My nice brother Johannes Ridderstedt sent me some old files a few weeks ago (in late 2017), stuff that he had preserved from an age-old computer of ours.
One of these was the file named gameland.zip (not published yet, but I might
put it up here some day.) I managed to get this running, and liked what I saw
(you'll find the YouTube link to it further down on this page.)
Around this time I was reading a bit about WebAssembly which I think will redefine and help reshape the web as we see it today. I was also looking at the Hello, Rust web page, and the "FizzleFade effect using a Feistel network" page in particular.
I didn't look at the Feistel network code; instead, I was much more interested in learning about how to draw 2D graphics to a canvas, which this demo was doing. Maybe I could reinvent some of my old, cool stuff using new, modern technology? And perhaps learn something new in the process of doing so? I started playing around with this, and spent maybe 5 evenings or so, a little time here and there trying to get some progress on various areas.
Here is the result:
Click on the image above to start the demo (it will switch to fullscreen.) Only tested in Firefox, Chrome and Safari on desktop; the full-screen stuff isn't fully standardized yet so it uses prefixed, vendor-specific JavaScript calls.
The code is available on GitHub if you are interested in the full details on how it works.
Update 2018-03-16: I made some adjustments to make it closer to the
original; faster scrolling, more blinking. I also considered switching to chiptune2
as the .mod player but after implementing the change I benchmarked the two
versions and concluded that the CPU usage was basically the same, so it wasn't
quite worth it. libopenmpt (the C library used by chiptune2.js under the
hood) has arguably a higher quality mixing code, but my usage of it is not
100% working so... I'm leaving it like this for now.
Finally, for reference, here is the output from running the original intro and the comments I wrote about it on YouTube.
This is the output from a fairly simple intro I made for a LAN party we were hosting about 20 years ago. The intro runs on MS-DOS so it's a bit hard to run nowadays, but DOSBox runs it decently enough to make a screencap of it.
Why the epileptic-style flashing background, you might ask? I think it wasn't quite uncommon at the time to do fancy tricks with the VGA palette. Flashing the background like this was incredibly cheap in terms of CPU (only a few port outputs to change the RGB values for color 0, which was the background) but looked quite fancy, so therefore it was added.
I'm not even sure in what language I coded this, but I think C or C++. The music is from the .mod file named "are_you_excited?" by the compositor Daddy Freddy (http://amp.dascene.net/detail.php?det...) The .mod player library used is http://mikmod.sourceforge.net/
Nostalgia! :)