Hello  and welcome to Superdance, a totaly useless but nonetheless fun to
look  at  piece  of  eye candy in HAM.  Simply run the program (from CLI or
Workbench), select a screen and watch.

  You  have a choice between rectangles and ploygons from the menu, as well
as  varying  the  rate  of  movement, and most importantly you can find out
about who wrote this.

  SuperDance  uses  HAM  or HAM8 mode and can therefore generate any colour
from  the  rainbow.   By  using some clever tricks, the drawing can overlap
previous  drawings without screwing up the colours.  I found this idea from
a  similar  program called "Dance" from an old Fish disk.  After looking at
it,  I  decided  there  were  number  of improvements I could make to speed
things up tremendously.  SuperDance is a totaly new program.

  The technique is simple.  Basicly, the polygons are drawn with a pattern.
The pattern is just a repeating sequence of HAM codes:  set red, set green,
set  blue,  over and over.  I just poke the pattern with the red, green and
blue  values  for  whatever  colour  I want, and then draw the polygon.  At
worst,  three  pixels  around the polygon will be affected adversely -- the
infamous  HAM "fringing".  But you won't get long horizontal streaking like
you  would in a typical HAM picture.  The drawback is that the edges of the
polygon may be very "chunky" looking, depending on the colours.  But at 640
x 400 on an AGA Amiga, you can barely tell.

  Another trick I use is to only draw into the two HAM control planes once,
Rectfill()'ing the whole area with the RGB pattern.  Thereafter I only need
to draw 4 (or 6 for HAM8) planes for the polygons.

  I  have  considered  making  SuperDance  more  interesting by having more
complex  patterns.   Instead  of  random polygon or rectangle, it could for
instance  draw  a star and then rotate, zoom, morph into other shapes, etc.
I'm  not  sure  how to create an algorithm that would be pseudo-random, but
not (almost) completely random like now.

  At  any  rate,  this  software  is  written  by  me, Aric R Caley.  It is
freeware,  distribute it as you please, but don't change the archive in any
way!   You  may  not make it part of a commercial package without asking me
first  (I  doubt that will happen anyway :), and if you want to put it in a
disk  collection  I  would  appreciate hearing about it.  If you like it, I
wouldn't mind getting a postcard from you, or an EMail.  If you really like
it, I really wouldn't mind a few dollars or a few disks of things you think
are cool :)

Internet:

dances@qedbbs.com (can't reply to messages right now)

Snail mail:

Aric R Caley
8720 Valley View, apt J5.
Buena Park, CA, 90620.