Effektz - free screensavers

Love it. But I loved the demo scene back in the day. The Silents, The Carebears, The Lost Boys, Oxygene, Equinox, TEX, Inner Circle, RSi, etc, etc.

Good start here, so now we need:

- Glenz vectors
- Jelly vectors
- A playlist of a variety of polygon shapes
- Shade bobs
- Other plasma varieties (besides sinus)
- Sinus dots, dot shapes and the like
- Phong/Goraud Shaded and/or textured cubes
- A variety of scrolltexts (sinus, DNA, tubular, etc.)
- Multi-sprite shapes (shapes made of balls, generally, that morph from one to the next, made famous by RSi)

Probably more as I think about 'em.

 

I was into the Atari ST demo scene myself, though I admired some of the Amiga stuff, too. (Spaceballs' State of the Art demo was crazy goodness back in the day. The Lost Boys tried to a similar music video-esque bit on the ST in their Ooh Crikey, Wot a Scorcher demo with a segment called Komische Sackratten Von Der Hohle, and it was pretty cool, but not quite of the same calibre, even if the music was better. )

I saw a few demos on the Palm, actually, including some of those, and they were great. FWIW, I also bought MW's Atari Retro. On SD, no less, in its retail box. Now if that were to come out for the iPhone/Touch...

 

I suppose it's too much to hope that getting the license again is a simple matter, huh?

Back to the demo, depending on just how bored you guys are, you should compile a bunch of them into a kind of iPhone megademo, complete with a game-like demo selector like you'd see in some of the cooler demos. Yeah, probably a bit ambitious for a freebie, but it's nice to think about.

In fact... why not hold a demo compo for the iPhone? We've already got lots of devs, and plenty of indies who might want to get in on some of the action.

 

Actually, I suspect that in spite of their own language in the SDK rules and regs, Apple are giving a pass to completely self-contained emulators. Sega has indeed been passing muster, but so too did the Chip-8 emulator. Now, I don't know where the fault line lies with this, but I think I can suss it out from the evidence; Sega is emulating its own classics, so they have full rights, and the Chip-8 emulator is open-sourced freeware, so no license is needed. The Commodore 64 emulator imbroglio recently I suspect had to do with its planned ability to allow DLC of new games. It's fully licensed and contains only licensed games, so that's not the problem, and obviously Apple isn't completely against the idea of emulators given the above evidence, so the only thing that fits is that it isn't fully self-contained and would allow additional binaries to be downloaded via DLC.

The original Boomshine by Danny Miller (which Chain Rxn is a direct clone of) is on the App Store, and Sneezies is a good, cute implementation, too.

Close, but not quite the same thing. (I'm not sure where that demo is from, just came up in a YouTube search) Actually, this is closer to glenz vectors than anything. Glenz bobs, I guess you could call them.

A free version that shows up the original would be rather popular, I suspect. Danny wouldn't like it very much though.

Exactly. And the demos could be old or new school. It could be a cool idea; developers could get their name in a demo compilation that could also serve as a bit of self-promotion, which was really the whole point of the demo scene back in the day. I think you could get a pretty good turnout if word got around. Anyone who remembers the demo scene days (or who still follow the present-day PC scene) would get a kick out of a megademo, either for nostalgic reasons or as showoff pieces, and developers could have a bit of down-time fun coding up some cool and fun effects and artistic demos that would double as some quasi-advertisement couched in its own art form.

The Palm demos were impressive, especially given the hardware they were running on, so I can only imagine what sort of things developers familiar with the iPhone platform could turn out if they just let their creativity and mad coding skills run wild.

 

Yes, but I think it has to do with the ability to download new games for the emulator via DLC. Sega's emulated games and the Chip-8 emulator are all completely self-contained, which seems to be the only significant difference.

I can imagine. He left a comment on my blog when I reviewed the first Boomshine clone on the App Store, Chain Reaction [iTunes link]. He wasn't too happy with Felix about that one, either.

True, but I think what also makes the difference is that shadebob sprites use alpha channel shading too (they're more solid in the center), so they make very different patterns than solid, flat circles.

I played Danny's version as a Flash game first, and loved it originally, but since the sub-genre has expanded considerably since then, his original feels kind of short. Chain Rxn was also kind of short, though I liked the musical sounds in it. Chain Rxn I think was adapted to be more of a social game given its Facebook roots, so the scoring challenge would make sense.

A bloke by the name of Eugene Alemzhin, who created Scharik Game, apparently, which had almost identical gameplay, though far simpler graphics. This inspired a few clones in DOS. That in turn inspired startup PopCap Games to write Diamond Mine in Flash, which was later renamed (by Microsoft of all people) to Bejeweled.

I liked the ones that simulated the original LCD myself, but then I'm a sucker for the nostalgia stuff.

But yeah, I'm sure Eugene could scarcely believe PopCap's popularity when they released Bejeweled.

I haven't found one yet, but it would be interesting if it did exist. I suspect there's still a lot of pie-in-the-sky developers concentrating on trying to strike it rich on the App Store though, so who knows if there's been time enough for a scene to get organized? I'd love to see one though.

 

Does it really keep my screen on?