Losing Victoria - Gasman / H-Prg


What do you do when you've brought your nearly-finished production to the
greatest demo party on the planet, ready to propel the Spectrum into the
limelight, only to spend the first day of the party faced with a broken Speccy,
watching the deadline for the oldskool compo go sailing past with no demo and
nothing to show it on? Easy. You enter it in the wild compo instead. A compo
where a humble Speccy demo has no chance against all the other epic
crowd-pleasers. But at least it'll get shown on the bigscreen and introduce
5000 unenlightened sceners to the Spectrum... hopefully. If not - hey, it's a
new demo, and it wasn't abandoned in frustration like it could have been.

OK, there are a couple of bugs, and it's highly dependent on timing. (It works
OK on Spin and ZX32... no idea whether it works on a real Speccy.) That's what
you get from rushed party productions. I could have refused to release it and
promised to release a fixed version "very soon", but that would be a lie. They
said the same thing about Genetic Error and The Loop, and this would be no
Exception.


Disclaimers:

I'm not a poet. I just did a demo full of poetry because nobody else would.

This demo is not based on a true story. All my break-ups have been wonderful,
thankyou.

Gasman / H-prg / RA
Helsinki,2002-08-03

gasman@raww.org - http://www.zxdemo.org/ - http://www.raww.org/

-------------------------------

Postscript - Version 2 (bugfix)

Losing Victoria reached 7th place in the Assembly 2002 wild demo competition.
It was tremendously exciting to have it shown at the party, and I received a
lot of positive feedback from the Spectrum scene and elsewhere; and Triumph,
4th Dimension and Triebkraft did an excellent job of repacking and fixing it
for Russian Spectrum systems, for which I'm very grateful.

With all this going on, it's always been a bit of a shame that it never
worked 100% correctly except on a handful of slightly inaccurate emulators -
especially once these emulators were improved and this demo got left behind.
If you ever wondered what that burst of music at the end was all about,
well... that was a mistake.

With this release, you can see the demo as it was always supposed to look,
on both original Spectrums and the two most popular Russian clones. The
timing on the Pentagon and Scorpion fixes is still very slightly wrong, but
it's infinitely better than any of the previous releases. Incidentally,
there are still a couple of minor graphical bugs. These might be fixed in a
future release, but to be honest that's pretty unlikely. The demo is now true
to how I wanted it to look, so it's time to move on. Assembly 2003 awaits...

Gasman / H-prg / RA
Oxford,2003-01-25

gasman@raww.org - http://www.zxdemo.org/ - http://www.raww.org/

.