At Revision 2017, we were blessed with the SEGA Mega Drive demo
Overdrive 2 by Titan, which among other things contains a very nice
checkerboard effect with (as far as I can tell) 8 zooming layers.
It occurred to me that this ought to have been a classic record-beating effect on the Amiga - who can make one with the most simultaneously visible layers?
But this doesn't seem to be the case. The best one I could find is in the relatively recent
15 Years of Fame by Up Rough.
It has 4 layers, but is not fullscreen.
Cyberlogik by Alcatraz and TRSI contains
a nice, 3-layer one, but this is an AGA demo.
Groovy! by Lemon. has a
2-layer, rotated one.
With the Amiga's
6 bitplanes, you would think that at least 6 layers should be achievable, right?
I discussed the situation with Britelite, and we agreed that this needs to be rectified. Hence
this challenge. The rules are:
- Minimum resolution 320 x 256.
- 50 fps on Amiga 500 with 512k chip ram and 512k slow ram.
- Single file, i.e. no streaming of data from disk.
- Layers move independently of each other in both X and Y.
- Layers move fully in Z (zoom), but not necessarily independently.
- Layers are able to have colors that are all different.
The challenge showdown is set to take place at
Gerp 2018. You are of course welcome to meet the challenge by releasing a checkerboard zoomer later on, but if you want your release to have the full novelty factor and be part of the main showdown, Gerp is the place.
