Shrine by Guru Magic
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▄▀ Produced ▀▀█▄
▄▄▄▄▄▄▀ by ▀▄ v1.1
─ Guru Magic ─
First Presented at Dexterity
South Africa's first ever demo competition
Yes it's finally here. Guru Magic's Shrine, fifth place contender
at the Dexterity Annual Demo Competition. It's release has been
somewhat delayed, especially due to (amongst other things) the
PyraTracker music system being extremely incompatable on Abacus'
machine and after 'repair', being extremely incompatable on all
machines. This posed a slight problem, as you can probably see.
Well, I've finally fixed this little nuisance and the routines
should work on almost any machine. Perhaps now we can get some of
our other releases out. (Supremacy comes to mind).
There have been quite a few changes to version 1.1 over the version
you might have seen at Dexterity (version 1.0ß). The main reason
for this is the demo was too short in our opinion, so we added a few
things, made others longer, etc. There is a new, improved 3D engine
so the vectors are faster, and both Abacus and I have since upgraded
our respective brilliant graphics systems (Abacus, you can pay me
later). Naturally the sound system was also upgraded. I think it's
on about version 1.4 now, the editor is at about version 1.06ß the
last time I checked. (hehe)
To run this presentation you have to have a SoundBlaster/PRO
compatable sound board. A patch for users without a sound board will
be released at a later stage, if the demand is sufficient, which it
invariably won't be, but enough about that. You will also require
about 1.76MB RAM, about 1.5MB disk space (you probably already know
that though :-) and a VGA screen. You'll also need some sort of
EMM driver (QEMM works fine, anything else that is compatable with
the LIM V4.0 standard should too). We have also tested DOS's
EMM driver (EMM386.EXE) which worked fine.
If you are experiencing trouble running the demo (it doesn't detect
your sound board, or it stops playing the music in the middle of the
demo) you might want to try manually configuring the demo by using
the commandline options. These can be found, along with their
descriptions, by typing SHRINE /?. There are various options such
as quality mode, looping mode (for shop window display), etc.
While testing, one problem with Norton Commander did show up. If
you use the Commander Link to transfer data between PC's, the
autodetection doesn't work properly - the most likely cause being
that our friends at Symnatec aren't freeing their comms interrupt.
Bugs and known errors
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As far as bugs go, we ironed all the known ones out although there
could be more lurking around somewhere. One problem we did find
was that the music system does not appreciate use of the secondary
buffers cache option in MS-DOS V6.0. If you use the command
BUFFERS=30,0
For instance, change it to
BUFFERS=30
otherwise you will get an internal error from MS-DOS and your
machine will hang.
The same thing will occur if you use strange QEMM settings such
as Stealth Mapping, etc. I am aware of, and know what the cause
of the error is, I just haven't had time to read through
the 350+ pages of documentation on the LIM EMS standard to find
out how to avoid it.
Users of Disk Cache's should be aware that these are a common
cause of conflict. We have tested Norton Cache, although
Norton Speed Cache did not work particuarily well, probably
because of memory shortage, but even more probably because of
strange memory mapping schemes.
As a last and final resort, you can try renaming AUTOEXEC.BAT
and placing only QEMM or EMM386, etc. into your CONFIG.SYS.
About Guru Magic
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Well, basically Guru Magic consists of eight talented people who
enjoy coding demos and testing our skills as a group in similar
ways. Believe it or not, we actually have a bit of a social life
on the sideline too. We often frequent clubs and bars as a crew
and often get drunk as a crew. That is when we code demos like
Shrine.
As a hobby Duendé smokes cigarettes and kills rodents. Abacus gets
layed and also gets layed sometimes and occasionally also gets layed.
Baroque kills little children in his shop and sells age restricted
computer games to innocent little toddlers, who grow up to become
mass murderers and psychopaths. DAC codes PyraTracker and tries to
convince Abacus to share his women. Deacon studies, or at least
pretends to under the beady eye of mother dear. Avatar drinks
whisky and trips over some very nice lady friends (personal coke,
uhm joke).
All Guru Magic members and their respective primary tasks are
listed below:
┌─────────┬────────────────────┬──────────────┐
│ Handle │ Real name │ Primary task │▄
├─────────┼────────────────────┼──────────────┤█
│ Abacus │ Brad Kronson │ Code │█
│ Avatar │ Holden Morris │ Graphics │█
│ Baroque │ Quinton Davie │ Music │█
│ DAC │ Shane Greyvenstein │ Code │█
│ Deacon │ David Beukes │ Music │█
│ Duendé │ Jaycen Dale │ Code │█
│ Myst │ Nicholas Wessels │ SysOp/PR │█
│ RTFact │ Jaco Gerber │ Graphics │█
└─────────┴────────────────────┴──────────────┘█
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Contacting Guru Magic
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Leave a message to 'Jaycen Dale' on Starport or see GM12-94.FAQ
Commercial demos
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If you wish to have a graphical presentation, (IBM PC/VHS video)
database system, training package or any other software written
for personal or commercial use, we can be contacted for the best
results at lowest prices.
See above section for contact information to obtain a free quote.
Conclusion
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Well that concludes this document. You probably only read this
after you ran the demo like any other DingBat, so we hope you
enjoyed the Shrine experience and this brilliant document.
Thank you for taking time to read this document,
DAC (On behalf of the Guru Magic crew)
[ back to the prod ]