\I[Dancing coder: Scout of C-Lous|By Frame|Section: The Scene of Ours]
\F1\1\MFuture Plans
\2We have seen two intros (or is Masque a demo?) from Scout. They have both been multitasking and that is really cool, but why?
\2
- Well... I grew up with Devpac, so when I switched to A1200 I began using Devpac 3.02 (3.04 later). I made a few small routines, and when a friend asked me if I would like to program a Wolfenstein-clone I made some system-friendly routines. The clone was never finished, but I continued using the (almost) multitasking intro routines.
Using them I can trace any routine in my program (except for the parts using the blitter directly) and I can watch the screen of the program at any time. It makes life a lot more easier :-)
The disadvantages are mainly:
1) No Copper list. The only way of giving copper-instructions is by creating UCopLists and calling MrgCop() which takes ages.
2) No 64-pixel sprites. The hardware only handles one sprite width at a time, and I don't know of any system-friendly way of removing the 16- pixel mouse pointer (not just giving it a zero image).
The main routines grab most of the processor time (as always when it comes to demos), but on faster Amigas it certainly is possible to do almost anything at the same time! (Well, I wouldn't recommend doing serial/parallel communications but apart from that...)
The routines give me another advantage as well. How many demos out today will work on the next generation of Amigas? (Remember how well all those A500-demos worked on the A1200...) It makes your productions much more stable. I made our Assembly '95 40k-intro entirely on a clean A1200 (with an external HD) and there was no need to test it on any other computer (it worked fine on the A4000 at Assembly)! You'd better be a real hacker if you try to do something like that non-system-friendly...
If I by some reason is forced to do things the non-system-friendly way, I only need to change one line of code - all the OS-dependent interface routines are stored in one single include-file.
If there's enough time I'll include (?) some routines in this mag.
\3
Do you plan any more intros in the future? Or maybe a demo?
\2
- I have no idea at all...
Well, let's just say: No more object-shows! It's too damn boring watching demos containing only slideshows of vector objects! If I get some spare time, I think I'll study 2d-effects...
\2
Well, you have now been introduced to a rather new face in the scene, Scout. He has been programming for 7 years on the 68000 (Atari), 3 years on the PC and and 2 years on the 68020 (now 68030) - stated just to confirm the fact that he is a really experienced coder, in that age! In the future we all have to watch out for the dancing coder. With certainty.
I hope you will like to be a member of C-Lous - also in the future!
\3Thanks to Raili, Scout's mother, for some interesting detailed information.
