Eager (to live) by Life on Mars
Full title: Eager (to live)
Label: Life on Mars
Credits: spke^lom (Design, Code)
nq^skrju (Music)
The "Hype Productions" intro was coded by trefi
using graphics by diver^4d and music by nq^skrju
Party: 3BM OpenAir 2015
Compo: ZX Spectrum Demo
Requirements: ZX Spectrum 128K/+2ab/+3/Pentagon/ScorpionZS256+
This demo absolutely requires 3.5MHz CPU.
It may start without it, but you won't enjoy it
nearly as much. AY/YM stereo mod is highly
recommended (ABC or ACB are both supported).
Duration: About 3 minutes of content; the demo is looped
Contacts: zxintrospec@gmail.com
Notes: <3 summer, 3BM and Hype.
Special thank you to diver^4d for his massive
help in re-designing the intro, few other cool
suggestions and real ZX Pentevo testing/audio
recording. We are also very grateful to riskej
for his help with testing the demo on a real
ZX Spectrum +3 (this is how we discovered that
our original balance was not all that great) and
also for his extensive knowledge of classics.
"Eager" is a demo about sensation (in the Jungian
sense of the word). It is very much a demo build
around a sound design, and as such it is intended
to reproduce a sensation of sound blowing at you
through a set of substantial speakers. Hence
this demo's obsession with tunnels and zoomers
is an intentional part of the design; hence, the
story this demo is trying to tell has no true
ending. Put simply, this demo is about stuff
flying in your face endlessly.
I believe that "Eager" is the second ZX Spectrum
demo to properly combine digi-drums with 50Hz
newschool demoeffects in full screen (the first
demo of this kind was "Scroller" by DeMarche
(2010)). "Scroller" implemented digidrums using
Covox; this demo does not require any extensions.
Thanks to riskej and boleg, I know several other
examples of demos that featured digi-drums tracks
combined with non-static imagery ("Mind Gigademo"
by Cross Road/Bad Boys Company (1994), "Zy-zy
Megademo" by Megacode/KSA (1996) as well as
"Andrenalize" by Global Corp (1998)). All of
them ("Scroller" included) achieved this feat by
careful interleaving of the sound loop with the
effect codes. The complexity of such an
arrangement is such that in every one of these
demos, only one scene is coded with the digital
drums and the effects are limited to various
constant-time routines: i.e. combinations of
multicolour, scrolling, unpacked animations etc.
The strategy used in this demo is very different
and is more reminiscent of the "interrupting
drums" commonly used in beeper engines. The basic
idea is that if digi-drum sounds are all
relatively short (about 110,000 t-states in our
case, i.e. about 31.4 ms), it is possible to use
track with relatively slow speed and pre-generate
in advance video frames to be shown as needed
(even in the middle of drum playback). This
dramatically reduces the (constant) time
requirements for the effects and allows, in
principle, to implement almost any type of an
effect as long as its average and maximum running
times are within the engine requirements. It also
allowed me to use fairly high-quality samples, at
31.25kHz. The engine can simultaneously playback
two samples into two different channels, which
helped to compensate for relatively low volume of
digital sounds on AY/YM chip by doubling up the
sound. It also allowed us to play some neat
tricks with the stereo.
In the case of this demo, the music speed is 5,
i.e. in theory drum sounds may need to be
produced once every 5 frames. In reality the
average would be just over one drum kick per 10
frames. One frame out of every five is occupued
by copying of frames from buffer onto the screen.
This leaves me, on average, with about 30-35K
t-states per generated frame, i.e. I tend to
generate about 4 new frames per every 5 frames
with the drum sound. My frame buffer holds 8
frames. The need to render effects into the
buffer and then copy them onto the screen
necessitates the use of attribute-only effects
and gives me about 30000/768 ~ 40 t-states per
byte to play with. I worked hard to make this
limitation not overly blatant.
Essentially, the demo is based upon three
effects. First, I prepared two different
versions of the tunnel. One type of the tunnel
is a plasma-type LUT, which is very smooth
(fixed-point arithmetics, essentially), but
fairly slow, ~100 t-states per byte and not
very convenient to use with textures. The key
speed up is achieved by working with the 256
bytes square chunk buffer and then very quickly
copying/reflecting it onto the screen:
ld a,(hl) : ld (nn),a : ld (mm),a
ld (bc),a : ldi ; less than 15t per byte
The second kind of the tunnel is a much faster
direct LUT, which is great for working with
textures, but not very flexible in terms of
available dynamics.
The second effect is the combination of
striped animation technique that appeared in
my previous demos with the palette cycling, to
significantly increase the number of frames for
motion of objects across the screen, all in
50fps full screen. I am still very excited
about this style of animation and will surely
do more of it.
The third effect is a true chaos zoomer, also
in 50Hz. It turns out that the main trick to
get this effect working translates well onto
ZX Spectrum architecture; the resulting render
is simply a sequence of pre-generated:
ld hl,nn : ldi
(the main magic is, of course, in the specially
prepared table look-ups). I will definitely
look into higher resolution implementation of
chaos zoomer on ZX Spectrum some time soon.
Overall, this demo took a lot more time than
I expected due to my difficulties in coming
up with the scheme for synchronizing
asynchronyous frame generator with the
display of frames synchronized to the soundtrack.
The balance between digital/chip sound also
proved tricky to get right. I definitely was not
ready for the resulting complications; hence,
the relatively raw state of the party version
of the demo. Hopefully, this improved final
version should resolve most of the issues
with the party release.
Libraries: The variation of PSG player used in this demo
is the fastest player of compressed PSG music
currently available on ZX Spectrum. It always
uses less than 1K t-states (below 500 t-states
per frame on average). The compressor is by
psndcj^tbk, with some minor format
modifications by yours truly.
The demo kernel is my usual demo kernel with
numerous hacks needed to accomodate the
asynchronious playback of frames. I do not
think I will use the kernel from this demo
elsewhere, at least not without re-writing;
I did not fully comprehend the consequences
of asynchronicity when I was hacking together
a custom kernel and the resulting kernel ended
up being too capricious.
Otherwise, the toolset I used to make "Eager"
is very similar to what I did in my previous
demos. The only big change was much more
active use of Processing, where I created
all of my effects before converting them to
ZX Spectrum and generated over 100K of
assembler source codes for some of the effects.
[ back to the prod ]