From the Archives - Alive 15 Demo Reviews.

2013 note:- A whole bunch of rediscovered demo reviews which were intended for Alive 15, somehow missed the great clearing out from the first issue of Mag! After merging together into one textfile, here they are, some great forgotten gems! They were mostly written at around July 2008.

Paradize Slideshow

by Simon Sunnyboy - Paradize

This is a simple slideshow of photographs taken by Simon Sunnyboy from the Outline 2007 party. It is notable for being the first Paradize Falcon 030 exclusive release, and arrived in November 2007. It is described as a 'thank you' to the organisers of the party.

When you click to run, it starts with a jarringly loud Amiga-chippy sounding modfile, a short and often looping tune. There is an infoscreen in a very hard to read font but at least we are allowed to do this in our own time before being invited to hit a key to commence the show.

There is a title screen, a huge and elaborate 3D'ish 'Paradize' logo, then it's on with the show!

The slideshow concept in this case delivers a satisfying load of pictures, not just a small handful, as Simon Sunnyboy has raided his photographic archive in depth. Outline '07, as you are all tired of hearing by now, was the party I didn't get to. Like this year's event, it was set at Braamt and the locations shown in the pictures, along with the people were intensely familiar from my other visits. We did get to see things like prescreens of the Blubber Songs zikdisk, and it was interesting that the Atari area was set up in the bar away from the main hall. This contrasted to the approach that party organisers had this year, which was to selfconsciously mix everything up to avoid any sort of factionalism.

There were lots of pictures delivered. I guess that there was some reduction in picture size as I spotted noticeable artifacting when viewing on a VGA screen. This is still there on an RGB monitor, but more sympathetically handled by that video mode and this demo would be best viewed that way. This would be an outcome from a necessary compromise between having lots of material and keeping a reasonable file size for something that can be run easily on a standard Falcon. However, none of this is able to spoil any enjoyment of parties recalled, even a party where I didn't get to!

Something that most people might not be aware of, this slideshow usefully runs straight off a CD-ROM, which doesn't happen with a lot of things. It also seems happy with accelerated machines, at least it ran nicely with my CenTurbo 2.

There's not a lot more to say, it fulfils the slideshow mission with a reasonable panache and style, being co-operative and on friendly terms with the vast majority of Falcons out there. Let's see more from Paradize on the Falcon 030 sometime!

Ratings:- 75% - Simple but decent slideshow for a cool party.

505's Blubbersongs.

There was one major release from Outline 2007, although it did not see release until after that party. This happily features some of the most talented active people on the Atari scene below.

Namely RA and Paranoid, gWEm, Zweckform and of course 505!

The main intent is to showcase the latest tunes of 505, but the rest of the music disk is worthy of further mention. It starts with a red background, the component parts of a blocky 'PDX' logo impose themselves on the screen, leaving a shadow. We are guided further into the demo with a red monochrome tunnely effect. This soon fades to the main screen selector menu.

Of this, there is a smart 'Blubber songs' title at the top, a cursor arrow controlled barrel scroller is the music selector, with up to 27 tunes to choose from. the barrel scroller seems to be a homage to the Exceptions 'Rob says Hi!' version, but perhaps not? There is a vibrating speaker to the left, which spins when the demo is loading in a new song. This is user-controlled with the ever handy 'spacebar'.

At the bottom, there is an info scroller with a nice textured font. This is an important part of the demo with quite a lot of information for those people who care to read on. 505 explains what he did, there's a general eulogy about the extra possibilities and flexibility afforded by Maxymizer, it allows for more useable basslines, better interaction with timers, a better SID sound, and filtering to soften the harsh character of a 'typical' chiptune. There is also an STe option using the two extra channels for samples on some songs. We have to say "Thanks gwEm!"

I mentioned a list if 27 tunes earlier, so here they are. Some of them are quite short, but all of them are a good demonstrator for the various new techniques that 505 is developing. My musically illiterate brief impressions are included.

We opened with 'Attack' which was on the intro and at the top of the selector. It starts a bit like a Tao-tune with a strong melody, some high-frequency torturing, and quite a nice set of drums.

Certain Rage (STe) Drums in DMA channel, nice metallic beat

Chippy, grumbling bassy counterpoint to high SID-dy lead-line.

Coffee Break, mellow tune with multi-SID. nicely realised snare drum later in.

Disco Slide, very metallic 'dinging' beat, complimented by 'gargling' chippy leadline. Nice section with medium frequency SID. Very memorable tune, one I've often come back to on XSC layer on Mac.

Easy, fairly conventional tune at first, but clear attempt to get something different sounding with filtering SID channels.

Erde, dramatic opening chords, strong tune in general, another XSC choice.

Everything, another mellow fellow, heavy use of the filtered sound, and sampled? slow drum.

Factored, slow starter, reminiscent of opener for Hmmm demo. Lots of high frequency tortured sounds.

Faster, as the title says, starts off slow, gets quicker, and quicker... More filtered sounds. Cheerful tune.

For the Moon, fantastic track, real other-worldly quality to parts of the sound. Earlier techniques come back in ensemble fashion.

Jumper, more high-frequency high-jinks.

Krabbencocktail, light-hearted tune, with folksy elements, and nicely weird effects later in.

Long Ago, foreboding tune with heavy buzzer and bassy drums.

Nuance (STe), Suspensful tune, (DMA features varied drums and cymbals)

On Behalf of the Queen (STe), harpsichord-like classc sound, then new chippy sound (Various percussion)

P7 Action (STe), a weird oscillator effect at start, (DMA Amiga like bass and drums). It is the most modfile-sounding tune out of the lot, with squiggly acid effects like Stax out of Lazer, it is one of my favourite tunes!

Paracon 8, a bass-driven tune, lots of squiggly weirdness in the mid-section.

Parkbank (STe), gentle tune with SID-string complemented by STe DMA String melodies and a bit of bass drum.

Phazer (STe), very heavy sound, contrasted with some high castrato filtered leads (DMA Bass and Snare.)

Psycho, very echoey quality to lead line, sampled drums, strong bass.

Reasonless, Eastern sounding, very filtered 'bells', grungy bass, strong SIDs.

Sinesinger, similar qualities to Psycho tune, lots of filtering and softening, at first! Total change of character, much harsher, but great 'whistling' lead.

Sphere, harsher ring modulated sound, heavy sampled bass drums with filtered leads over the top of them. Great tune.

Thing, strong beat underpinning some very high filtered and distorted leads.

Thrust, nice tune, lots of varied effects, another XSC frequent player.

Upbuzzer, heavy distorted sound mixed with lots of high frequency ones, very fast tune.

Ultimately, when you are done, then press 'Escape' to return to the desktop.

From this selection, it is clear that 505 has carefully constructed that most rare and special of things. A new ST chip 'sound'. In fact there is more than one 'sound', a whole battery of new techniques, tunes, and general audio weirdness of the coolest kind! The journey from simple blip-blop to this point has been long and amazing, and what we are privileged to hear these days, bears little relation to what was(nt) available back in the old days of chipsound.

I'd definitely like to hear more, and I hope 505 and others are working with MaxiMizer to get even more spacious and wicked sounds from it.

'Hurry'

Outline 2007 invitro from Lineout

This was one of a very small number of Falcon 030 productions released in 2007, and like a lot of things that appeared that year, was concerned with attracting more visitors to the Outline 2007 party for some reason.

It was released just one day before the party, living nicely up to the "Hurry!" label, which was fine by me, as I did not get there that year (Oh not again! Will you shut up about that! - Ed note)

Unusually for recent invitros, this one was made as a Falcon 030 exclusive production, and it even used the more dynamic bits of that machine's hardware, namely the DSP for some hardcore 3D stuff.

There is a wider range than normal for the creator credits, as apart from Earx's excellent code and Havoc's excellent graphics, there was also some nifty 3-D modelling done by the mysterious Suzie Cube of Limp Ninja, not to mention further additional contributions from Shifter, some design ideas from Damo, and music from 505.

Reading the 'readme' file reveals quite a lot more about the creative process behind this intro, apparently the original inspiration came from Damo's interest in radio controlled cars, and some strange home video of these in action.

So we come to the inevitable 'loading and running' thing. There is the usual Lineout plain start screen, offering you a 50mhz RGB screen, and err, that's it. Some mention was made of a VGA 'hidden key' but I doubt it's really there.

Firing up gets the first part, which is a very 'de-rezzed' digitised movie footage showing false colouring in places, described as dithered bitmap scaler running at 20-25 fps with a data rate of 130kb/sec. In plain English, I guess this is a super special custom video player for the Falcon that Earx fixed up with massive data compression and scope for extra effects, more of which we'll see the next time it comes around. The other notable fact is that no DSP was required.

The second part is the one which attracted a lot of comment as it features the notorious textured 3D jeep model, which got a little bit too much exposure according to some people on Pouet. Regarding the jeep, I got to speak to 'Suzie Cube' at the last Outline party, who revealed that it had a lot more detail in the original model, but this was ruthlessly trimmed by Earx to fit better into the demo. The readme text statistics advise that a not unimpressive 400 triangles were DSP-assisted to move around at 25 fps as it was. Over the top of the jeep constantly driving across left to right, a furiously vibrating "Hurry" logo draws you to the party, and the music from 505 is harsh, fast-paced and fits the mood of the intro pretty well too.

We are sent back to witness more of the blurry RC model monster truck movie footage, but there are added refinements. In addition to the low-res fun, there is also some kind of realtime squiggly black lined outline drawing of the shape of the vehicle as it bounces around. (Earx does eighties synthpop styled A-Ha pencil-sketch rotoscoping videos next time?!)

After a revisit to see how the jeep is doing, (very well, if a bit repetitive for some), we are thrown into the final part where we get to enjoy a spinning around 360 degrees all axis single bitplane version of the jeep in background. This is over the top of a four-colour slightly manga styled picture, and a user-scrollable party info text in a rather dull system font is in the foreground.

I get the feeling Earx wanted to do more with this but did not have the time, according to the readme.txt. This intro was described as a technology demonstrator for early versions of several new routines which should be appearing in a future Falcon demo (HINT!)

For a quick invitro hack, it does the job nicely, the over-exposure of the jeep notwithstanding!

Ratings:- 84% - Cool and refreshingly different, if a little bit rushed.

Meikever

'June Bug'

A demo for 96k and Atari ST Compatible at Outline '08

by RG and Lineout

code earx graphics pea ideas earx, msg music msg (main), crazyq (end)

This neat 96ktro grabbed a well-deserved second place at Outline '08, against tough opposition like Paradox's NAME HERE demo, and the even mightier Defjam with his newschool styled 'Morphonic Labs'. Meikever came about from an unusual but effective collaboration between the currently active Reservoir Gods (Pea and MSG), and Earx of Lineout.

There was a history since the summer of 2007, where early screens had been seen by passing eyewitnesses at parties such as Evoke, but by the time the pizza menus were being worked out for Outline '08, Meikever was a certain release at that party, as Earx was pleased to announce, and even more pleased to reveal all on the big screen three days later...

Meikever was intended to run on 'ST compatibles', which means it was tested on a trilogy of ST, TT, and Falcon. It would also be emulator compatible, and was Satandisk friendly on my STe, which was very helpful.

Upon going to start it up, clicking on the loader.prg reveals a little joke to start with. This is the Reservoir Clogs 'Cracktro', a thoroughly oldschool affair consisting of a borderless screen, divided into bottom and top sections by varying shades of brown. In this sea of gravy-coloured splendour, a 'Clog' logo swishes back and forth somewhere near the bottom border. In the mid-section, a series of sineous LED dots form letters and a scrolltext of many greetings, with a classic Madmax tune to round it off. If this demo is run in 'Careless ST-Format reviewer from the mid-nineties mode', then you will not realise that there is more to this demo as long as you remember to press the spacebar!

When you press the spacebar, deceived by the 1990 ambience and expecting to see the loading screen for "Super Turbo Bottom Hunter 3D!" by Hagrid Developments, the main demo starts, and you get something else entirely...

-- main part --

The opener was described in the sparse but helpful readme file as an 'LED plasma'. It starts with a busybee mouse pointer in the middle of the screen, with a flickering sand dune or contour like texture partially screened off by the 'LED dots' described, which expands and contracts and moves around. There is a smartly done 'Junebug title going into the bottom right corner from the both sides. The 'LED plasma' then turns blue before fading to the next part.

There is a 2x2 and 8x8 rotozoom. This is a hand-drawn 'Lineout' fancy text logo, with a coarse pixellating effect at the start, which increases resolution to the full version. This is impressive enough, even before we get a touch of of the Sanity Falcon 030 early years as a fully coloured background appears underneath the rotozooming bits. There is a little bit of a return to the LED dot patterns at the end.

The famous or notorious 'Dutch railways screen [tm]' is hard behind this. A fairly technical screen with some attractive and bright artistic qualities nevertheless. Or more SoLo2 described as a hand drawn piccy of a Dutch train on the leftward third, a vector lined Dutch railways company logo spins around in the middle, with a magnifier running alongside to the right. It is described in coder-speak as a '3 bitplane anti-alias lines (1.5 pix)' with hotspot. Apparently, this is a first on Atari!

Something more conventional and somewhat 'midschool' next, which is a jelly dot morpher, but packing them in at 800 morphing 3D dots at a time. A series of objects including a full 3D version of the Atari fuji logo. There is a little bit of 'design' in the bottom left corner with a changing logo doing its thing.

The next part has the moniker of the 'cube-in-cube screen'. Which quite accurately describes what it is. Two solid 3D cubes, with one inside the other, flitting in and out flirtatiously, which sort of starts to look like fancy stuff, and running in 4 bitplanes and a single VBL, according to the coder.

This is seamlessly followed by the 'Spaz cube' or the more pedestrian description of a 'Cube in a box' (by me, sorry! ) This is a solid 3D cude inside what looks like an opened box but is really a cunningly drawn background. Still top marks for another atmospheric and involving screen. To top this off, there are what you could descrive as 'busy lines' clinging nervously to the edges of the cube. The cube then seems to open out, so it becomes a flatpacked parody of its former splendly cubed self, waiting for some bored warehouse worker to fold it back into a boxlike shape again.

But there is no time to reflect on 3D that might have been, as we're thrown into the last screen for this main part, which are a series of smart ribbons rolling along in a 3-D vector style on the left-hand side. To complement the ribbony theme, a Pea-drawn Japlish female covered in ribbons awaits developments on the right hand side.

-- end part --

There are some real goodies saved for last. To keep with the summery theme, we are treated to an ice cream! A lovingly drawn static one at first, which suddenly switches to a texture-mapped and z-buffered 3D ice cream which rotates on its axis. Cool effect or what! The cone is textured, and this is topped off with shaded icecream balls!

This is really the end now, with a classic twister doing its thing. We are rewarded with a slick and simple interpretation, this includes various credits text spinning around it. We are implored to 'Stay Cool' and 'Stay Atari', which seems to be good enough advice to me.

Then it is really over...

I almost forgot to mention the music, apart from the (hem!) borrowed Mad Max thing at the start, there was also a driving powering tune from MSG, using one of the new zik composers (I guess Triplex? Feel free to point out and laugh at my wrongness!) Followed by something somewhat mellower from Crazy Q at the end, in a sort of 'ending things' way.

Meikever is an extremely worthy Outline contester, and a good example of what modern demos can achieve on the humbler members of the Atari ST family. It was also the lovechild of an unlikely but effective shacking-up between the Reservoir Gods, and a stray Earx! What issued forth was not one of those scruffy and neglected backstairs sprogs, but more of a favourite son. We hope to see more unholy couplings in the future!

Ratings.. Graphics:- 88% - Wide range of attractive hand-drawn material from Pea, and effective use of colours and design throughout.

Sonicks:- 89% - Something borrowed, something MSG, and something Crazy Q!

Gee-Whiz:- 80% - Some older looking code, some really new stuff (Dutch railways), all of it running slickly and nicely.

Overall:- 87% - Lovely bright modern Atari ST demo for lovely bright modern Atari ST fellows!

Videl Visions

by Cerebral Vortex

This was a nice and totally unexpected release from Cerebral Vortex, who tend to be better known for Jaguar related stuff, but they did co-operate in the making of the 'Kick my Ass'embler' demo with Paradize last year for the ST. The timing was good too, as it was a timely "New Year" release in January for the Falcon as well.

It is a slideshow or graphics disk, not too much to say about it, well we'll start with some credits for who did what.

Namely Bear who painted the graphics in the first place, a neat 'newschool' chiptune from Marcer, with GT Turbo providing the code to get it all to work together.

When it starts up, there is a bit of an explanation text first about the history of Bear, He was involved with the early 90's ST scene in Invisibles of Flexichron, then spent a bit of time on the *other* sixteen-bit platform for a while, and was generally hanging around the edges making odd bits of pixels when the fancy took him. He's started to do a bit more on the Falcon now, as I'll explain in a moment.

In the infotext, there is also an explanation of the 'tools used', in this case the slightly forgotten 'Rainbow 2 Multimedia' art package on the Falcon. It seems that there are some artists that are prepared to spend a bit of time getting around the quirks of the interface and manage to produce pictures with a unique style all of their own.

To start with, we get the rather predictable title screen 'Videl Visions', a hand-drawn grey logo on a yellowish shading backdrop. This gives way to the main functioning part of the demo, namely a hand-drawn mouse cursor and a thumbnail gallery of nine pictures in total. The method is very simple, to go to an individual picture and select it to display fullscreen.

When you press the spacebar to go back to the selection menu, the last picture selected remains in the background.

There is also another display mode, namely pressing F10 for a slideshow mode.

The individual pictures are all hand-drawn and are completely original material. Bear uses Rainbow multimedia to good effect. He manages to get a soft 'organic' feel, the underwater painting of a seahorse seems to work the best. Somehow he uses Rainbow Paint to give an overall feeling of something between a chalk drawing and an oil painting.

You can find an online gallery at the Cerebral Vortex website http://cerebral-vortex.net/index.php?id=73 if you can't be asked to run the demo or view it at Youtube.

I would hope on the strength of this that we will see more of Cerbral Vortex and especially Bear on the Atari scene, perhaps some of his artwork in a bigger and more dynamic production sometime?

Rating:- 78% - Not a major release, but refreshingly different artwork.

-=- Pure -=- by LaResistance

Regular readers of Alive might recall a review of an interesting demo from a seemingly new Polish group on the Atari 8-bit, LaResistance. This was 'The Shrine', a demo which heavily featured lots of 3D objects with an ancient and stoney theme, and was rather well put together, as I recall.

Well they haven't been totally asleep since then, as there was a new production made for the Glucholazy 2008 party which actually managed to downsize its hardware requirements for the 8-bit Atari. No monster memory requirements, just a standard 64kb Atari 800 is needed. But is their new intro any good? This review intends to find out.

The intro starts quickly without undue ceremony, a rich Pokey tune starts up, an achingly pretty 'Pure' title appears, then a coarse blue tunnel fades in. We are greeted with various creator credits onscreen, then an object appears at the end, a spiny starry polygon in the characteristic blocky Atari 8-bit res, but it is shaded or mapped. The poly fattens and loses its spikiness, the whole scene fades out as the last of the creator credits goes.

A more abstract and hard to describe scene is running on its heels, a kind of textured plasma, still in the same purple/blue colour scheme as the preceding tunnel, flashes white, as if there is a palette glitch or is this deliberate and edgy? More 3D goodness resolves itself into view, as a complex construction of three square torus's locked together in an Escheresque pattern, spin around at a good frame rate. These are shaded or light mapped in the same way as the tunnel object.

These are gone in a short time, and replaced by a common mid-nineties standby, the cojoining blobs with a dark heart, but a shiny outer layer. For some reason, my mind associates this as a common ST effect, but not something very often seen on the Atari 800, if at all?

Following that, there is a scene which has been taken out of the Dead Hackers 'Dream Dimension' demo, or more accurately the 'Dream 4Mention' 4ktro version, as we are spinning around (choppily) between a bump-mapped floor and ceiling reminiscent of a scene from those other two demos. To move on from that more technical and difficult to prettify screen, we are treated to a major revamp of the common and garden spirally tunnel, as the blue shaded world is ditched in favour of a colourful mediterranean sunburst of colours making up the tunnel walls. This is a fast moving and appealing effect too.

With this new power of extra colour, the blobs are back, doing their thing in the foreground against a churning, shifting background. We are next back in the blue world, with a complex 'sunburst' polygon in the foreground spinning around against a background of sunburst style bumpmapping plasma.

The final act is getting ready, a very simple scene with a 'Pure' logo in the top left corner, a spinning shaded 3D diamond, leaving a black shadow as it rotates. It morphs, fattens and distorts, then stretches out again, and then that is the end.

Not surprisingly, this won its category for the Glucholazy 2008 party, and has been generally well received by the demo watching masses on Pouet. One thing which was mentioned was the general absence of 'design', this being a pure coder porn intro, and indeed, that is the case. Some people even think that LaResistance have potential to beat Taquart and the 'Numen' demo. I'd say it is possible, but there is a huge jump in scale between something like this, and a demo the size of Numen. If things go quiet for a couple of years, I guess that LaResistance are making a serious attempt to better it!?

We'll see...

Ratings..

Graphics:- 90% - More colourful than the 8-bit average.

Sound:- 80% - Decent rich tune delivered competently.

Coding:- 93% - Some very well put together code, one or two newish things on the 8-bit.

Overall:- 85% - A good tight optimised intro.

CiH, for Alive Mag, Oct '08.

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