The Big STOS Demo
| Date: | June 1990 |
| Size: | 336644 bytes (zipped MSA) |
| Location: | download |
The Big STOS demo was written by Zogg and The Skunk, entirely in STOS
BASIC. Pretty much every demo on the scene at that time was written in
68000 assembler to get the most out of the machine, so Zogg thought it'd
be interesting to see what could be done in BASIC.
The Intro
The intro is a static screen announcing the demo. It uses palette splitting
to overcome the ST's normal 16 colour limit and achieves 44 colours on screen
at once.
Once you press a key you get a brief loading screen and then the menu.
The Menu
More palette splitting in the menu and not much else to look at (I'm guessing
that this was down to the speed at which STOS processed the interrupts -
there's no assembler used in this demo, remember). Pressing the numbers 1 to
5 take you to the individual demoscreens.
Beat Box II
This demoscreen was coded by The Skunk. It starts out with a looped sample and
a cute fade effect. Once the screen has all faded up, a scrolltext appears and
zooms along the bottom of the screen. As well as being a member of the Watchmen,
The Skunk ran a PD library and I guess this was an advert for it.
The BASIC Hyper Scroller
This screen has a big (well, for big STOS, anyway) scroll text and a sample
playing. All code and graphics in this screen were by Zogg.
The All New Sine Distortor
The sine distorter screen has a bunch of different shapes, including photos
of each of The Watchmen distorting on a sine wave, while a scroll text
whizzes past. There's also some chip music.
The Sampled Bit
This is a pretty ugly looking demo with a sample-sequence tune by Zogg. He
also did the code.
Shifter Health Hazard
This is my (Chris's) favourite screen. It features a whole-screen scrolling
background and a nice sample loop. The "shifter" in the name of the demo is
the ST's video shifter chip, which shoves the graphics out to the display.
The code was by Zogg.