This is Plasmic. .sPOOn.'s first PC demo.. we think you'll like it .. really :)

It features various effects, oldskool and newskool, but NO 3d scenes at ALL !!
that's right... the only vectors used in this demo are in a transition, and they
are only 2D :).. we are getting tired of all those 3D studio or Lightwave render
engines out there, and want the scene to return to the old objective, the good
old kick ass routine based demo's .. come on guys, there MUST be new effects to
discover yet.. FD for instance is a nice idea... just keep of off the 3d scenes
for a while now thankyou.

credits :
code      : shayera/.sPOOn., Anders Brodersen, Michael Bang, Henrik Bagger
music     : Dreyer/.sPOOn.
pixel gfx : Bifrost, Airwalk/Polka Brothers, Steffen/???
3D gfx    : shayera/.sPOOn.,Colin/Polka Brothers

commandline :
 -save      : save soundcard config, so you don't have to reconfig every time you run the demo
 -big       : run demo in a window on a 640*480 display (you still have to support 24 or 32 bit colors !!)

First off, a little heartfelt sigh.. :
This demo was to have been released at The Party 8, December 1998, but the startup code
I used (PMode/DJ) seems to have some problems running on a PII/300 so the demo was dis-
qualified.. (waaaaah :( ) now I use CWSDPMI and it had better work, or else.......
after TP8 I upgraded my own machine and the demo runs on :
 Celeron/400, 64MB RAM, Bansheee AGP.. so all should be well now
only sadness is : the Banshee is not very fast under DOS.. it seems that using AGP
under DOS is not the fastest thing in the world :(  .. If someone out there has some
good advice about this, then PLEASE contact me (shayera) with your info !!!

This demo uses the Allegro graphics library for a lot of things, since this enables
the coder to concentrate on the FX, and have a functioning set of routines for
allocating and using screens, bitmap and drawing that will work on a lot of different
display cards.. plus it would enable us to port the demo to linux in a matter of days.
also, allegro has a number of neat things,including it's 'archive files' which enables
us to pack together all our pics and stuff in one file (ok.. we use several.. but ..)
and not worry about how to read it back in...

all transitions on this demo were developed by shayera.

routine details :

the moveplasma is based in part on the works of Erik Hansen and Jan Møller, as
optimized by Michael Bevin in his fxlib 1.1, since his way of rendering was
4 times faster than mine .. his way of rendering the pixels can be optimized further
on a pentium MMX but i haven't tried (yet)

the 'swirler' is coded by Anders Brodersen, once known as RIP/.sPOOn.,
and has quite a lot of options, this demo only uses a few of them .. 
the code has been further optimized by shayera, as would be expected, including
porting the lot to allegro.. 

the zooming and rotating truecolor rayanimation was code by shayera (the truecolor zoom-
rotator) and the beautiful anim was rendered by Colin / Polka Brothers way back in 1995
It was intended to be used in an Amiga demo which I, as usual, never finished ;)
The anim was made with Lightwave 4.x on an Amiga 3000 .. Amiga is power :)

the neontunnel is in part based on a tunnel routine by Michael Bang, but totally redone
by shayera, and was, when envisioned, intended to look like an effect from the Amiga demo
'Tint' by The Black Lotus.. however, when I was working i got another idea.. and here it is.

The rgbinterference is a good old routine, just with 3 moving circlesets instead of 2 as we used
to do on the amiga.. fully coded by shayera, with a one shot blur before running, developed by
Henrik Bagger, that smoothes the circles (but also introduces some moire in the pattern)

The texslime is a remake of the old SLIQ texslime routine by F. Becker, but re-coded without
any 'nasty' inline assembler.. i spent DAYS trying to second guess F. Becker and trying to 
guess what exactly he was doing, since i don't know ANY X86 assembler...
I've seen that Michael Bevin has another version in his fxlib1.1, but this is my own port
of the routine (Michael's is 256 cols only.. and VERY hard to re-work for truecolor :)

The 'plasmaball' is once again fully shayera's to blame for :)
It is the pc version of his good old 24bit effect for the Amiga (yes, on the amiga it ran
in full 24bit colors !! not 18bit or something.. but it only ran in 80*64.... )

The rgb plasma is fully developed by shayera, who just looooves rgb effects...
it runs in full 24bit colors
It is a good oldskool effect, from way back when.. this time just run in 320*200
singlepixeled (yes 1*1 pixel) full truecolor glory.. if only I could do that on
my A1200.. *sigh*

This demo requires a modern pc ;) with a gfx card capable of displaying a lowres
(320*240) mode with 32 bit colors and a linear framebuffer, however, the demo CAN
attempt to run in a window on a 640*480 display.. this will however slow it down !
To do so, run the demo with the commandline argument -big
The demo will attempt to use first VESA 3.0, then 2.0 for it's display.. if neither of
these are found, it will exit and say something rude to you fornot providing it with
a decent and modern display environment ....
After some updating of my display code, it now runs also in 24 bit modes in either
320*240 or 640*480 resolutions

It supports most modern soundcards, through MIDAS 1.1.2
If you want 'nosound' just tell midas to shut up with it's config screen

this program runs under both DOS and Win95, however, under Win 95, when the demo
is exiting, Win95 will pop up a requester.. just say No :), this has something to
do with the way midas treats the timer.. it works fine, but when win95 gets back
its timer, it smells a rat, and complains about it :)

NOTE : if you copy this demo to a different machine, REMEMBER to delete the
file called plasmic.cfg !! this holds the config for your soundcard, and if
you run the demo on a different machine without reconfiguring, you MIGHT crash.
This config file will however only be created if you tell the demo to do so.
It is there for conveniance...

This program was developed with :
DJGPP2.02/GCC 2.8.2
Allegro 3.11
libjpeg 1.03 by Eric Vannier, modified by shayera
libjpeg uses The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG software
Midas 1.1.2 by Sahara Surfers
UltraEdit-32 5.10a
Windows Commander 3.51

Plasmic should run on almost anything from K5/Pentium and up, as long as you have 320*240 in 32 or 24 bit
true color (or 640*480, but then it won't look as neat)

Plasmic was actually developed on an AMD K5/166 PC, with 32 MB ram, a 2Mb S3 virge gfx card, a SB AWE64 sound card
and running under (gasp horror) Windows 95 by Micro$oft..
This machine is actually rather slow. Equal approximately to a pentium 133 in integer, and a P100 in floating point.
So you don't HAVE to have a killer setup to code.. but it sure helps .. *sigh*
Before coding my next PC demo I hope to have upgraded this considerally.. it is SOOOO hard to make timing when
the machine you work on is 2-3 times slower than your target audience's machines...
update March 1999 :
The coders current setup is :
Intel Celeron/400, 64Mb ram, 16Mb Banshee AGP and AWE64.. runnin winblowme 98
This is much nicer to work with than my old K5... (and a LOT faster)
Contact Information :
if you want to get in touch with shayera for any reason :
 John Hinge - shayera / .sPOOn.
 Silkeborgvej 220 B
 DK-8230 Aabyhoej
 Denmark
 shayera@cutey.com
 tel : +45 4083 9699

or Dreyer :
 dr_dreyer@hotmail.com

Companies : shayera is always available for work offers.. He has good experience in coding
on both Amiga (C and 68K assembler) and the PC (C, some perl/java)
To top that, he has worked for a year as a systems administrator in Egmont Online, and has a good
knowledge of administrating and supporting networks with the following stuff in them :
HP Netserver LHPro and LH plus, Bay Network hubs, Cisco 3600 routers Catalyst 100MBit Etherswitch, Cisco PIX
Firewall,SGI Indigo & Octane, PC and Mac clients.
All that on a 100MBit network linked to the Internet with a 512Kbit frame-relay.
On the serverside the software was Microsoft Windows NT4.0SP3, IIS3, MS Exchange 4.5, Sybase SQL server,
Apache HTTPD 1.2b8, IRCD2.9.3(Win32).
On the Client side the software was :
Microsoft Windows 95, Windows NT Client 4.0, MacOS/Finder 7&8, IRIX 6.4.

He would be very interested in doing the same for your company!!
