ReliQ

a 4k intro presented at Mekka/Symposium '97

° General Information

Okay, so starfields suck. But music in a 4k intro is, although not novel,
something very rare. To hear it, though, you need a General MIDI compatible
sound card (either native or via driver). Use MegaEm or IWSBOS with your GUS.
ReliQ should work without a sound card, but you won't hear any music. Duh.

I coded this thing on a Cyrix 6x86 P166+ system, so ReliQ should work fine
if you have an equivalent system. It does not, however, work fine on a
Am486DX2/66 with an ISA VGA card. Trust me, I tried it. What is this world
coming to? A couple of years ago exactly the same effects would have run
smoothly on a 386SX16.

Which brings me to why we chose the name ReliQ. Well, it _remotely_ reminds
you of relic, now doesn't it? And relic is something very old. Do the
routines in this intro strike you as being particularly innovative? No, in
fact they remind you of a Z80? There you go: An old name for old routines.

Not everything is that old, though: The comet Hale-Bopp is a very recent
discovery. In fact it is the first comet to appear like a wireframe object.
(Does anyone know the 3D-coordinates of the verticies of a Buckyball?)
The reason why we inserted the hail to Hale-Bopp was that we wanted something
like "in the blender" used in tpolm's demo Empire (okay, so we rip). Our
dad came up with "hail, Hale-Bopp" which is great, because the comet's
closest approach to Earth is on April 1, 1997 and that is nearly the
release date of ReliQ.

A last warning: I would reboot after running ReliQ. This is advisable since
I don't reset the frequency of the timer (due to space consideration). Your
system should run normally except for Floppy Disk I/O. You won't be able to
write or read from a floppy or stiffy.

So plug in your hifi, load your MIDI drivers, switch off the lights and enter
the realm of the old: ReliQ.

° Aim Of This Info File

To be bigger than the executable itself. To do that, I had to insert this
sentence. Talk about recursion. Does this sentence remind you of Hale-Bopp?
My favorite dependant clause: If I had completed this sentence.

° Credits

The essential production of ReliQ boils down to the following people

∙ Music: Hilander/SLi
∙ Code: MLF/SLi
∙ FILE_ID.DIZ: Avenger & Poti / Black Maiden (thanx, guys)

Special thanx must go to the following people for helping me during the
development of ReliQ:

∙ Bartman/Abyss
for letting me use his computer at Mekka/Symposium '97 to tune ReliQ
for use with a GUS PnP.
∙ Eartoaster/ConSub aka Henning Glawe
for supplying me with sample code of whatever my heart desired and
letting me use his toaster at the Mekka/Symposium '97
∙ Tumblin/Bodies In Motion aka Terry Sznober
for making his BitmapScaler source available to the general public
∙ Glenn Miyashiro, Jerzy Tarasiuk, Mika Rasanen, Todd Zimnoch and
Eric Nadeau
for instantly replying to my plea for help concerning COM file segments
∙ Ville Nummela and Francis Reynders
for helping me out with plasma routines, although, of course, I didn't
use them in the end

° Contacting SLi

SLi is an acronym for Sentient Lifeforms. Currently, we only have two
members:

∙ Hilander aka Sven Flegel responsible for music
∙ MLF aka Michael Flegel who should be doing the coding

We are desperately seeking a graphician. If you happen to stumble across
one, please drop us a line:

∙ Snail Mail
Michael and Sven Flegel
Am Ehrenmal 2
21516 Schulendorf
Germany

∙ email
flegel@physnet.uni-hamburg.de

∙ internet
www.physnet.uni-hamburg.de/home/vms/flegel

Please tell anybody who will listen about our website. It's been in existance
for quite some time now, but I don't have the feeling that anybody ever
visits it. So check it out and let me know what I can do to improve it.

° Of Interest

ReliQ was coded in 100% pure assembler. The source code totals about 120k.
In this included is the entire music. You can aquire the source code at our
web site mentioned above.

Not once, in the entire source code for ReliQ, did I use the mnemonic 'or'.

° Disclaimer

I am not responsible for any damage this product may cause your computer,
your helth, your dog's health or any part of your anatomy. (I do take
liability for any damage done to your cat though.)

hail, Hale-Bopp

MLF, March 28, 1997