From: hazen@athena.cs.uga.edu (Mark)
Subject: Re: The Lords (C64)   Was: Questions...
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 05:28:57 GMT

In article <1992Nov8.183306.26743@ultb.isc.rit.edu> jms1086@ritvax.isc.rit.edu writes:

>Oh my god... FOund an old Lords dude... Cool... I ran a board a while 

Oh, THANKS. Bring my age into it. :-) At least I'm not the oldest
memebr in Megawatts, eh Marc?

>back, that used to distribute the demos from Venom, and thats how I got
>yer demos (wasn't Lords an off break of Venom??)... It'd be cool if you
>guys got back together on the Amiga... I'm just starting to get into 

Nope. Lords was the first serious C 64 demo group in the U.S.; Venom
came together a short while after the Lords (Which at that time was
just Eclipse and Morrissey) did. Venom asked me to join them, I said
I';d think about it, and then I called Morrissey to shoot the breeze,
and he told me Eclipse had been trying to get in touch with me about
joining or something like that. It's been a long time.

Doubt we will; I know more about Amiga coding than Doctor O does (due
to his lazy coder self not bothering to buy the books on it...) :-D  I
am studying copper capabilities right now. Fun stuff... It amazes me,
it seems just by my reading that there is a LOT of possibility for the
Amiga demo wise that no one has SCRATCHED the surface of. I mean, flex
scrolls hit it big what, two years ago? Wow... big hairy deal. One
nice aspect of Amiga coding (for some people, I have forgotten
geometric calculus, and intergral calculus isn't worth shit to
democoding... :-P ) is the fact that it is very math oriented.. but I
remember, two years after everyone said the 64 was dead, some AMAZING
stuff came out, because people began looking directly at the hardware,
and learning to trick it into doing things it was never designed to
do. No one can ever tell me Commodore EXPECTED people to try FLD
programming, if they want me to believe them. That was just one of a
thousand or so wondrous tricks and hacks that _worked_. Remember the
first demo you ever say sans-borders on the 64? I do. El_Cid of
Eaglesoft did it, I think. Impressive back then...

	But then again, all I am doing is studying my RKM. I have yet
to sit down and actually code anything. Right now I'm having fun
conjuring ideas to irritate the other coders around. :-)

>Asm, maybe I could start a little something in the US... Hmmm.. 
>I haven;t actually seen any demos from the US for the Amiga... Anyone
>wanna try and get a group togther, cause I'm sure there's alot of people
>getting tired of switching to PAL everytime to see a demo! Heh heh...
>AH well... Just a thought.... 

Well, sory. I'm already in a U.S. demo group, and even if I were in a
solid US group, there are a NUMBER of reasons to program demos in PAL
anyway, including: 

1) fewer frames per second, ergo you have to spend less time dancing
around your video displays.

2) Larger screen sizes, by about what, 15%? That's 15% more demo to
see.

3) PT format, as well as most other music formats, are keyed for PAL
synchronization. 

And a number of other goodies... :-)  Interesting note, Doctor O's
last hardware hack was to make a PAL Commodore 64 that runs off of a
60 Hz power supply. How he did that I have little idea, though the
CIA's and the vid chip both had to be replaced with 50Hz chips...

>Oh yeah, Rerveb, what was yer last guys demo? The last one I snagged was
>Dreams I think (or something like that..)... Still have it somewhere...

Well, I really have no idea. Lords kinda died out after the last demo
I worked on, which was a solo effort called "Sellout". Sellout was my
farewell to the 64 demo, and I remember how flickery the damned thing
was... then again, it was the first C64 demo with single bit clarity
vertical and horizontal scrolls (4 scrolls going on in different
directions if I recall) going on. One HELL of a lot of tinkering just
to get it to work right, and then I got most of the cash ready to go
buy my Amiga, so I slapped the music in it and put it out with an
excuse, that being that as soon as I got my Amiga I doubted I would
ever want to touch the 64 again.

Well, I have pulled my 64 out of storage once since that fateful day I
packed it up last June (of 1991, as it were. Actually I think it was
the end of May, but who cares?), and I was right. I didn't want to
touch it. I packed it back up quickly because I wanted those glorious
memories of coding and music triumphs to stand in their own light, not
pale next to the 68000. :-/

Vector math is going to be fun to learn, though. ;-)

-- 
My other .sig is also an Amiga.              -hazen@athena.cs.uga.edu
Mark Hazen			 	     -Reverb of Megawatts (huh?)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Newsgroups: alt.sys.amiga.demos