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Assembly 1994 - The 3rd Phase
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ASMROM94.mdf
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valhalla.txt
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1994-08-29
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28KB
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517 lines
==============================================================================
VALHALLA INFO FILE FOR VISIONS OF LIGHT
==============================================================================
Table of Contents
How to use this document viewer
A few things about the demo
Information about us
Messages section
Cursed! The tale of Asm '94 :-)
==============================================================================
How to use this document viewer
==============================================================================
Simple :) Cursor keys scroll around the document in the normal boring way :)
Some areas of text, eg. the contents page, will be highlighted. These are
active areas, and if you put the cursor somewhere in this area, and press
return, you will jump to another point in the document, so to look at any
topic on the table of contents, just put the cursor in the table of contents
on the topic you want, and hit return. Cool, huh? :-) (PS. This was my first
ever C program - Imp. :)
==============================================================================
A few things about the demo
==============================================================================
This demo was developed in its entirety after the two of us met in our first
year at university, and decided a demo would be a really cool thing to do :)
It started off (as they do) as loadsa little ideas for routines that we
gradually had a bash through (including a few failed ones)... and then I
(Imp) volunteered to do the music and put the whole thing together (worst
mistake of my life :-) which at times dealt me a major no rester trying to
understand Sandman's code ;-) (Hmm... in fact trying to understand MY code
was bad enough!) Anyway, the whole thing from start to finish probably took
us about 4 months or so... right up until we finished it... about 1 hour
before the deadline :) (see the lil' story below!) I wrote all the music for
the credits while we were at Asm'94 with a pair of minature headphones
plugged in tut' GUS trying to compete with a however-many-thousand-watt
speaker system they had erected in the hall (best bit about Asm i reckon ;)
The machines we used to develop the demo were :
486DX33 (at times a DX40 :), GUS, Tseng Labs ET4000 supa fast jobby (Sandy's)
486SX25 (whimper whimper), GUS (suprised? :), Trident 8900D (Impy's)
This gave me quite a bit of hassle when putting the whole thing together,
since I was doing it all on my SX25 with a pretty slow graphics card,
compared to the great mother of a machine they had at Asm :) (nice seeing
your stuff run that fast ;) Had to work out quite a few clever bits of code
to make the demo run the same speed whatever you run it on... only bit left
which I let run as fast as it likes is the 3 coloured glass lenses bit which
I have never seen run on anything faster than a DX66 with a really sh**e
graphics card, so someone with a fast machine tell me what it looks like :-)
Sound support : Although we had a modplayer, it only supported GUS and
only did MODs... We kinda thought it would be a bit lame to make our demo
GUS only, and more to the point, MOD format really sucks :) (S3Ms rule! gimme
those 7 octaves :) so having fiddled with Demo-VT a bit before, I decided it
would be a much better idea to use that. I had a few minor problems with it
along the way... and about 2 pretty major ones :) so I can't thank Jcab of
Iguana enough for all the continued help he has given me with it (even to
the point of Emailing me bug fixed versions of the EXE :-) (bugs??? where did
that word come from? :) sorry! *undocumented features*) Please note (so that
we don't get 20,000 tons of mail about it) that we have experienced minor
timing problems on some SoundBlasters, but it works ok on most.
Minimum system requirements :
This depends a lot on processor speed, graphics card speed, and more than
anything else, sound card. Although I have never tested it on a 386, a friend
ran it on his 386DX40 (I think!) with GUS, and it ran fine. On no sound it
runs a little bit faster, so you could probably get away with an even slower
386, but I don't guarantee it. SoundBlaster is another matter entirely :)
The music to all of the demo except the end credits is in 16 channels... and
if your processor is trying to mix this in real time at the same time as
running a really cool headache, then you can really expect it to have a
mare :) I ran this on my friends SX25 with a SBPro, and it was quite funny :)
Basically, don't try this at home :-) A DX40 is probably about right for the
slowest machine you can use with a SoundBlaster... sorry about this you
people out there who still have SoundBlasters! As for SoundPlayer on LPT1:
and PC speaker, tee hee, 'nuff said :) (you ARE joking, right?!)
==============================================================================
Information about us
==============================================================================
1) The members of Valhalla
2) Our productions to date
3) Possible future productions
4) How to contact us
==============================================================================
1) The members of Valhalla :
+===========+=====+====================================================+
| Handle | Age | Tasks |
+===========+=====+====================================================+
| Sandman | 19 | Coding, Graphics, PR, Design |
+-----------+-----+----------------------------------------------------+
| Implode | 19 | Coding, Music |
+-----------+-----+----------------------------------------------------+
| Dambuster | 19 | Raytracing, Object designing *not official member* |
+===========+=====+====================================================+
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2) Our Productions to date :
+==============+=======+=======+===========================================+
| Filename | Size* | Date* | Description |
+==============+=======+=======+===========================================+
| CRITICAL.ZIP | 190k | 2/94 | Critical demo by Occult, a one man demo |
| | | | produced entirely by me, and done in a |
| | | | hurry, done before Valhalla formed. |
+--------------+-------+-------+-------------------------------------------+
| BSCRTEXT.ZIP | 20k | 3/94 | A small bit of my old source to do a text |
| | | | scroller, should be of use to people |
| | | | starting up in demo coding, as it was one |
| | | | of the first things I coded on the PC. |
+--------------+-------+-------+-------------------------------------------+
| SRCTIMER.ZIP | 20k | 4/94 | A little util to help you optimize your |
| | | | code, times how long the program takes to |
| | | | execute, and gives the frame rate. |
+--------------+-------+-------+-------------------------------------------+
| OTT.EXE | 40k | 8/94 | Over the top 64k intro for assembly 94 |
| | | | again done in a hurry. will probably |
| | | | re-release with improved music. |
+--------------+-------+------+--------------------------------------------+
| VOLBYVAL.ZIP | 1.3Mb | 8/94 | Visions of Light demo for assembly 1994 |
| | | | our most recent production, and the best |
| | |