From: Alfio Puglisi (puglisi@arcetri.astro.it)
Date: Thu May 30 2002 - 09:08:34 MDT
On Wed, 29 May 2002, Phil Osborn wrote:
>My opening piece, however, was one of those hacker
>contest demo disks, where the object is to absolutely
>push the limits of the machine with something that
>will fit on a single (880K - Amiga) floppy. There are
>hundreds of these, but I had found one that looked
>like the perfect intro to the VR panel.
>
>It consisted of about 4 minutes of silouhettes of man
>and a woman dancing separately to sound-tracker music
>with a fractal background swirling around them, while
>they morphed back and forth periodically into various
>geometric shapes. All very fast and upbeat and just
>eye candy to run while people were still coming in.
>There was nothing suggestive about the dancing - it
>was just disco-type stuff - and it was just monochrome
>silouhettes anyway. But it was cute and happy, and I
>thought it might help get people focused on the
>subject more than more talking heads trying to cut
>thru the con-lag. Also, it let me show off what my
>ancient Amiga could do that would still be hard to
>match on a PC with 100's of times the horsepower.
That must be "State of the Art", by Spaceballs. Very very famous demo. The
silhouettes were actually quite easy to program, and the moving background
even easier - they both relied heavily on the dedicated Amiga hardware.
On today's PC, the silhouettes would be trivial to replicate. I don't know
about the flashy background, but it should be easy too.
Also, that Amiga was runnning in 320x200 resolution with 8 or 16
colors during the demo, which means a very small quantity of data to show.
>me on how I could have avoided the unpleasantness by
>such things as making sure that if I were going to
>have dancing, then both sexes should be shown.
>
>I pointed out that in fact, both sexes had been shown.
> She had not noticed this little fact, somehow.
>Anyway, she concluded, showing NUDE dancing might
>easilly be construed as sexist exploitation. "NUDE
>dancing"????? "Wait a minute," I interrupted, "They
>were just silouhettes. How could you have determined
>that they were nude?"
The girls actually seem nude (big breasts with "natural" shape, no hints
of clothes). The jumping men seem to have clothes, and the dancing one is
different from the girl only because of the hat (!). If you look at the
girls too much, you can miss the sparse boys.
None of my friends who saw this demo complained - male or female - they
were impressed regardless.
Alfio
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