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Text File | 1994-09-28 | 16.7 KB | 297 lines

<head> <title="...forever..."> <font=monaco10.fnt> <font=newy36.fnt> <font=time24.fnt> <image=back.raw w=256 h=256 t=-1> <buf=4420> <bgcolor=-1> <background=0> <link_color=253> <module=console.mod> <pal=back.pal> colors: 251 - black </head> <body> <frame x=0 y=0 w=640 h=4420 b=-1 c=-1> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- F A C E T O F A C E W I T H F A M O U S S C E N E R S ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ::: ::::::: ::::::: :::::: ::::::: ::: ::: ::: :::::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: :::::::: ::::::: ::: ::: ::: :::::::: ::: : ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: ::: :::: :::: ::: ::: ::: ::: :::::: ::: ::: :::::: ::: :::::: ::: ::: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- <link=gasman.scr>G A S M A N / H O O Y - P R G ^ A Y R I D E R S</l> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- one of the most faithful Speccy sceners from England! one of the still active ZX warriors! suddenly caught and heavy moleSTed by Grey / Mystic Bytes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Grey: Yo Gasman! I am so glad to catch a die-hard Speccy fan for a chat! Welcome to Atari's garden dude! :) Gasman: Yo! Nice place you've got here :-) Grey: And now get naked! Get naked!:) Let's start with a small introduction to our community, Gas! How old are you, what are you doing in the so called "real life" and so on? Gasman: I'm 22, living in Oxford, UK, and I've followed the typical path for demosceners, I guess - I finished my studies in computer science last year, and now I'm working for a small company doing web development. Grey: Could you dig out from memory that 1st moment when you touched those rubber keys? :) And what were your impressions? Why did you choose Speccy instead of Commy or 8-bit Atari? Gasman: It wasn't really my choice, as I was only 4 years old at the time :-) It was certainly one of the cheapest computers around, which I'm sure helped the decision quite a lot - and my parents had a Sinclair ZX81 before, so it was the natural progression from there. I wasn't a big fan of the games back then - for some reason I found the idea of being chased down corridors by ghosts rather frightening... luckily the Spectrum had some of the best manuals and programming guides out there, so it all moved on from there. Grey: I've heard that Sinclair's babe was the most popular micro-computer in UK, is it true? Gasman: Yeah, that sounds about right - about 5 million sold in total, I believe. I don't really remember any of my friends having C64s or Ataris - the only other 8-bitters I saw were BBC Micros (the platform chosen by schools across the UK). Hmm, that makes me wonder why the BBC demoscene is totally non-existent... Grey: The Speccy world gathered a lot of die-hard fanatics who didn't let the legend fade out! Some software companies were supporting this machine till the very last death pangs. Such big titles as "Lemmings" were even released! Was this community REALLY *THAT* STRONG?! Gasman: Yep, the Spectrum lived on commercially well into the 1990s, with a loyal band of followers. At one point the magazines published petitions to fill out and send to the software houses, and that persuaded some of them to carry on supporting the Speccy for a little while longer. Some of the later games were very impressive achievements, considering that they were designed with the next generation of computers in mind - but eventually they reached the stage where you'd spend 10 minutes loading a level from tape, and one minute playing it (Street Fighter 2 was the most notorious example, I think...), and it was time to move on. Grey: And what about media-press? What was the last commercial paper- magazine released? Are there any fanzines available and where can we lay our hands on them? Gasman: The last one to die off was Your Sinclair, which released its last issue in August 1993. It carried on being a really entertaining magazine right to the end, despite the lack of new games to report on - instead, they started talking more about programming, emulators, the demo scene, and a strange mysterious thing called the Internet :-) The writing style was excellent, and certainly influenced a lot of today's computer mags. There are a few fanzines still in production - the longest running ones come from the two German Spectrum clubs: SUC <http://www.sintech-shop.de/home/spectrum-user-club.htm> and SPC <http://www.womoteam.de/>. I'd also highly recommend ZXF, which started quite recently but has quickly become one of the top sources of Speccy news - it's aimed at newcomers as well as 'old hands', and best of all, it's a free download from <http://www.zxf.cjb.net/>. Grey: And now let us poke our noses into the mysterious Speccy scene :) Do you remember the 1st demo you ever saw? When did you decide to become a member of that community and why? Gasman: The first demo I saw must have been Beruska by Marek Fiser, which I got on a Your Sinclair covertape - a short animation about a man and his pet ladybird :-) The life-changing moment happened the next month, when they had NMI 2 by Dynamite Dynastie on the tape - this was one of the first 'technical' demos to show off effects that had never been seen in games. It was traditional oldskool stuff, really (25 scrollies at once, multicolour effects...) but it inspired me to start work on a demo of my own. And some time later, I made my debut with a lame demo written mostly in Basic, which I foolishly named "Second Reality", unaware that some Finnish guys had already picked that name for a certain PC demo... :-) Grey: What group are you in and what's your role? Gasman: My main group is Hooy-Program, where I'm the main coder. I also do quite a lot of music, although the music writing duties for our demos are divided between myself, Yerzmyey and TDM. I do the occasional bit of graphics too, when nobody more talented is around... Another group I'm in is Raww Arse, which was formed from all the remaining sceners from the UK and a couple of others - unfortunately the demo making activity of the group has fizzled away, but it still lives on in other projects like the raww.org news site. Finally, I'm a member of AY Riders, a group of musicians who have produced two albums of Spectrum chip music goodness - <http://ayriders.zxdemo.org/> Grey: How many ppl is the Speccy scene gathering together nowadays? Are there any demo parties dedicated only to your community? Gasman: I reckon there are about 40-50 really active demo makers today, although it always surprises me when a new party springs up in a remote corner of Europe and the compo results are filled with new unknown names. There are certainly hundreds (maybe even thousands) of 'casual' Speccy fans, including plenty of software and hardware developers, and many more just in it for the games and the nostalgia. We do have occasional meetings just for the Speccy scene, but not very often - the most important events in the party calendar are the multi-format ones, especially CAFe (big PC / Amiga / ZX party in St. Petersburg) and Forever (all-8bit party in Trencin, Slovakia). For the last two years it's been my pleasure to add Assembly to that list, too. Grey: Talking about parties - what's the general idea of organizing "International Vodka Party" at Yerzmyey's flat in Poland? ;) What do you celebrate and what are you doing aside from drinkin' countless glasses of vodka? ;) Gasman: I think you've summarised it quite nicely there! It's a small informal gathering, a sort of antidote to the big all-format parties with strict alcohol regulations... we made a couple of trips to the historic centre of Krakow to admire the architecture, and still found time for a demo compo. Strangely enough, after eight shots of vodka I was inspired to fire up my laptop, and ended up doing some of my best music and coding work of this year :-) Grey: What kind of effects contain standard Speccy release? Any new graphic modes discovered? New sound tricks? 3D objects with lotsa faces etc? Please describe at least one Speccy demo pleez! Gasman: As far as graphics modes go, there's only two real techniques - multicolour (changing screen memory while the same line is being rendered, to allow more than two colours in an 8x8 block) and interlace (which isn't real interlace, just swapping two or more images every frame). One of the most impressive developments in this area is the DithVide graphic mode unveiled by Zilog at this year's Forever party, which combines both methods - see <http://www.zxdemo.org/item.php?id=4801> for an example. In the sound department, we've had sampled music for a long time but there was a major breakthrough last month when Czech scener Poke released the first demonstration of SidSound on Speccy. It must be said that most recent demos don't really push these limits, though - they tend to be based on so-called "chunks", patterned 4x4 blocks that simulate low-res greyscale pixels. The Russian group Placebo are the undisputed leaders in this style - they've achieved really advanced (but rather low FPS...) 3D effects like texture mapping and Gouraud shading, all set to a heavy industrial soundtrack and mixed with stylish graphics from their main artist, Paracels (who makes Speccy pixelling look much easier than it really is...) But perhaps it's not fair to talk about a 'typical' Spectrum demo - there's a lot of diversity, and groups often have distinctive styles. Skrju have taken the scene to a new extreme with their experimental art, and Brainwave always stand out with jazzy soundtracks and healthy doses of colour. Grey: Have you seen any new demos released for C-64 or Atari XL/XE? And what's your opinion? Do Speccy releases beat them? Gasman: Well, I was really blown away by Taquart's "Numen" demo when I saw it at International Vodka Party - in the end it got shown about 5 times in total! I think it'll be a tough job for any 8-bit demo to beat that - although it does leave me wondering if Taquart are so far ahead of everyone else that they'll be unstoppable for ever... I'm always impressed by the C64 demos I see each year at Forever - I dare say the Spectrum is slightly further ahead for individual 3D effects, but you can definitely feel the dedication that goes into making C64 productions so polished and professional. I guess the Spectrum doesn't quite have the 'critical mass' where we see megademos competing against megademos, so demo makers don't see the need for those final touches... Grey: Is there any disk-magazine released for the Speccy? (with english articles?). Any place to download it? Gasman: Subliminal Extacy <http://papaya.raww.net/> is one which has become something of a legend on the Speccy scene - unfortunately at the current rate we'll be expecting the next issue in three years time... Luckily the Russian scene has started to cater for the outside world with English language articles - Adventurer and Scream are two disczines I've really enjoyed lately, both downloadable from - <http://trd.speccy.cz/press/press.htm>. Grey: What's your Speccy config? :) Gasman: It's a Spectrum +2 (128K memory, AY soundchip, and built-in tape deck) with a Plus D disc drive added. However, this stays in a cupboard for most of the year - the only time I use it is for presenting works at Assembly, where they insist on showing them with the real hardware. For my everyday work, I've moved entirely on to emulators and cross-assemblers. It's much more convenient, and being able to cut and paste between text files makes coding a lot less painful :-) Grey: Is there standard spec or is it possible to see more POWERED machines? Gasman: It's a standard in the UK, and not much more - standards are one place that the Speccy scene is really lacking. Almost every country has its own 'local' clones - some of them have more advanced features (the Russian ones tend to have 256 or 512K, for example) but that doesn't really result in better demos, just incompatible ones :-/ So, I guess the real standard on the Speccy today is "emulators" :-) There's one recent addition to the Spectrum family which takes things a step further - the Peters Sprinter: <http://www.petersplus.com/sprinter/>. It's all based on programmable logic, so it's hard to say whether it's a Spectrum clone or a PC with Spectrum emulator support in hardware. All very clever stuff, but to be honest it's so far beyond the Spectrum that it doesn't really interest me as a Spectrum fan. Grey: I wouldn't finish this interview without a mention of your great www-site (www.zxdemo.org) :) How many visitors "hit it" every month? Gasman: It's been attracting 9000 visitors a month recently - it's come a long way since the early days when it was a single page with as many demos as I could fit in my 10Mb free webspace account. For the future, I'm hoping to increase the background information and make it more of a two-way experience - expect to see Pouet-style comments and voting in the near future! Grey: Ok Gasman, it's time to GET DRESSED! : Thanx for your patience and all your answers! Keep cool and all the best for your projects! :) Gasman: Thanks! Greetz to sceners from all platforms, everywhere! - - - --- - ------ FINAL NOTE - - -------- -- -- This chat was lead especially to inject some optimism into our minds! Speccy, the legend of computing is still alive and kickin'! It's never too late to rise up from the ashes! FUCK THE MAINSTREAM! DON'T TRAMPLE ON YOUR ROOTS! grey / msb signed off... -- - --- -- ------------------------------------------------------------------- CHOSNECK 4th appearance contact us: done by the dream survivors greymsb@poczta.fm ----------------------------------------------------------------- -- - --- ---- </frame> </body>