D-Bug presents:

WHO OKAYED THIS

(title's full caps is intentional, it is like that for stylistic purposes.)
A quick intro to announce the fix of EKO's Epidemic musicdisk (included with
the intro).

Usage:

Due to the amount of outstanding issues present in the original demo it was
not possible to chain the fixtro, EKO intro and main musicdisk in one go. So
in order to watch the intros, double click on "epidemic.prg" to run both
intros and/or "zikdisk.tos" to run the music disk itself. Note that you can
press space to exit each part. Finally for the music disk itself press up and
down cursor keys and F1 to F7 to select tune. As a final note keep in mind
that you may have to hit the desired function key a few times before it
registers - this is normal. A final version may address this.

Requirements:

Falcon030, 14MB RAM, RGB monitor required to run this. (It will work on VGA
too but the musicdisk stuff will flicker like mad and display garbage at the
bottom of the screen. Not that it doesn't flicker with RGB but it's a lot
less!) Latest Hatari will probably run this but it requires a quite beefy CPU
to see in full frame rate and without audio skips. A finaly may address the
memory requirement and reduce it to 4MB. Not much you can do on a short notice
when the musician hands you an audio track that compresses down to 4MB :).

About the fix:

The music disk has a weird history - people would download it from FTPs, it
might run the intro (just a rubber wireframe vector on VGA, got a bit further
in RGB), then the main demo would crash in under 1 second after it started. So
firstly I fixed that - yay the demo started!

But then I noticed quite a few weird things:
- It would take a few tries to get keystrokes to change tunes to register
- The 3D was very flickery, especially in VGA
- It took a really long time to switch between tunes, leading to big pauses
- One tune was completely missing (i.e. the file was not even present in the
  archive)
All this lead me to believe that this thing was not meant to be released in
this state. But since it wasn't that hard to get running (sort of) it's not
too bad.

It was not possible to address all the above issues (and maybe more) in this
small time frame (remember, an intro had to be written too) but I did get the
tune switching pauses down to a minimum and with the help of Lotek Style got
hold of a 8 channel version of the original misssing tune. I should mention
here that the music disk was originally released for the PC and so it
contained s3m modules (case in point: the one that was missing). If I had to
guess I'd say that most of the demo was ready but the s3m tune(s) were never
fully converted to 8 channel .mod format so the whole thing was put on ice,
and then released by mistake or intentionally at this state.

Short story of this intro:
(hey, I'm on the airport and have some time to kill!)

The music disk itself was patched to work about 2 weeks before the party. So
instead of just dumping it out in the open and because I was visiting
Sommarhack I thought "what the hell" and started thinking about ideas for a
small intro. 

The ideas that popped in my head were a bit too ambitious for such a short
time frame and I remembered I had an unfinished intro that might work ok as a
fixtro. The main effect was written in 2004 (!) on a piece of paper (!) during
my service in the Greek Navy - there was no end to boredom most of the time
:). As you can probably notice, it was written with a plain ST in mind so it
might look a bit lame for a Falcon intro - this is not false but then again
where is *your* entry for the party? :D.

It was really not meant to be anything time consuming, just debug the main
effect and stick a random tune in there. But then XiA supplied me with a 3+
minute tune and TiNKer drew some graphics which meant I had to put some more
effort into it - thanks guys /o\.  I started working on it at 5th July 2005
(don't ask) and finished at 5th July 2017, which makes an exact 12 year
development time - not a world beater by Atari ST crew standards but not a bad
contender either ;)

Credits:

Code and fixes by GGN
Graphics by TiNKer, Evil, GGN, Pursy, Flanker, Def KLF
Music by Excellence in art

Released at Sommarhack 2017 (8th July 2017) in Grado, Sweden

