Clan demos

There were two demos on a Clan CD decades back: one demonstrated a face, which could be rotated with the mouse, the other a (fairly abstract) landscape over which you could fly. I do not suppose either of these have been updated to run on a Raspberry Pi? The landscape one I found very beautiful. The absence of any human presence in the landscape (on a toroidal surface I think) gave an eerie feeling of desolation, as if one was shipwrecked as a disembodied presence on an alien planet.

gave an eerie feeling of desolation, as if one was shipwrecked as a disembodied presence on an alien planet.

That’s the impression that I got from Lander. A desolate landscape with trees, water, and unoccupied houses.

We were speaking of visual/audio memory a short while ago. Well, that is what I think of when I listen to Erasure’s “Piano Song”, because I first played that at the same time as I was listening to a new tape, and that song was playing while I tried not to crash the lander craft… (easier said than done)

I still have those Clan demos (from Clan Disc 2 March 1995) but my attempts, outside or within (i.e. with GraphTask) the Desktop, all give ‘This screen mode is unsuitable for displaying the desktop’.

Each is a small Absolute (FACE and LAND24) written by Matt Taylor of Living Colour, and described as 24-bit real time demos, executed with Obey files thus:

WIMPMODE X320 Y256 C16M [or WIMPMODE X384 Y288 C16M]
WIMPSLOT 1024K
POINTER 0
RUN <Land$Dir>.Land24 [or RUN <Face$Dir>.fanim]
WIMPMODE X1024 Y768 C256

I wonder if they work under the now discontinued RISC OS Pico?

EIDT:

No, that’s not viable. For a start, *WimpMode means nothing to the Pico’s CLI.

Clandisc2 still is available from:
http://www.riscos.com/the_archive/acorn/clan/index.htm
The problem is the low resolution of Landscape, 320X256. Face might be more acceptable to modern monitors. For CRT monitors the trick was to set vsync at 100 or 150 Hz, but LCD..
Face runs under Aemulor on an Iyonix, if suitable MDF available and if the monitor accepts 384X288, rejects Landscape here.
Raspberrypi3B+ accepts both, under AemulorA53, with Anymode active and ‘disable-mode-changes’, ie. under ADFFS conditions. Cannot get them to run under RPCEmu on RPI. YMMV.

No, that’s not viable. For a start, *WimpMode means nothing to the Pico’s CLI

Pico boots into BASIC, doesn’t it?

Assuming that “Land24” was in the current directory, the sequence would simplify to:

MODE "X320 Y256 C16M"
*RUN Land24

Pico may not support that screen mode, but at least it should understand the MODE command.

Clandisc2 still is available from:
http://www.riscos.com/the_archive/acorn/clan/index.htm

That’s some interesting stuff there, thanks. I noticed disc 5 includes a revamped !Paint with restructured menus. I haven’t got the demos running yet but a directory name suggests the Rooms demo might have Gouraud shading which is nice to see on RISC OS. It’s a pity we can’t get our hands on any source code…

It’s a pity we can’t get our hands on any source code…

Given that it’s an Acorn era item any existing source code is probably on media somewhere in a random box in whatever room Andrew R currently uses for the physical bits of the Risc OS IP obtained from Castle (formerly from PACE and previously Acorn)