PUBLIC HOUSE

Crikeroonie! Poor old Jon. He didn't know what he was letting himself in for when he scribbled those lines about Speccy public domain last month. Now he's got about a billion PD progs teetering dangerously on his desk, all shouting out to be reviewed. Let's join him at the Shed Speccy and rest our hands casually on the red-hot power pack. Ouch!

Demos, eh? As I said last month, with no game to worry about, demos can use the full resources of your Speccy to produce some shockingly good effects. As a rule of thumb, they all have to be loaded in 48K mode (most use fiendish code compressors, y'see). all have the bonus of brilliant music tracks for 128Kers, and all have mind-numbingly lengthy scrollies (with occasionally nasty language - be warned, ye of sensitive dispositions). Well, enough about rules. And thumbs. On with the reviews!

No More Intelligence - the Trilogy
By Dynamite Dynastie
Reviewer: Jon Pillar

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.