PUBLIC HOUSE

Having given up on the Brit special altogether, Jon instead turns his attentions to a fabled megademo and something that isn't PD at all. Take it away, Mr Tambourine Man! (Someone turn that Byrds tape off.)

Compiling Public House has been made infinitely easier by my recently buying a +D disk interface and drive. Y'see, in Europe the +3 is (rightly) ignored (horrible machine). Instead, the programmers have armed themselves with third-party 3.5" disk drives, thus cutting out all the tedious loading from tape (especially when you're dealing with fourteen-part megademos). And what have we here? it's a fourteen-part megademo. Quite a famous one in fact. Pray silence folks, it's the...

Legendary Spectrum Demo
By Pentagram
Occasionally naughty
Reviewer: Jon Pillar

Long since dismissed as a cruel joke by the PD fraternity, Pentagram's megademo has, at last, actually appeared. Hurrah, eh? By far the biggest demo yet seen (compressed, it takes up 248K), LSD is the result of over a year's work by the various members of Pentagram. So let's get started, shall we?

After a nice intro (with a lovely semi-circular scrolly) which explains that each member of Pentagram contributed two or three parts, LSD stumbles badly. Hacker Chris is the first programmer up to bat and his parts fail to impress (as they say). A fun bouncing logo is spoiled by a hideous attribute background; a scrolling chessboard effect pales in comparison to the one in Shock; and a greetings part, where you type in the name of a programmer to get a secret message, is just plain annoying. The only bit that really impressed me was a big, wavy scrolly giving a sort of underwater effect.

Things perk up with The Jokemeter. Despite putting himself down as not being a coder, Agent-X's bit has masked sprites over an animated background, with both standard and vertical attribute scrollies. A second sub-part features bouncing playing cards and two silly scrollies. Exasperatingly good stuff.

BZYK (he of Soundtracker fame) contributes two bob demos (you know, the moving ball effects as in Shock Part Seven). They're okay, with some convoluted patterns, but the second attempt's animated bobs don't work at all (as the scrolly admits) and overall you get the feeling it's all been done before. BZYK then teams up with Amst to produce an excellent 3D demo, with various balls flinging themselves about the screen and making up cubes, LSD logos and so on. As I say, excellent.

Amst then goes on to stretch the Speccy quite a bit with two solo efforts. First of all, a series of vector line shapes nips around and about each other, their reflections showing in a handy pool of water. Then, a message scrolly orbits a planet like the old Universal Pictures logo. Incredible. Only slightly less wonderful is the next bit, where the mighty Amst (along with BZYK) creates a sort of moving carpet of dots that wave and wobble ever so smoothly.

Now comes the most technically-impressive part of LSD - logos flash on and off around the screen, while a message scrolls vertically in the border. Ber-limey. (Hats off to BZYK there.) Finally, you get to see the Pentagram programmers as a load of digitised mugshots pop up on screen to the accompaniment of some fascinatingly trivial wibble.

To be honest, I found LSD disappointing. The quality of some of the parts (Amst's 3D work in particular) really blows your socks off, but the rest of the megademo is uneven, and at least one of the parts downright poor, which reflects badly on the superior bits. Part of the prob is, most of the coding was done over a year and a half ago, and it shows. It's not bad; simply out of date. A rather larger part of the prob is that Shock came out first. Compared to that tremendous megademo, LSD is merely extremely good.