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From: dmb@wam.umd.edu (David M. Baggett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: union demo 2
Message-ID: <1991Apr5.202600.7995@wam.umd.edu>
Date: 5 Apr 91 20:26:00 GMT
References: <7871@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU> <40919@cup.portal.com> <1991Apr05.082347.2154@ecst.csuchico.edu>
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In article <1991Apr05.082347.2154@ecst.csuchico.edu> ekrimen@ecst.csuchico.edu (Ed Krimen) writes:
>Bob_BobR_Retelle@cup.portal.com writes:
>
>- Lotsa questions about various "demos" for the ST..
>-
>- These demos are great, but..  is anyone involved in creating the 
>- demos also involved in creating anything useful..?
> 
>No.

Now Ed, let's not bash these demo writers too much.  :-) While in
general it seems that many of these demo authors are egomaniacs who
don't follow guidelines, there are some of them that write "useful"
stuff.  (That is, if you consider games useful.)  At least, I know the
game Enchanted Lands was written by some former demo hackers.  This
shows in the game itself -- the scrolling is smooth and full-screen,
and the music is good.  Not my favorite game, but techincally quite
impressive.

I'm sure demo authors write other things too.  (I realize you were
being a bit sarcastic.)

>- If you bother to wait through all the text on most of these demos, 
>- they all seem to be self-congratulatory messages between various
>- software pirating groups...
> 
>And there's something wrong with that?  Maybe they should 
>congratulate one person.  Maybe they should congratulate, maybe -- 
>just maybe, Bob Retelle?  Nah.  It would read, "Greetings to Bob
>Retelle.  Scr*w everyone else," or something like that, as they do. 

I agree with Bob.  I think it's pretty tasteless to put cheesey
messages to one's friends in demos, and besides that, it limits the
usefulness of the demo.  One purpose of demos is to show off the
computer.  I remember the "walking robot" demo from Atari 8-bit days --
I bet that sold a few machines.  But no store owner is going to put a
demo up that says, "Howdee to all crackurs out there" or some similar
garbage.  Correctly spelled messages might be nice occasionally, too.  :-)

>- We've got a wonderful body of "demos" to run on our computers, but 
>- do they equate into anything "real"..?
> 
>I don't know about you, but I bought my STe just to see the CoolSTe 
>demo by An Cool.  When I'm not reading Usenet, CoolSTe is always 
>playing.  I can't get enough of Janet Jackson's 'Rhythm Nation,' nor 
>of Mickey Mouse bouncing around among 4096 colors.  

I know I've already bantered about this before, but I think demos often
miselad non-programmers as to what the capabilities of their machine
actually are.  You can do a heck of a lot more in a demo than you
can in general-purpose code.

The recent thread on flicker palettes provides an example:  Suppose
I come up with two palettes in which 32 combinations blend with no
flicker at all.  Then I can write a demo that puts 32 colors on the
screen at once with no flicker (of course, putting a note at the bottom
of the screen saying, "By the way all u crakers and hakkurs, count the
colurs on the screen HA HA wunder how i did that?")

That doesn't mean that anyone could use my 32-color "screen mode"
for _anything useful_.  You couldn't write a paint program to 
take advantage of it.  (Well, maybe.)  In any case techniques
like these often break down when you try to make them general-purpose.

>But I agree with you, too bad we don't see more productivity products 
>from them.  I think they could write some very nice stuff.

To be honest, I'm not so sure that's true.  I don't mean to be
critical here, but many of the demos I've seen

	1) simply crash when run from a hard drive
	2) take over the entire system
	3) provide no way to exit the program, probably because they
	   trash the OS in horrible ways
	4) are usually weird and unpolished in their operation
	5) rely on all sorts of undocumented and unsupported
	   hardware "features", e.g., shifter bugs, instruction
	   timings, etc.

It's as though the authors only spend much time on the "nifty hack"
parts of the demos -- the routine that puts 522 colors on the screen or
whatever, and then just do a half-baked job on the rest.  It doesn't
take much work to make a well-behaved program, but it requires a kind
of discipline I guess.

You can't release a productivity program with any of the above 5
problems unless you want bad sales.  Games, on the other hand, are
pretty much like demos in that you don't have to follow as many rules.

Dave Baggett
dmb%wam.umd.edu@uunet.uu.net