Dead interesting, these demos. Basically, they
show the evolution of a programmer's coding
talents (or something).
NMI 1 is a three-part
demo dedicated to the humble scrolly. Sine-wave scrollies, colour bars, seventeen scrollies
on-screen at once, wobbling lines dancing
around pulsing logos... it's reasonable stuff,
but the standard Speccy font and horrible
selection screen give away its age. Pretty
damn devastating for a first attempt, though.
Jumping ahead a few months,
NMI 2 is a
different kettle of fish. Part One has a gigantic
fluidly-moving vector graphic, which cunningly
fiddles about with interrupts to produce a
screen 768 pixels high. Part Two has twenty-five simultaneous and very fast scrollies along
with a thunking music track, while Part Three is
patently impossible. There's just too much
colour on the screen. It can't be done.
Evidently Dynamite Dynastie has programmed
a routine which ignores the Speccy hardware
and manipulates your brain's perception of
reality instead. No, really.
Jumping ahead a few more months, we
come to the spankily splendiferous
NMI 3 - No
Panic. It's a megademo (lots of mini-demos
linked together) of about thirteen parts, with
some amazingly good parts, some fairly good
parts and some quite interesting bits. Luckily,
there are far more amazingly good parts than
near-misses. The megademo encompasses
just about every form of effect known to the
coding fraternity, with a few gags thrown in for
good measure. (My fave bit is the menu on
one of the graphics demos - it tells you to
press certain keys to get an effect, and when
you press them the screen clears to
reveal the word 'effect.' Ha ha! Oh,
please yourselves.) Super stuff.