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by the Dead Hackers Society
Early July and it's Sommerhack 2015. The Dead Hackers (DHS) are back! They're back with a resounding table-thump of intent, that disturbs quietly resting songbirds in the next village, and jolts clouds of dust into the air from said table. A coughing fit ensues all around.
Yes, they're back, with the welcome return of a jumbo family pizza-sized beast of a demo, after a couple of years or so of relative quiet. This summer, in spite of the cloud and lashing rain outside, suddenly got brighter.
It's not their long expected Falcon 060 demo, but rather they have revisited the scene of their most recent triumphs, the Atari STE. So what is that platform good for? Well with a full complement of 4 Meg of RAM, and a fast hard drive type device such as UltraSatan or CosmoSEX, quite a bit, as it turns out.
The 'holy two disk limit' has been well and truly broken here. A chunky 15 MB of data, around half of that audio, awaits our perusal. But hey, storage is cheap these days, it's as if something I predicted a long time ago is coming true?
Guess I'm running out of preamble, so time to run this thing.
Click on executable, pause whilst black cursor in top left corner flickers reassuringly. Then it starts, the soft sound of waves slopping gently and other random noises of the sea are heard. Then the title screen to own all others fades up. This is an animation, but stunningly fullscreen realised, of a boat gently bobbing in a sunlit, sunset sea, the title of the demo splashed over the front of this. This animation is a surefire winner for 'best looking screen of the year'. But it does have strong competition later on, especially from this demo!
The music starts properly, a strong and confident work of synthesis by Excellence in Art. (We are really missing his next demo, but a tune on here will do nicely for now.) A Jules Verne inspired porthole appears, with a suitably deep ocean themed set of flowing plasmas or textures. As with the previous screen, borders are broken, the top and bottom ones here.
An insanely happy, deliriously coloured still picture from Templeton, of a golden globe emerging from a treasure chest, announces the next set-piece. This is a maximally full screened globe made out of coloured layered strips, with a mad rastered background going on. The globe bounces around the screen with furious energy, the strips twisting back and forth on themselves.
The next screen is one where the effect and design are most artfully combined. It's also the most conspicuously non-fullscreen effect, but top and bottom borders are still banished. We get a vertically virtual bump map, with a suitably marine theme. Not just any old bump map, but many colours are used in this screen. A fishing line is painted over the screen, waiting to catch and reel in any remaining sceptics.
A tropical maiden is painted by Templeton in all colours of summer, and presents the next part. This is the latest variation on the not uncommon 'rotating city block' effect. Starting modestly enough with parts of the skyline exposed only at first, but fully textured office blocks then crowd all corners of the screen, with an aggressive intensity that might be reminiscent of the final days of Nokia Corp, as seen through mind-altering substances?
The most 'conventional' (done before) part of this demo follows hard, with a bunch of zooming textures on screen. No rotate, but no embarrassing borders left either, and all the colours possible to summon from the STE palette.
This fills a space whilst the final parts of the demo are getting ready. A message tells you onscreen that the end is near, some suitably ethereal plasma strands smoothly glide around the screen. Then we're on to the last of Templeton's summery still masterpieces of many colours. A sailing boat, possibly the one at the start of the demo sails into peril, as a massive wave looms over it. A useful fact file in the DHS picture database tells us that 9631 colours were used here, at a resolution of 400 x 273 pixels. This is not untypical for the demo as a whole.
The penultimate screenful, has a tropical island template for the top and bottom borders, sky at the top, and a sandy beach at the bottom, with a suitably tropical palm tree joining both parts. In the vacant middle, a ghostly transparent rotating cube and shiny blobs play out, whilst the sea flows past them. Some credits in the same transparent scheme appear, then the music and the demo itself fade out.
There is one final part, and quite a nice way to end things. A final animation of a waterfall, a massively dominating presence, with no borders left untouched and over 1000 colours used.
A tasty bonus is left to this last part, as it can be left on screensaver mode until you, the viewer decide to press space to end the demo. So you could show this demo with the only Atari STE at a coding party, walk outside for a casual chat and return some time later, secure in the knowledge that this final screen of the demo is still impressing the hell out of casual passers-by whilst you're gone.
So we've been duly impressed. The Dead Hackers Society have managed to fully deliver a 'Falcon demo on an STE' with no compromises. Their earlier releases on the STE had achieved 80-90 percent of the distance, but this one has actually gone all the way.
Some subversive thinking on my part even considers that this demo is right up there with what the Amiga 500 can do on a good day. Top coders for the Amiga may well be able to re-establish some superiority, but it would have to be on a REALLY REALLY good day for their part!
Most people will be content to enjoy the spectacle on offer here. A few might question the non-realtime nature of the animated parts. But I would argue that boundaries are still being challenged by the fullscreen and massively coloured nature of these, and with the cunning coding needed to do all that.
The creator credits for this one are a tight team. Namely Evil and Gizmo providing coding and associated data generation, Xia with his excellence in making a tune, and Templeton doing a huge job, being completely responsible for all the graphics, including those stunning starting and ending animation scenes.
Whilst this one will keep us happy with our STE's for some time to come. We can't help but wonder where the Dead Hackers journeys into Atari code will take us next?
Ratings..
Graphics:- 97% - This has just about anything you need from an STE demo, bumper full screens with gorgeous colours, massive animations, full screen effects. Indeed, summer is here!
Sound:- 92% - Xia assumes a 'Random Orbit', his tasteful tune fully complements the excellence of the rest of the demo.
Gee-Whiz:- 94% - Pushes the Atari STE hard, with a renewed emphasis on a world without borders, constant high colour use, and the animations are a major enhancing feature without overwhelming the rest. 'Falcon demo on STE' is not exaggerating.
Overall:- 96% - This will be very hard to beat on the STE. I hope some other people are motivated to try!
CiH - For Maggie, July 2015.