Attack of stubidos

Attack of Stubidos was released at Byterapers, Scoopex Finland and Bloodsuckers party held in Parikkala, Finland, August 1991. The demo won the demo competition at the party and was coded by Gremlin and Xentrix. Though we have to admit that there were only like five contributions in the demo competition.

The introduction is nothing special. There is a textflasher on the top of the screen and some sprites saying 'beyond' moving over them. On the lower part of the screen there is a picture changer which switches from one picture to another by replacing a pixel of the former picture with a pixel from new picture slowly a small portion of picture at time. The animation frames are calculated while the former picture is shown and can be viewed, so the calculating process doesn't take much time (as it shouldn't as it is a pretty simple algorithm). The introduction was coded by Gremlin and the music was composed by Laxity.

In the second part there is a parallax effect that is stretched to the limit. There are three moving fields scrolling over each other (well one of them is in sprites) and one field staying still. This part features nothing much more but there is in fact a lot of unused rastertime. In the lower part of the screen there is some text like credits. The part was programmed by Xentrix and remains as the only part he ever coded in any Beyond Force demo.

The third part contains a circlescroller made with bobs - only this time the circle is in yz-plane and the scrolltext letter normal is pointing out of origo and perpendicular to x-axis. There are over hundred bobs (though some of them are sprites) that make a scroller. There is also a logo in the lower part of the screen and it is drawn by Max. The fabolous music is composed by Skyline Technics of Horizon. Programming was done by Gremlin.

In the fourth part there is a whole new kind of a routine on C-64. Anyway, the idea came from Amiga so it's not all new though the routine has to be made on C-64 in a whole new way. The routine itself is a kind of a plasm with only four colors and stretching veritcally with weird double sinuses. The implementation requires using the famous D011 trick that scrolls the screen lines down and makes it possible to change the screen memory values on the same text line which isn't just as easy as changing the memory values at every rasterline (if you don't believe it - just try!). Additionally, there is a scroller in the lowest line of the screen which only appears to be the last line of the screen since the drawing of the text lines has been delayed for the most part of the screen where the plasm effect is. The routines naturally run in every frame. Music in this part was composed by Zardax of Origo Dreamline. Coding work was done by Gremlin.

The last part of the demo features a real vector scroller consisting of normal dots. The scroller rotates over x-axis and z-axis and includes a zoomer. Rotating over the x-axis is optimised due to all calculated dots lying in the xy-plane. There are about 70 dots still calculated and drawn in every frame. There is a logo in the lower part of the screen which was drawn by Napalm and in the middle of the screen there is a normal 8x8 pixel scroller. The music in the part was done by Jeroen Tel of Maniacs of Noise. Demo programming by Gremlin.