ÚÄ¿Back In the Kitchen (ITK '97) read me ÀÄÁÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ ITK was originally released for the Amiga at the Hurricane party in Denmark '92. Seeing that it's its fifth anniversary this year I decided to do a little remake of our old demo on the PC. So here's the result! An Amiga demo running on a PC with a few improvements here and there but largely it's pretty much the same. Sort of. If you're wondering, "Did they do the original?", the answer is "Yes!" ÚÄ¿System requirements ÀÄÁÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ To fully enjoy this demo a high-end 486 or any Pentium class processor is recommended. The faster the better, though anything above a P200 is overkill. Isn't it amazing what you can get away with in C these days? Only 45 lines of assembler ;) You will need a pure DOS boot to run ITK '97. No Windows '95 dos-box thanks. The demo REALLY needs the VBlank bit for MIDAS (because the videomode used will have different frequencies on different cards) and to do double buffering and timing so it looks like an Amiga demo (ie. NO horrible graphics tears) Also, you will need a VBE 2 driver of some sort. I believe some video cards come with one in the ROM these days. If yours doesn't you can use UniVBE (or SciTech Display Doctor as they call it now) which you can download from the internet at "http://www.scitechsoft.com". If you've got an S3 based card (like a cheap Trio or ViRGE like me) you can use a FREE VBE 2 implementation developed by Dietmar Meschede called S3 VBE/Core 2.0 and it's available for download from "http://wwwmath.uni-muenster.de/math/users/mesched/" Since ITK '97 renders directly into the linearly mapped video memory you will need a VLB or PCI video card. Oh, and a bit of memory. 4MB _should_ be enough from my calculations but I don't have SIMMs that small anymore so that remains untested. ÚÄ¿Having troubles, eh? ÀÄÁÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ If for some bizarre reason ITK '97 should refuse to run properly there are a few command line arguments you can use: nodetect - Don't autodetect soundcard. This will bring up the MIDAS sound driver selection screen. If the sound is wrong or there is no sound this is the option for you! dac6 - UniVBE misreports the DAC width on some cards. If the colours look weird you can try this option which ignores what the VBE 2 driver tells you, or... dac8 - If your card has an 8 bit DAC but it's being misreported you can try this option. It will give you slightly nicer fades and palettes. rm - You should have no need for this option. It will use real mode VBE palette calls. Dunno why I included it. vmode X - X being a hexadecimal VBE 2 mode number. ITK '97 really wants a 320x240x8 linear mode but if it can't find one it will pick an 8 bit mode with the same aspect ratio and run the demo in a window in the middle of the screen. If you are unhappy with its choice of mode you can force it to use any one you like. Note that NO checking is done so if you pick a hi-colour mode it will look, err, interesting to say the least. Also, on the Hercules Stingray the 320x240x8 mode appears to be slightly f@cked (even with vbetest.exe) so if you've got one of those you should use this option. Most video cards will have mode 100 which is 640x400 and mode 101 which is 640x480. Ideally you will want to use 400x300 which is non-standard and may not be available on your card. You will have to use a utility such as vesatest to find out the mode number. Often this mode has the number 14F though. -nosound - As required by the The Party '97 competition rules, this will run the demo without sound. nocensor - Being the paranoid person I am, I've censored some of the graphics for The Party competition to avoid any possibility of disqualification. You should definitely always use this option if you are after the true oldsk00l flava. ÚÄ¿That's all folks ÀÄÁÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ ITK '97 was developed on an Intel Triton 430TX, AMD K6/200 with a noname ViRGE video card and a ViperMAX in 99.99% C. ITK '97 uses  MIDAS 0.7 by Sahara Surfers  PMode/W by Charles Scheffold and Thomas Pytel And a warm thank you goes out to h0llywood/mono (and probably loads of other groups) for generously letting me borrow his A1200 power supply thereby jeopardising the Christmas mono releases so I could rip the rest of the graphics when mine broke down. I don't have the original sources anymore (the old coffee on the floppydisk trick). You wanted a thank you, there you are mate ;) Visit mono on the World Wide Web at (you should, it's really cool, especially if you're into tracker music) http://www.scene.org/mono That's it. Happy viewing! SurfSmurf / >(oo)< / [damn] Rednex / Movement csorensen@ea.com