Crittersoap, the son of Marabu wanted me to explain him how to write a demo in Assembler. Every now and then I explained him some methods and routines in Z80 Assembler.

Usually I created a small program and then explained to him afterwards how it worked. I wasn’t such a good teacher at that time and I think that Crittersoap didn’t really learn this much from me. Or have you seen any other demos from Crittersoap besides the first three?

This Crittersoap Demo 3 was created at the Castle Meeting 1a. Critty also wanted to contribute to a meeting demo and asked me to help him with his part. He explained me that he wanted a scroll text and a jumping HJT logo. Then I sat down, created this demo and explained him afterwards how I did it and how he can manipulate certain things with it, like enter text or change the graphics for the HJT logo.

I had the feeling that there was something missing in this demo and since there was still a lot of calculation time left I had the idea to add this fading effect for the HJT logo.

I had seen a similar effect in some old CPC demo and I had an idea how I could improve it. In the old demo the background was plain black, but I added the chequered pattern that could even be scrolled horizontally.

Each frame just 1/8 of the jumping area was erased and filled with the chequered pattern, so that it looks like the jumping HJT logo leaves a slowly fading trail behind. When the chequered pattern was set to move horizontally only 1/8 of the pattern moved with each frame, so that it looked rather weird for a scrolling. Critty probably didn’t liked this scrolling since he turned it off.

The only thing Crittersoap really did by himself in this demo was typing the scroll text. But so what, everybody has to start little - I wonder what he could have become would he have stayed longer on the CPC...