Raaaaahhhh - the AMAZING Longshot's comeback

A new milestone in Amstrad CPC demoscene history has been reached by Longshot / Logon System, and I wished to enlight this effort here on my personal website.

32 years after its original release, a new version of the Amazing Demo has been published ! In all honesty, this demo aged poorly by today’s standards but it’s still quite relevant from a historical’s point of view. This version includes compatibility fixes for CRTC and FDC. But the real interest is its new intro part, featuring for the first time a new CRTC technique called “RVLL”. It allows to set, for each scanlines, any location in the first 64KB of RAM. Similar techniques existed in the past, but it was limited to a much smaller amount of RAM. But wait, this demo was only a warm-up…

A new PDF ebook, called the Amstrad CPC CRTC Compendium, was also released. Featuring 171 pages (!) for its French version, it aims to describe all the different behaviors of all the CRTCs integrated into the Amstrad CPC / Plus machines. Several documents on this topic existed in the past, but it never went so far into the exploration of the video-chip. That will be useful of course for demomakers willing to push further the last technical limits ; but that will be also a definitive reference for all emulator writers willing to reach the ultimate 100% CRTC emulation accuracy.

Finally, Longshot released some sort of “acid” tests for the CRTC, called “Shaker”. With it, an emulator writer can check how good its CRTC emulation’s accuracy is. While I believe most emulators will cover all basic features pretty fine, I expect many failures to be revealed by this program for the most advanced use-cases.

For more information / downloads, please have a look on Logon’s website here.

Can you believe that all of that was released in a single day, like that, with no particular advertisement ?! Every 2 or 3 years there is a “special something” popping up into the Amstrad community that redefines a new standard, and this day just happened today.

What an impressive achievement for Logon System. Raaaahhhh !!!!