TURN IT BACK

by Seven

Introduction:

Ok, here it is. My third 4K-intro, this time with music, pmode & vesa, all
things I've never done before (not even in a non-4K). So if you think the
music sucks, the memory requirements are too high and low-res modes are
outdated, don't bother telling me. I know that already. Else you can send
me your comments at Stefaan.VanNieuwenhuze@rug.ac.be

Hope you enjoy it,
Seven

Blame it on ...:

The reason I had to add so many new things is that other people keep setting
the standard higher, even in 4K-intros, and so I'm obliged to follow. Much
respect to Picard for showing with Mesha that protected mode is possible in
4K, and for Franky & Shiva for making adlib-music outdated by using voice-
synthesis in Void 3. The initialisation is 85% based on the stub from Void 3,
by the way. The music-system was originally from Psi/Future Crew and has been
adapted by The Watcher/TUHB, who was so kind to give my a copy that I could
mutilate. Thanks to Coplan/Immortal Coil for listing to the first versions of
my self-made tune and giving some constructive criticism. The file is
compressed by Jibz's Apack, and the rest of the code was 100% guessed by me.

Requirements:

- 9 MB of RAM with a 32-bit DPMI-manager. (If you don't know what that is, you
might be a windows-user. Just run it in a dos-box and you'll be fine).
DOS4GW and CWSDPMI don't work, as they do not support COM-files :-(
- A VESA2 compliant videocard with mode 320*200*32 with LFB (Lineair Frame
Buffer)

If the above is missing, Turn It Back will confuse you with "DPMI?" or "VESA?".

- a rather powerfull PC (made on a PII 350...)
- An adlib-compatible sound-device. If you don't have it, the data send to the
hardware should cause no harm, but if it does (or you don't like the music,
shame on you!), enter anything on the command-line to silence it.

Complaints & Answers:

C) I CAN'T HEAR THE MUSIC!
A) If you can't hear sound:
1) you might be deaf.
2) you should consider yourself lucky (it's not really a masterpiece).
3) your amplifier or boxes are not connected or have the volume at zero.
4) you have entered a command-line argument, which shuts the music down.
5) your soundcard does not support adlib. I took the following quote from the
info-file of Purple Dreams II/The Watcher. As I'm using the same music-
system, this also applies here.

"Special note: The music in this 4k intro is pure Adlib. Some cards,
like the Sound Blaster AWE 64, don't fully support Adlib natively.
In case of the AWE64, first "aweutil /s" needs to be executed before
anything will be heared."

C) IT HANGS UP MY COMPUTER!
A) This can be due to a variety of reasons, such as your computer having not
enough free RAM (9 MB required), or me being a lousy coder (the most
probable). By adding a command-line argument, the timer-interrupt for the
music is not loaded, so you maybe you can avoid some problems that way. Else
you can try restarting, but remember to stop after a few days.

C) IT IS SOOOO SLOOOOOW!
A) Hey, it's optimized for size, not for speed. To make things worse, it was
made on a PII 350, and the compo-machine at Inscene will be equally power-
full, and I want to give the audience something worth watching (if it doesn't
crash, that is). There's no reason it should't run on a slower machine, but
it will take (much) longer. The nature of the effects makes it impossible to
skip frames, so you should wait a few years until you have a faster machine
:-(. If you are using Windoze9X, running other tasks in the background makes
it slower than a snail on a monday morning, but you knew that already, right?

What do you mean this info-file is too large? It's only 4K!