AGA Multitasking Demo

by Dual Crew Shining

Credits

Packed in:

Psykotrope May 1995

Soundtrack

Belfagor / Dual Crew Shining Aug 1993

Last edited on 13 Aug 2023 by menace. See all edits

1 comment

Tizzy - 21:29 8 December 2014 #

This production was originally intended for a special division of the demo competition at the party that was called "Multitasking demos". Commodore was a sponsor of the party and wanted to promote "nice programming" where programs could run alongside each other. What it meant was that the demos in this demo competition should be able to nicely play with the rest of the operating system.

Since the operating system did not expose the graphics chips at the level required to create demos this was not an easy task and no other demo was submitted to the multitasking demo category. The party organizers therefore dropped the competition.
This demo was then submitted to the normal demo competition where it was well behind in quality due to its limited use of the hardware.

The demo loop runs on a timer instead of vertical blanking synchronization. There is no copper code since that chip is not accessible from the operating system. The scroll and the background runs in two different windows. The vector routine uses a pure software rasterizer since the blitter chip's filling operations was not exposed to the operating system.