two layer scrolling from the Amiga demo ‘Hit Fido’ a few years ago, but I need to get my finger out to come up with a demo effect for a menu for one of the disks with the special SAM Revival issue. If you’ve read the comments in the last SAM Revival ‘Comment’ section I’m toying with a 4x4 greyscale block video… probably using MODE2 just to be different!

Colin
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Quazar : Hardware, Software, Magazines and more for the SAM Coupe
1995-2010 - Celebrating 16 Years of developing for the SAM Coupe
Website: http://www.samcoupe.com/

Hey, one “stupid” vote. Is Bob lurking here as well? :-)

Um… relevance of the last comment above??!! :-? anyways…

I’m about the same, first it’s the “Wow, I never knew my Sam could do that!” then the “Oooh, interesting, I wonder how they did that?”

I remember in years gone by I thought “Why didn’t they do that in a game or something?” but then you realise there’s a big step between proof of concept and final execution in a much larger project. Most game development time isn’t spent in making sure the fancier effects work, but in the overall product, due to scale, graphics, levels, refining interactions and controls, whatever… ;-)

So I think Demos are a great way for people to experiment, learn, get their skills out there and shown, and also fire up other people to think “Hey, if they can do that, maybe I can do….”

Sam can be a great machine for demos.

Ok, 24k might be too much, but can use some tricks with many video pages changing per line, or can do bitmap effects with very very optimized z80 code on smaller screens like I do on CPC, I don’t care about fullscreen if the effect is modern. And with the good palette they can look better, imagine a gouraud shading with good shades.

I am new in Sam and started learning the basics, how to switch the memory banks, vram banks, line interrupts and that. I have many ideas. Will slowly start making a demo (don’t know how long it will take). I don’t have the real Sam yet, a bit expensive on ebay, but might buy one sooner or later. Meanwhile I’ll just code on PC and test on SimCoupe.

Demo always makes sense on old machines, cause the demoscene keeps them alive, shows more things are possible.

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