Timeless by Tran

Timeless, a PC MSDOS (386) demo by Tran from 1994 with Soundblaster & Gravis Ultrasound support.

The demo runs forever. I only captured a bit over 3 minutes of it. It re-arranges a limited set of effects and textures to create hundreds of different visuals.

What is remarkable about this demo is the fact that most of the effects used are simple VGA hardware effects (no, not 3D Gfx Card, we are talking about plain Standard VGA 320x200 pixels 256 colors mode). I recall that this demo was actually running smooth on a friends 286 AT computer. As I said, it used only very little CPU power and that primarily for the Soundblaster sound, which was reduced even further, if you used a Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) as sound output device.

You can download this video in AVI format at http://www.mediafire.com/?wdqrzilyjyd

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• timeless
• tran
• demo
• pc
• dos

[HS3006]

Tran co-created a DOS protected mode program used in this demo. He wrote this entire demo in 100% pure 32-bit assembly language. He released the source code years ago, and it's available on the Internet.

[sacreleases]

@HS3006 you are talking about p-mode, rigth?!

[timepope]

This is the best screen destioyer i have ever seen. Now. with 2D chips. this is thoing I remeeber outlawing this because of CPU and powercosts. But at idle. this is nothing today.

Tran. You are a god among us. THank you.

[timepope]

Yes, guys like Tran are the same guys that program in Ruby

[vertigox64]

@sandras233 People are still coding games for 8-bit computers, creating demos in 64Kbytes, among other things, this is beautiful coding, not 25Giga of shiny graphics and no smile on the face of the operator. Oldskool will never die, because it's about a challenge and having fun.

[sandras233]

Oh, those were the days ;) Back then, they used to know how to code efficiently - 'coz they had to ;)

[HS3006]

@sacreleases Yes, that's the one.

[Schneelocke]

Neat, but your capture appears broken - the sprites (like the snail crawling across the screen, the winged objects, the little hearts that "rain" down etc.) don't show up properly.

Still, thanks for this; it does bring back memories.

[ThePuppetgirl12]

thank u very much for this ... i am have been obsessed for years....

and years ...many of my videos are based on these simple techniques ....please sub scribe back dear sir or madam

[pgtlaser]

Ah man, I used to just let this run for hours, perfect music for doing creative things. Totally brings back memories.