Reverie by Cryptic Allusion [web]
-=> R E V E R I E <=-
Final Diftro
Copyright (C)2003 Dan Potter
Released Dec 27, 2003 for
the Ultimate Meeting demo party's
Dreamcast compo
gamedev.allusion.net
INTRO
-----
Thanks for download this demo. As the credits scroller says, I only had
about a week and a half or so to put the whole thing together since I got
started kind of late. I haven't done any music in about 10 years, so that
took a bit of refreshing as well. :) But I hope you'll enjoy it
nonetheless.
For those of you who followed the PC demo scene back in the early 90s, you
might remember a crusty demo group called Digital Infinity. We produced
Farandole Composer (which makes FAR files, still supported somewhat by
ModPlug!), we wrote an intro for Snowman's Music Contest 2, and we produced
two little demos/intros called DifTro. I (Dan) also used to run
Programmer's Oasis, which was a BBS in Dallas, TX for Digital Infinity and
Future Crew, and just general demo-related stuff.
We used to talk really big back then and do very small (I kind of shudder
thinking of some of the things I used to say back then :), and the thing we
were talking about most before we sort of faded off into the sunset was
that we were working on a megademo called Reverie. Well, I will ruefully
admit that that basically never got past the planning stages because that
was right around the time I went off to early college at TAMS. So it seemed
as if Reverie was not to be.
Fast forward 10 years, and I want to write a little Dreamcast demo to show
off some of the ways to use my new Tsunami and Parallax libs for
KallistiOS. I needed a name for the demo, so I figured what the heck...
this demo would certainly have been worthy of the Reverie name back in the
early 90s. This'll give some closure to those demo days finally! Those of
you who knew DIF back in the day can get one last laugh.
The modern demos of day (early 00s) are all about the art and design. There
is a lot of coding involved, I'm sure, but they are more like music videos
than old style demos. I've always been a fan of the old style demos -- a
few clever "how'd they do that!" tricks, showing off your code, etc. Pixel
tweaked art. Doskpop.
Well, anyhow, just watch the demo and you can be the judge of whether I
succeeded in my little homage or not. :)
HOWTO!
------
So you just want to watch the thing, eh? :) You've got a couple of options.
Reverie is included as a single executable file, in these formats:
- reverie.elf: ELF file loadable with dcload or dcload-ip.
- reverie.bin: Raw binary, unscrambled.
- 1st_read.bin: Raw binary, scrambled.
Additional formats (SBI, NRG, CDJ) may be available where you got this
package.
Simply burn this CD and boot it in your Dreamcast(tm) or load it with one
of the dcloads, and you should be good to go. The demo will exit to the
boot menu when completed.
Also if you are using dcload-ip you may want to take a screen shot of the
demo. This will probably mess up the music timing, but I assume if you are
taking screen shots you don't care. To do this, just hold down both triggers
on an attached controller and hit Y. It will be written to the file
"/pc/tmp/shotXX.ppm", where XX starts at 00 and counts upwards.
You may feel free to include this demo on any sort of compilation disc
(whether commercial or not) as long as you include all of the files present
in this distribution archive (including the sources).
If you make CD images of this demo, please use the included IP.BIN as well.
CREDITS
-------
Reverie was written by me (Dan Potter). I wrote the code, tracked the
music, did the artwork and a font. All the big demo guys back in the 90s
did at least one of these, so I couldn't let them finish ahead of me :)
A lot of thanks needs to go to people who wrote supporting things though.
- Vogue of Triton and Purple Motion of Future Crew, for some samples in
my S3M. I know I recognize some of them from older Amiga mod files
anyway, so who knows where they came from originally...
- The whole KallistiOS team on SourceForge, for continuing to do a great
job testing and contributing fixes.
- The authors of the PNG and zlib libraries, for image loading.
- The authors of ModPlug; wow, what a fantastic library.
- The authors of the "Flubber" font included with Knoppix; I used this font
to make the "Reverie" title pic.
All artwork was created in The Gimp under Debian Linux. All code was
written on Debian Linux as well. ModPlug Tracker under Windows (ugh) was
used to write the music.
SOURCES
-------
One way in which I've definitely diverged from old school demos here is
that the full source code for this demo is included. This includes a
Makefile, all of the cpp and h files, the artwork source, music file, etc.
With what is included, you should be able to build the demo from scratch
and more.
I did this because I want there to be more examples of how to use Parallax,
Tsunami, and KallistiOS out there. Also there is no good reason to keep
this stuff secret. I'd rather share it with everyone.
The source code compiles with GCC 3.0.4 and KOS 1.3.x+ from Subversion.
Actually as of right now (Dec 23rd) this requires a very bleeding edge copy
of KOS that may not even be fully checked into Subversion. So I apologize
for that, but I ended up making some improvements in there to support the
demo that will get rolled out eventually. You must also have all of the
kos-ports tree compiled and available.
If you want to compile it, make sure there is also a dir called "deps"
under the source tree for dependency scratch files. You also have to pull
the different pieces from music/ and gfx/ to put in romdisk/.
All of the source code is licensed under a new BSD-style license. This is
the same as KOS itself. This means that you can take pieces from whatever
and use them in your own stuff, commercial or no, proprietary or free, as
long as you credit me somewhere.
The music and artwork (both "source" and "binary") are _not_ licensed under
the BSD license. If you want to distribute or use these separate from the
demo itself, please contact me. As long as they are distributed as part of
Reverie then that is fine, but for other uses, go ahead and email me at
<bard@allusion.net>.
Also perhaps of interest, I included "plan.txt" which is just my internal
thoughts and notes about the demo. Some of the things I wrote in there never
happened for various reasons, but I did manage to get around to most of it.
THAT'S IT
---------
If you want more info on homebrew DC development, please visit these sites:
http://gamedev.allusion.net/
http://www.cagames.com/
http://www.consolevision.com/
http://www.boob.co.uk/
http://www.dcemulation.com/
I hope you enjoy this, and have a good holiday season and new year!
Dan Potter
Cryptic Allusion
www.cagames.com
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