--- The Euskal Amiga-PC Party 4 Invitation ---

DISCLAIMER:

I hope a non-formal legal text will suffice to give you the idea.

I DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EVENTS ARISING FROM THE HANDLING, UNPACKING
AND/OR EXECUTION OF THIS SOFTWARE, INCLUDING DAMAGES OF ANY KIND
OR LIABILITIES OR WHATEVER. They key phrase here is  ^^^^^^^^^^^.
THIS SOFTWARE IS (C) COPYRIGHT 1996 by Javier Arevalo, AND CAN BE
FREELY DISTRIBUTED BY ANY MEANS. I won't be able to stop you doing
so, therefore I don't care.

All trademarks are property of their respective holders, etc, etc.

No animals were injured during the development of this production, etc.

Anyone cares to write a paragraph of this kind and make it public
domain so we can just insert a WWW URL instead of the ugly-looking
things above?

Welcome to the show!
Coming up tonight.... your usual jare-is-sleepless demo textfile!

This is written in english for everyone to be able to read it. Its
contents are definitely NOT worth the effort of translating into
spanish, so I won't do that.

In the year of 1996, the Fourth edition of the Euskal Party in Spain
is set to break new barriers. Yes this is true, almost everyone in
either the Amiga or PC spanish scene has confirmed his presence. And
when I was faced with the development of an invitation intro for it,
I knew I had to work hard to be up to the level expected...

...but then I thought again, and changed my mind. So here you have
it, the invtro, a little thing designed by accident, created with
the elements that were at hand in that moment. Well, at least it
is my first production that:

1 - Doesn't have a lame ASCII setup program.
2 - Doesn't use the DemoVT music system.
3 - Doesn't have any 3D in it.
4 - Is multilingual.
5 - Is actually nice to watch.

I'm actually involved in another game project, for which I plan to use
HiColor/TrueColor video modes, so I thought this intro could serve too
as a proof (or counter-) that my VESA code works. It also uses a couple
of tricks thought by JCAB, and the hicolor emulation mode that I saw in
Complex' Supermax intro. I definitely recommend to watch it in 16 bit
mode, the default, but you can override it with the -bpp parameter.

I have tried to stick to well-documented interfaces, hence I don't make
use of the fancy new VESA 2.0 protected mode or Linear Frame Buffer
enhancements. I also hope I haven't messed things up with cards that
don't support low-resolution hicolor modes or have BGR color ordering
like ATI Mach 64. If your VESA BIOS doesn't support low-resolution,
maybe the fine UniVESA/Display Doctor driver from SciTech may help you.
Please contact me at jarevalo@ran.es in case you find any problem.

The code is optimized for a Pentium machine which has become standard
by now. Yes, making use of the U & V pipes is fun by itself, and it
will pay in terms of speed. But I guess I have left some unoptimized
bits that will decrease the overall performance. Life's hard.

The sound is made to work using the environment variables BLASTER and
ULTRASND. Have these configured correctly for sound, or else extract
the great tune using your favourite ripper, and listen with your
preferred player. The music is a 4-channel MOD file converted to
S3M, and will select 44100 16-bit stereo replay if your card supports
it. As far as I know, the type parameter for BLASTER is:

T1 -> Old SB 1.5
T2 -> SB Pro
T3 -> SB 2.0
above -> SB 16, AWE, etc.

If I'm wrong with this assumption, please email me at jarevalo@ran.es.
However, to properly run the invtro, you will need to supply a -type #
command-line argument. I only have the SB 2.0 manuals at hand, and
the sound guru JCAB is not available to be asked. I only foresee the
chance that type 4 is actually a newer SB Pro, and JCAB's drivers for
SB 16 don't recognize that fact.

It is all then packed with our usual WCGSL library, and the executable
run with PMODE/W by Tran & Daredevil and their funny compressor. Some
may think that a ZIP file of over 350Kb for such a simple production
is overkill, but well, the song has some heavy samples that don't
compress well, and the background image is stored in 16 bpp.

The code was compiled using the great Watcom C 10.6 compiler. The
font is some Windows font processed and antialiased. The light bitmap
was generated using some drawing tool and then realtime filtered for
getting different light colors; I think it looks very nice. The code
itself is 100% c source with ASM inline code for drawing pixels or
dumping to the screen. Otherwise, it makes use of our WCGSL support
library and the VTAL Sound System, exactly the same that I was used
for our previous Pump demo or my game Speed Haste. The background
image was drawn by COI using his graphics tablet and weird idea of
art (but I love it!).

Everything was developed in a DOS shell under Windows 95, so I don't
expect many compatibility problems with that. Tests haven't shown
any problems except the usual old Windows display or sound drivers.

You can skip the text pages with SPACE, or exit with ESC. I didn't
put a screen capture handler for PrtScr because I don't have code
right now for saving truecolor files; maybe next time. I tried to
make it all flexible and user-friendly, so pressing ESC again while
the music fades out will quit quickly.

Oh, try the -balls # parm, it gives a much more colourful look to the
display (but in can render the text unreadable!). A generally nice
number is -balls 10

Nothing else to say... I have tons of work to do so I don't think I
will be able to test this extensively. Cross my fingers that it all
goes well and doesn't erase any hard disks or breaks any trademarks
or infringes any U.S. patents.

See you at the Euskal Party! San Sebastian is a beautiful city in
the summer, lots of fun to have and places to see, so if you have
the chance, don't miss it! Remember, July 25-28th, 1996.

I dedicate this work to my brother JCAB, who is right now at L.A.
attending E3. Today was his 27th birthday and one of the very few I
haven't been with him, I hope he had a great time there and made all
your jaws drop with his game project with Scavenger. Greetings to
my friends and all the sceners.

Yours truly

Jare/Iguana A.K.A. Javier Arevalo Baeza
Madrid, Spain. May 19th, 1996.

P.S: Oh, I forgot to put some smiley, so there you have. :-)