Early Years of Pu-239

Note: the VIC-II bug behind sprite stretching was not actually discovered by me, although I dare to say that I 'perfected' it in my demos, and even devised a theory (or a working hypothesis) of how and why it worked.

"Pu-239" by Albert was released 12.2.1989, but really all it had was a proportional-font scroller in sprites with another multiplexed set of sprites behind it. After all, we were just learning to code. "Solid Plutonium" 28.2.1989 was 7373's continuation of the double-scroll war between us. Every demo just had to have two scrollers in them.

25.3.1989 in the demo "Alias", 7373 changed his handle to Falstaff, because I was always bugging him about the 'anonymity' of the handle 7373. It seems that Secundus was against this, as I later found out in one of his VIC20 demos. (Btw, the VIC20 demos are available from http://www.funet.fi/pub/cbm/vic20/demos/Pu-239/.)

Another masterpiece from Falstaff, "Screw" was released 12.5.1989. Somewhat influenced by a Kefrens demo for Amiga (name?), this demo had two vertical rotating bars, rotating around the graphics on the screen. The picture shows the first part of the demo.

"Pipe" by Albert was a somewhat crude in appearance, but it featured a scroller 'mapped' into the surface of a pipe (i.e. a cylinder). It used sprite stretching of course.. In "Finito" 31.5.1989, Falstaff celebrates the end of the elementary school and creates a fairly cool-looking raster color effect (later used in Midsummer'89).

"Vector" is the only 'vector' demo by Albert this far. And it really isn't a vector demo at all. Yes, it does show a vector-like object on the screen, but it is only line-drawn in realtime, all the line ends are pre-calculated. I made a simple basic program to calculate the rotation of the object, and another program to edit the result to hide the lines that should be hidden. In the end, a very annoying music was added (read the whole scrolltext and you know what I mean), and the LONG text about our first 'copy-party' in Lahti, which ended up to be a real disaster.

Well, Lovejoy hadn't really made any demos for C64 at this time. We could tolerate that from Secundus, as he only had a bunch of VIC20's, but Lovejoy had a C128, and had in fact done some coding (one very simple demo even), so we pushed him into action. Lovejoy coded one demo part, I (Albert) coded one part, and Falstaff coded the first part for the first Pu-239 megademo "Midsummer", released 20.6.1989. Falstaff had some real trouble linking the parts together, because at that time he didn't have Action Replay, so in the end he used Lovejoy's C128 and its built-in machine code monitor to glue it all together.

"Megascroll", which was released 27.8.1989 continued the megademo theme. As all our megademos, it was a single-file demo with many parts. Megascroll was the first(?) border-breaking sinus/expand scroll we have seen. This doesn't mean that it was actually the first, but because we didn't get much demos from other groups, we just didn't know what they were up to. The demo also has a breakout game in it..

"Slow Ideas" 31.12.1989 was a statement that is true even today: All cool ideas are too slow to implement. The demo has a Sprite tech-tech and 2 other parts. (Has anyone else ever made a tech-tech effect with sprites ?)