Comment by reconnecting
10 months ago
Description from pouet.net and how it works (1)
The Mars demo was written by Elixir's resident graphics guru and Head of R & D Tim Clarke in 1993, whilst he was still at school. Freely distributed on the Internet, the demo soon gained legendary status for its ability to generate fractal terrain and render it real time, all with a meagre 5K. As a result Tim was headhunted to work for space agency Lunacorp in Washington for several summers whilst studying at Cambridge University.
We recommend running this in DOS mode as it was designed to run on a 386 and may well crash Windows. Remember that this demo was designed for machines that were around in 1993! Use the mouse to move around and press any key to quit.
One of the first emails I've sent in my life was to Tim Clarke asking how Mars did work and I was so happy he answered! I remember the graph with the stars.
I didn't have any access to email at this time, and Mars looked to me like people somewhere out there were playing with real-time generated 3d virtual worlds while I was stuck with Windows 3.1 forever and no one would rescue me.
I remember mouse control - I didn’t expect in a dos application at the time, and it also felt like a waste of space ( I think you had to fiddle with interrupt 33 or something like that to deal with the mouse which was more complicated than basic port reading )