Spot That Demo - Overdrive 2 Edition

[Morden]

I've been watching Overdrive 2 again, and I suddenly noticed it: Arcade machine screens are displaying scenes from other well known scene demos! I spotted four of them, but the last one eludes me. I guess it's just too much white scene noise inside my head. It's familiar somehow, but I can't really place it. Anyway, here are the spotted ones (sorry for the humongous screenshots):






The only one I'm not sure about is this one. I'm 90% sure an Amiga demo from the early 90s, but since every second demo had a spaceship sequence back then, my memory is a blur. The ship reminds me of Hardwired, but I'm sure it's not it. I remember a demo with extensive spaceship sequence and a lot of geometry, but I can't remember which one it was. I think it even got a ST port. Oh well. I'm sure someone will know.



Speaking of Hardwired, the ship launch sequence from Overdrive 2 reminds me of similar scene from this demo.



Edit: Doh! It finally clicked! It's Second Reality!

[Stef]

I only recognized Batman and Second Reality :p
"Porting" second reality on MD was one of my crazy willneverdo project :p

[Morden]

I've seen a C64 port of Second Reality, so anything is possible. It was impressively accurate. As accurate as a C64 port could be. It would be interesting to see how close a MD version would come to the original. Watching Second Reality I get the feeling that a SNES would be a better pick for most of the effects, but I might be getting this feeling because of plentiful transparencies, which, as Overdrive 2 shows, aren't at all impossible on the MD.

Also, I'd like to know if these demos appearing in Overdrive 2 are someone's [Alien's?] top five, or were they chosen by the members. I'm a sucker for The Black Lotus demos, and Pulse + Sunflower stuff. Oh man. Newschool, but you can't deny it quality. Although I do admit, in a way, TBL with their later demos are Andy Warhols of the scene.

[Oerg866]

Also, I'd like to know if these demos appearing in Overdrive 2 are someone's [Alien's?] top five, or were they chosen by the members. I'm a sucker for The Black Lotus demos, and Pulse + Sunflower stuff. Oh man. Newschool, but you can't deny it quality. Although I do admit, in a way, TBL with their later demos are Andy Warhols of the scene.

They're Alien's favourite demos.

[Sik]

I've seen a C64 port of Second Reality, so anything is possible. It was impressively accurate. As accurate as a C64 port could be. It would be interesting to see how close a MD version would come to the original. Watching Second Reality I get the feeling that a SNES would be a better pick for most of the effects, but I might be getting this feeling because of plentiful transparencies, which, as Overdrive 2 shows, aren't at all impossible on the MD.

Yeah, I was just watching it again to see how it'd compare and the translucency stuff is pretty much the same kind of stuff as done with the debug register. The interference one could be even achieved by just adding linescrolling to the one already in Overdrive 2 XD Overdrive 2 also already has the voxels too (the clouds during the rainy scene) and of course the 3D scene.

It seems the hardest stuff would be anything involving texturing (the text on the water, the rising sword). The launch bay was pretty much the 68000 blitting bytes in RAM non-stop using an unrolled loop which seems comparable to how those effects work, but I'm not sure if there's enough time to blit those at full framerate (assuming there isn't some way to cheat it). Then again, one would also have to take into account that a large part of the screen is not touched in those effects.

[Stef]

Yeah i studied the demo a bit some time ago when i had the project to port it, and the transparency effects could be done easily using a prepared palette as no much colors are involved in these parts.. also the debug register is a good candidate (i believe original Final Reality was using hardware XOR VGA feature to do it as well). In some area i think OD2 has some influence from FR (the 3D part for instance) I believe we can do a close port from the original (not perfect though)... the C64 version is as good the C64 allow it