Release date: November 2014
Platform: zx spectrum
Pouet:
Full title: Wonderball (aka Happy Birthday Diver)
Label: introspec & triebkraft
Credits: introspec (design & code)
key-jee^tbk (music)
The running man animation was made using 12 frames
of the video about Interactive Media Canvas “IRIS“
by HYBE (2012):
Requirements: A ZX Spectrum with 128K of memory (or compatible)
Stereo format: ABC
Duration: 2:38 (looped)
Contacts: zxintrospec@
Notes: Happy birthday, diver^4d!
This demo is horrendously delayed and I won’t bore
you with a range of convincing excuses that explain
why it is so. Put simply, this seems to be the best
(the quickest & the nicest) I can do at this stage.
I hope you like it anyway!
The code here is mostly original, although often
suboptimal. My knowledge of monster^sage-style
stack-based 8x8 chunk blitters comes mainly from
the example coded for me last year by psndcj^tbk;
many thanks for this mate, your help is hugely
appreciated. Few things that I do with these chunks
seem original to me, but I am sure there must be an
ugly Russian demo from 1990s which does most of it
in a frame :) The music player is interesting
because this is the fastest player of compressed
PSGs on ZX Spectrum (~450 t-states per frame on
average, less than 1K t-states in the worst case
scenario). The demo kernel is a slightly modified
version of the kernel used earlier this year in
“Down“; I first wrote it based upon the sources of
the Triebkraft demo kernel by psndcj^tbk and jtn^4d,
which were kindly given to me by psndcj^tbk. The
kernel is using the ZX7 “mega“ decompression routine
by Einar Saukas, with contributions from Urusergi
and Team Bomba.
Thanks: key-jee^tbk for allowing me to use your nice track,
trefi^debris for his unhealthy facination with demo
kernels, hacker vbi for his continued interest,
optimism and enthusiasm, nyuk for “Zapilyator“ (TM),
which proved to be extremely useful here ;)
nq^skrju for regular sanity checks, diver^4d for
the hexagonal gigascreen palette, which made my life
much easier, and last, but not least, psndcj^tbk,
for getting me into this mess in the first place!
Greetings to aaa, alone coder, bolek^4d, crash
nicker^debris, dman^pcb, evills^zt, g0blinish,
gasman^hprg, kotsoft, lordcoxis, mike^zt, mister
beep, nodeus, prof^4d, psb, random, rob^entire,
sq^skrju, TSL, true-grue, tutty^debris,
tygrys^, unbeliever, utz.
Software used: SjASMPlus by Aprisobal,
based on the SjASM by Sjoerd Mastijn;
Processing ;
MATLAB 2010a;
ZX7 compressor by Einar Saukas;
Spectaculator by Jonathan Needle;
UnrealSpeccy by SMT and other people;
UnrealSpeccy modification by TS-Labs and EARL;
ZXSpin by Paul Dunn;
ZX Paintbrush by Claus Jahn;
Photoshop CS2;
Irfan View by Irfan Skiljan;
Far by Eugene Roshal & FAR Group;
Far plug-ins to work with ZX files by HalfElf;
TRDtool by Shiru;
TRX2X beta 2 by Alex Makeev;
monoscl by Shiru;
mktap ver.5 by Jan Bobrowski;
7-zip beta by Igor Pavlov;
as well as various in-house software.