Genesis8 - Outerloop, a demo by thesuper released at DiHalt 2013

[NewsBot]

Outerloop, a demo by thesuper released at DiHalt 2013
26 July 2013, 1:24 am

Outerloop, a demo by thesuper released at DiHalt 2013

Source: Genesis8 Amstrad Page

[TFM]

Damn it. That's not CPC.    Got excited for nothing.    Does it at least run on the speccy emulator for the CPC?

[ralferoo]

Nice demo, some good effects in here...

[genesis8]

Damn it. That's not CPC.    Got excited for nothing.    Does it at least run on the speccy emulator for the CPC?

Trick or treat like I said :-) But it's a nice demo, and certainly doable on Amstrad CPC (should need only about 10 or 20 years to do it myself...).

[HAL6128]

It's definitly a great demo.
Does it use any hardware programing technics which the CPC isn't capable of doing?

[TFM]

There is nothing a Specci can do, which the CPC can't.

[HAL6128]

Oh, I think so.
I just thought that the ZX has also a custom gfx chip like the CPC. Maybe it has some special Features?

[ralferoo]

This, like most good Speccy demos, make great use of the attribute clash. So, for example the moving pattern behind the hand etc is trivial to do on a speccy but much harder on a CPC. There's also the fact that the screen is narrower (well, there are 256 pixels that are wider than ours, so they occupy the same space as our 320) and less tall, so there's much less data to draw each frame too. In fact, about 6KB instead of 16KB for a full screen. The clock is "only" 3.5MHz but the clock stretching that the Amstrad does means our 4MHz is pretty similar in practice.

So, overall we have more work to do per frame to try to copy a simple effect from Spectrum demo, if it uses attributes well it'll probably be slower still and we have about the same clock speed, so doing these effects on a CPC would work less well. On the other hand, there are loads of effects that the CPC can do that are impossible on a Spectrum, so it's those things we generally see in our demos...

[TFM]

That attribute clash can be done by using color cycling on a CPC.

[Gryzor]

I didn't see anything special in it, but I liked the Menger sponge and its animation. Hm, ideas to take it further in a demo...