VEX-InTrO
(c) '94  Dirk Jagdmann / Niklas Beisert

Information about the VEX-InTrO

The VEX-InTrO is a public piece of software. You can and shall spread it
as much as you want, as long as you distribute the files
VEX.EXE      size:65535 bytes
VEX.NFO      size:????? bytes
FILE_ID.DIZ  size:  574 bytes
together and make no (NONE AT ALL) changes to them and no money is charged
for copying them.

Hardware things:

The VEX-Intro was designed to run perfectly on a 486dx2-66 with a
fast VLB graphics adapter and a SoundBlaster (or compatible) soundcard.
That does not mean it would not run on a 386dx-33 with a slow ISA graphics
adapter and a SoundBlaster 16 ASP with a sampling rate of 44kHz and a
mainboard that does not support 16-bit DMA-transfer. It would sometimes
be slowed down to something like 5 frames/sec or less (and the end-part
scroller won't work correctly :( ).

The reason for this is that the spacecut calculations are quite slow,
(in fact the calculations are fast, but they split up one plane into a
large number of planes, and slow down the drawing process...)
especially when you spacecut 4 cubes, or a transparent "ball" consisting
of 26 planes to a textured octahedron.
The end-part scroller sometimes does not work, simply because I was too
lazy to make it work below 35 frames/sec... :>

You might ask why we don't support the Gravis Ultrasound...
There are (of course) reasons:
a) it would be hard work to include Ultrasound support in 8 bits of code :)
b) we don't have any and know nobody who would lend us his

Instead we support SoundBlaster 16, because we both have sb16s and
sb-pro stereo sound sounds more than terrible on a sb16...
You want to know how how sb16 sound works? contact me! (pascal)

Software, Coding:

The intro was completely coded in Borland C++ 3.1 and TASM 3.1, the size of
all the source-files is approximately 190k. The unpacked size of VEX is
≈ 230k. (thank goodness we could compress it to 65535 bytes :)
The vector-part consists of 23 objects, 400 points and 230 planes.
The plasma is a 80x50 octo-sine plasma. The endpart-scroller has some
nice lissajous figures in the background and a boring text in front of them.
And finally we made a short information file (yeah, guessed right, you are
reading it right now) which tells you all the facts about this intro and is
even more boring than the scroll text at the end of VEX...
The time needed to code this Intro cannot really be measured, all the
fragments of code were made in 1993 and 1994, but it took us some
2 or 3 weeks to put all the code, graphics and music together.
The vectorpart scenery was mainly worked out in 2 days. (nights! :)
(These were tough nights...)

Music:

The Music is a normal S3M Modul, tracked with Sream Tracker 3.01ß.
It only consits of three channels, because the SBs don't support hardware
mixing and resources are needed for the gfx...
I only used 5 instruments for reasons of size. The unpacked size is about
22KB, but we could compress ist to about 14,5KB.
If you wan't to rip the tune, try to do so... (hehe) If you can't, wait till
I release it and it appears in one of your personal favourite BBSes.

GfX:

The Beginning and End-ANSIs were drawn with The Draw 4.6. I think there's
nothing very special about them, except that they look nice.
The objects in the Demo are mostly mathematical, except the computer and
the disk (yeah, the disk was hard work).

hints/troubleshooting

If the system hangs when you start VEX, turn the sound off, or set the
sound settings manually.

If the system hangs right in the middle of the action (so sorry...)
or shows garbage, reboot without ANY drivers etc. and restart VEX.
This should help... (at least it DID, when I tested it ;)
OR: try setting a different sampling rate!
(e.g. -8 and -s3 don't work together on my computer. dunno why!?!)

If you have a SoundBlaster 16, but the 16-bit DMA-transfer does not work
with your motherboard, try the switch -8. This will make the sound player
play in 8-bit mode and speed up the DMA-transfer.

If the intro is too slow, set the sampling rate down (-s1/-sm), or
turn the sound off (-c0). You can also make a clean boot (F5 before DOS boots)
without an expanded memory manager such as EMM386 or QEMM. (I have never
experienced a speedup by that... [maybe because I use Novell's EMM386?!?])

If you have got a sb16 and a VLB or PCI graphics adapter you can set the
sampling rate up to 33kHz or 44kHz (-s3/-s4)

Adresses

Dirk Jadgmann (DOJ)        Niklas Beisert (pascal)     Bertolt Meyer (?hook)
Kaiser-Friedrich-Ufer 13   Oberstraße 84               Wrangelstraße 18
20253 Hamburg              20149 Hamburg               20253 Hamburg
Germany                    Germany                     Germany

Fax: +49-40-443391
(don't mess around )
(with my fax if you)
(just want say you )
(hate or like VEX!!)