Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Thanks to Warp, I spent most of my morning looking at old Amiga demos.
> 
> In particular, I remember as a young teenager reading a review of a demo 
> named "Jesus on Es" by LSD. The reviewer clearly rated it extremely 
> highly. I always dreamed that one day, I'd get to see this apparently 
> legendary demo.
> 
> Well, about a year ago, I discovered an online video file of the demo. 
> (Presumably made using a TV digitiser.) It's compressed to hell, so some 
> of the visual effects don't come out very well. I'm also fairly sure 
> some of the shorts aren't that jerky on a real Amiga. [Because I've seen 
> other programs do it smoothly on the same hardware.]

I just found a higher-quality version of the video online.

Two versions, actually. One uses "DivX", the other uses "H.264". Neither 
of these videos will actually play on my PC, but if I rename the DivX 
one to ".avi" suddenly it plays. (The other one refuses to play no 
matter what I do to it.)

The sound is clearly, the visuals are sharper, and they move faster. 
However, half way through watching I realised with some irritation that 
sound and picture aren't synced properly. I don't know whether the whole 
thing is out of sync by a constant amount or whether they slowly slide 
out of phase; either way, I'm not sure how to fix. But it's damned 
annoying in a carefully synced high-BPM audio-visual experience!

I notice also that the visuals aren't exactly the same as the first 
video. I presume the exact sequence is randomised.



Also, I did thing about getting hold of an Amiga emulator. It used to be 
that only M68k Apples could run such a thing - but today, PCs run so 
much faster than an Amiga that in principle it should be possible to run 
hardware emulation purely in software.

I did in fact discover two such emulators. One costs money, and the 
other requires you to get hold of a ROM image from somewhere. 
[Obviously, CBM holds the copywrite on the contents!] I'll have to see 
if I can find software for taking such an image. (Also, there is NO 
DOCUMENTATION ANYWHERE!)



Watching this demo, you do wonder why the reviewer all those years ago 
was so excited about it.

...and then you go watch some other demos. They all do stuff that is 
wildly more technically impressive, but... I think the longest demo I 
saw was about 9 minutes? Jesus on Es runs for THIRTY MINUTES. During 
that time, the music is non-stop and never repeats. (The graphics, on 
the other hand, repeat far too much!)

Even if you just think of it as a music compilation with a few visuals 
thrown in just for giggles, it's still quite impressive that you can fit 
30 minutes of sound on two 720 KB floppies, no? ;-)

[Before anybody flames me: Yes, I know how sampling works. I have 
personally DONE it. :-P Still, that Rolf Harris sample is quite big... 
wonder how they got it all to fit?]

It's also quite amusing the number of synthesizer samples that I 
actually *recognise*! ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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