Degreelessness
Occasionally when I am feeling nostalgic I dust of some off my old creations. Back in the day I used to create graphical demos for PC, which are difficult to run these days because they were designed to run under DOS and not Windows, and computer hardware has change so much since then. Fortunately I can use DOSBox to run them with Vista. DOSBox even has an option to record videos, so I recorded a demo I wrote way back in 1995 (it actualy got me my first job). 'Degreelessness' was built on a Pentium 75 PC and runs with glorious 256 colour graphics. Its a little embarrassing, especially the goatee, but bare in mind is is over 10 years old!
Here it is, courtesy of Google Video.
Video doesn't work, at least from this angle. Google video gives "not found".
Works fine here (just clicked play and away I went)?
"Mork" seems to have been an H.R. Geiger fan (also Evil Dead II and Casablanca are referenced) : )
Very nice! I remember the demo scene with fondness from my days with the Amiga.
Damn - submitting a comment stops the video. Why the name 'degreelessness'?
It's called Degreelessness because I have no degree. It felt like more of an issue back then. Now, nobody seems to care. :-)
I love old DOS demos!
Google video is using %100 for no apparent reason.
Why not post the original binary? Might I find this on pouet, by any chance?
You can download the binary here:
http://hornet.scene.org/cgi-bin/scene-search.cgi?search=degreelessness
You'll probably need Dosbox to run it!
Hey, I just bought the Pygame book and thought I'd take a look at your website, and I noticed this.
It's very interesting, but I have a few questions - Is it software rendered or did it use 3dfx acceleration that was around back then? Did it always run that fast on the pentium? How much assembler is there going on back there, and how much of it is C? Is the music procedural? Was the face stored as a model file? Is there any chance that you have the source lying around?
More importantly, did it actually get you a job? Hehe. I think it's great, well done!
Hope you like the book!
Wow, lots of questions.
It was entirely software rendered. It ran smoothly on my Pentium 75 I had back then, but not quite as fast as the video. The majority of it was written in C++ with polygon rasterizers and effects written in assembler. The face and torus were stored in 3ds model files, IIRC. The music was a mod file, which is an old format for storing sequences music.
I probably do have the source somewhere. Wouoldn't recommend it as a learning tool, my coding was more chaotic back then.
It did get me a job actualy. Working for a games studio in Glasgow. :-)