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From the Beyond Force homepage; "Poor was released at Dominators and Upfront christmas/new year party held in Denmark, december 1989. Poor was a part of co-operation between Origo and Beyond Force. Origo's parts were released under label Biascrusher. This text is about Beyond Force's contribution to the demo. Coding in Poor was done by Sam, Solomon, Hazor, RSB, Pi and Control.

The introduction features a Beyond logo and a flying matt that is moving in a circular path in yz-plane lapping the logo. The matt itself looks like a chessplane with white and red squares. The logo is one colored but that color is changed at every rasterline. There's also a big scroller in the lower part of the screen. Coding in the introduction was done by Sam, the scroller font by Drive and the 'popcorn' remix was composed by the legendary Rock of Finnish Gold.

The second part contains an animated multicolor sinuslogo on the lower part of the screen but the main thing in the part is the routine in the upper part of the screen. The routine draws some different figures in the upper half area that have been drawn with mouse before hand. So it looks like someone was drawing these figures on the screen while the demo continues. It differs a bit of the normal demo standard because of its original idea. The coding in this part was done by Control and Pi. There is also a scroller in the middle. The music was composed by Johannes Bjerregaard.

Next up is a green shaded field that looks a bit like electrical potential field. The field is slowly changing and it is implemented with the famous riffs shading method. There is also a scroller with a small font in the lower border. Main programming is done by Solomon and some finishing including the scroller was done by Hazor.

The fourth part includes another routine based on a new idea. This time it is coded by RSB (Revolutionary Singing Bitkiller or Bitwizard depending on the source). At the time this demo was released tech-tech routines were pretty popular. RSB has probably got his idea from these tech-tech routines and improvised a bit as the result is a kind of tech-tech that flexes horizontally. Actually only thing common with the tech-tech and RSB's routine is looks - they look a bit same. So it is in fact a horizontal flexer flexing independently on every single rasterline. There's also a dycp scroller in the part and a text flasher on the lower part of the screen. Music in this part was composed by JCH.

The part followed by that is also coded by RSB and it is the latest piece of code RSB has released on C-64. The part features two effects. The first one is on the upper part of the screen and is a smooth logo switcher - a sinusoidal line moving horizontally separating two different logos on both sides of the line. The other effect is a picture changer in the bottom of the screen. The pictures change with a technique that lowers the resolution of the picture so low that it becomes a single big pixel and then it heightens the resolution back and the viewer can notice that the picture has changed. Very famous music in the part was composed by Maniacs of Noise.

The sixth part is a bob-part. By the way a bob here is a small ball (in an area covering 8x8 pixels). There are many different movements and curves that move these bobs. There's a funny fade from low-resolution coordinates and low-resolution bobs to high-resolution coordinates and bobs. The part seems really nothing special now in 1997, but at the time bobs were pretty rare. The programming was done by Control and Pi. In case your browser supports java, you can view imitation of the original routine right on the side of this text.

The seventh part has a kind of a 3d-scroller with a 3-pixel wide font (!). The scroller is an upscroller that starts from the lowest part of the screen and is widest there and then it starts to shrink while moving towards the center area of the screen and then widening back to the width it had in the lowest point. So the impression is that the upscroller goes farther and farther away from the point it starts and then move back closer smoothly. Also the height of the letters is scaled as they move farther away while scrolling. The letters are colored with some rastercolors that are naturally flexing depending on the distance measured from the viewer. The part was coded by Sam with the nice tune by Rock of Finnish Gold.

The following part is probably one of the best in the demo and it includes two different colored logos saying 'Beyond' and 'Force' moving in a sinus going over each other. In top of this there is a real tech-tech on it. The logos are really big in C-64 standards. In fact so big that unrolled loops wouldn't be enough to create all the graphics in the logos in every frame. The trick here is to update the horizontal borderlines of the logos and let the inside of the logo be the contents of the previous calculated frame. So the idea is a bit like delta fill occasionally used in the filled vectors nowadays. There is on top of this a real big multicolor scroller in the lower part of the screen and it doesn't even use vsp (the trick that is used on c-64 to reduce dramatically the speed of scrolling, especially when the scrollers are in bitmap or otherwise are very big). So in fact a huge portion of rastertime is consumed scrolling the text. This furthermore emphasizes the speed of the sinuslogo routine. The font in the scroller was made by the Ruling Company. The classic music was composed by Moz(ic)art. Programming was done by Sam.

The last part is a traditional starfield with stars appearing first from the middle of the screen and then departing towards the sides until totally disappearing from the screen. There is also a text area moving around the screen with flexing text. All the characters in the text are flexing independently of each other. The part was coded by Sam."

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Last edited on 24 Apr 2020 by 100bit. See all edits