Clearing out my demo backlog : pushing the limits within the limits
The notorious lord Sinclair ... would put shame to American salesforce on his better days, could even outdo Atari selling abacus for next-gen hardware i bet .
Despite that, i think after the c64 the zx speccy must have the biggest cult , if it comes to games being made i even think its ichiban at the moment but boy o boy ... i think Sinclairs pitch himself was "let the developers be creative" and push crud hardware and they DID
I mean you got like less than an ST or Jag here, no hardware scrolling, no sprites, no NOTHING that i can think of, no redefineable charsets (that would be "tilemaps" today i bet) and on top of that a low-res with small blox that can have only 2 colours BUT
the colour system of a speccy is based on voltage so it says "16 COLOURS!" but actually
you have 2 times 8 where the luminance is defined by the voltage, so you get red, and screamier red or pink-ish, and you end with 8-ish colours BUT
black with more luminance ?
yah
So despite that there's a ton of awesome demos and ten ton of awesome pix-art too , all within the limits using ... well spec requires a special kind of dithering really, you can only use 2 colors per block and of that you can't use the same one dark/lite in one block (i guess thats due to the fact that its the same one with a higher voltage)
can check that here
ofcourse you can search for zx demos on pouet and demozoo too, the one here makes great use of the machines limited hardware id say, doing cool stuff using just what a spec has (but theres lots more great zx demos)
EDIT : waking up , painfully as expected after last nights broken cycle - we'll have to add this one
instead of making an extra post ... its not about the spam and considering the price certainly not about the money. I have to say that THING is trying hard to make me buy NEW stuff, oblivious to the fact that Santa brings "no income" for new year .. its quite annoying and makes me wonder why we havent installed adblock yet
Ad Mortem by
Arise : https://demozoo.org/groups/887/
and Joker : https://demozoo.org/groups/887/
Arise being one of the bigger groups i suppose and from the looks like Joker being one of those who returned to its roots after turning past 40s heheh
you can see in the space scene with the rollercoaster-type effect how the square blocks bleed into the next color zone, probably not if you're not used to it because the eye gets fooled easily but thats the spec there, just like you can see in the opart how square blocks stand out on a still screen.
https://demozoo.org/productions/370512/
END EDIT
we tried our hand once at drawing a pic ... even using multipaint on a PC (which is accurate but easier ofcourse using a pc + pc mouse)
https://demozoo.org/productions/334702/ its in the christmas pack '23
(should start at 0:50)
Drawing the pic took a lot of time actually since we never did that for that machine, getting it somewhat right with the colours , the tune was made in Arkos Tracker (same for the ST christmas card) which is a pc tracker that runs on linux and exports to a lot of formats
can hardly call that a demo but i guess by todays standards it could be
intermezzo ? ::
Something interrupted the sleep cycle so we missed two hours, the constant beeping prevented going back to sleep, like your head ringing on meth ( ... maybe not something everyone's familiar with from their better days) ... because of that im dizzy, nothing recovered , everything hurts the same as before sleep, my knees go through , my neck and shoulder is one stiff plug , my infections didnt go down and my snot pockets didnt go down either, actually they got worse lying there for two hours ...
But we did get two hours of hostile thought towards the place ... not sure what that was
"NU GAAT HET LUKKEN" perhaps ? or someone switched the meds with placebos or effexor (nah, those dont work) or ... ritalin or ... animine ???
whatever it was, tomorrows gonna be more shyte than usual
after this message by our sponsor back to reality :
Checking out this demo another one came to mind
Don't know why but for some reason spec and ST's seem to have a major following on the east side of europe , despite the fact that i bet they werent even available from the start
i remembered a demo from last year, its from a RUSSIAN demoparty, goes to show : demos without borders
people are still having PETs , detached from the grinder , politics or any of that east-west shit they force you into
https://demozoo.org/productions/365241/
Bit Tired
by https://demozoo.org/groups/68836/
See, the beauty of retro, in a day and age where the A.I. will do that for you
im sure it COULDNT do any of this - this requires specific creativity and knowledge of the machine, id say maybe LOVE for the machine, most main democrews stick to their first childhood love and friend for life
this one, for a russian machine : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK
BK-0011M to be more specific
it has 16 palettes of four colours each so that probably means you can have at most 4 per scanline (IF the machine is strong enough to have stable lines per 1) BUT you can have different ones per zone, although they are set and you can't choose them ...
retro is like an archeological dig, right , so knowing THAt, that makes THIS demo quite something even if it looks like
omg this is something russian from the 70s it certainly isnt :)
well the machine is more or less ...
DEMOS WITHOUT BORDERS ... 6am again ...
im tired, but have to hold out or the cycle will be wrong again
check it out, and do it in the knowledge that you cant ask jippedee to do this
these are all VERY talented people, probably slightly above average intelligence too
all wasted talent now
the world will be normalized to make the A look I