Text from Madheader 2
| Description: | A0d's quasi-amusing memory filler. |
| Text: | what you are looking at is the last piece of coding mr.mad ever did on this machine. that is to say, the first embryonic version of it. programmed in late '89 or early '90 it did combine a lot of things on one screen that had never been combined in such a way before. there were even various preparations and facilities in there for it to be a loader! it was never finished because he had decided to move on to the pc. yes, you heard it right. the pc. he had been active on amiga for a while by then and he believed that the ibm platform computers were the future. but... because those things were ludicrously expensive in those days he had to sell almost all of his other stuff to be able to afford a pc and to keep his car running at the same time. so everything was sold except for a few disks which contained all the car/wgi productions, his only weird science demo and the proto version of this. having looked at it a lot of times during the nineties and noughties and the intricacies of his code being way beyond my knowledge, which consisted mostly of putting text on the screen in unnecessary complicated ways, i never managed to do anything with it. but somewhere around the end of 2010, just for the heck of it, i took the original memory dump, separated the various code and data segments and tried to put it into my cross-assembly environment. eventually i succeeded but most of the code still eluded me so i wasn't able to make any meaningful additions or improvements to it. an insignificant place inbetween my other programming stuff was its irreverent fate again. until, july i think it was, of 2012, when in some sort of a melancholic mood, i showed mr.mad what i had done and complained to him that i couldn't get my head around the various problems with his program. in typical mr.mad fashion he grabbed my laptop, glanced over the code and, amazingly as if no time had passed the last twenty years, immediately went into coding-mode. within fifteen minutes he had found how to solve most of the hurdles i encountered trying to make the additions i wanted. in the end the problem was in the way he stabilises the raster-interrupt. he devised a method using the nmi, catching the irq on the appropriate screen-line and determining its exact horizontal position and then modifying the irq routine itself to include the proper delay. but further on he also used the nmi to do the multiplexing between music play and disc-loading. the same trick he used in the loader part of 'is it true?'. complex? perhaps, but i have never seen it fail. anyway... the project was started again and actually for about 90 percent finished that year. we only needed some fancy, more modern aestethics. unfortunately 2013 turned out to be a rough year for mr.mad and a lot of other stuff happened in the lives of thelex and me so, again, it all grinded to a halt. shamefully i have to admit that this demo would have laid on the shelf for a lot longer if mr.mad hadn't suddenly passed away in august this year. after his death thelex and i decided that we would finish the demo in honour of him. so now, lacking a thoroughly dedicated graphician and musician in our group, you are tortured with a lot of unbalanced flashing, coder colours, a wired picture and the original led storm music mr.mad used in the raw original. i still hope you like it for what it is and not give us a hard time because we are not a 'triple a' group. rests for me only to say that some additional memories and musings about mr.mad can be read in the scroll underneath this one written by thelex (warning! long read) and ofcourse the credits. code by mr.mad and a0d, graphics are all stolen and wired so you tell me! music by tim follin featured in the game 'led storm', text by thelex and a0d and further design and support by the beast and thelex. ps. this tragedy doesn't mean we from wgi are quitting in any way and i can reveal that we are working on something that is supposed to be released next year (because 2015, why else?) or on x'2016 which will certainly land us in, at least, the c category. hahaha. mr.mad's spirit is still with us and inspiring us, so see you next time. |
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