VEX-Intro V1.1
(c) '94+'95  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 and can, as long as you distribute the files
VEX.EXE
VEX.NFO
FILE_ID.DIZ
together and make no (NONE AT ALL) changes to them.

The VEX-Intro was designed to run perfectly on a 486dx2-66 with a
fast VLB graphics adapter and a SoundBlaster (or compatible) soundcard.
(this should have been the configuration of the Assembly '94 intro
compo computer :)

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... :>

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.
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! :)

What is new in VEX V1.1 ??

The first and most important new feature is the GUS-Support. Herewith thanks
to Sound Solutions Germany for donating a GUS.
Secondly the Music Track was resampled and slightly changed and the colors of
some objects were changed, as many people told us it didn't look very
beautiful in the Assembly version.
The title piccy was changed to a higher resolution, 'cause it looked ugly...
All in all the size of the intro increased to more than 64k, but there is no
limit on the CD... ;)

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)

pascal

Address

Niklas Beisert (pascal)
Oberstraße 84
20149 Hamburg
Germany