FOG
Intro Review
FOG? What the f... is a FOG? To answer this question, here's a
quote from its coder taken right from pouet. Argonaut: "This is
an intro for the Falcon Owners Group that I did in 1996 I think.
Never released until now. I tried it on my Falcon recently and
it didn't really seem in sync and the music sounded bad. Then it
ended suddenly. Still, something for the Falcon :-)"
Unfortunately I had never seen, read or heard anything about
FOG, because I didn't had a Falcon back then, and besides I
wasn't in contact with any Atarian at all. Fortunately I got a
falcon in the meantime, and as well as the Internet for
contacting other people, so let's go!
This intro seems to dislike my monitor, so time to connect the
old RF to the TV. Ouch! Lots of snow there, it must be
influenced by the season :) Hey, it has an option to kill the
internal speaker, that's handy!
Well, the intro consists of the following effects, in this
sequence more or less:
- An averaging effect which is used to "smoothen" the FOG logo.
- A screen blender which uses an RGB-splitter spline-waves going
from top to bottom in true colour. This effect is used several
times during the demo to switch between screens and it looks
really nice.
- A 3-D flat shaded routine on top of a true colour picture,
which is abused to show lots of small objects. This part if
far too long and boring for my taste.
- A text display routine, which uses "sprites" to let the
letters fly in from the right border. The font looks quite
nice but I have that feeling I have seen it before.
- The DSP is utilised for module playing, which is nothing
special but at least it is used at all.
Everything's running smooth, no complaints about that. However
apart from the screen blender it still looks a lot like an ST
intro in true colour. So my recommendation would be run it once,
let it crash (it does on my machine) and then focus on more
decent demos.
(cxt: I never saw it crash on my machine, but I used VGA mode
and not RGB.)
I tried to run the "FOG intro" on hatari 0.91 CVS just to see it
crashing while showing the first effect. It seems even more work
is required on the DSP emulation!
GGN for Alive, 2006-12-31 (I'm still not joking!)
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