Persistence Of Vision, or POV, started in 1987 as a demo packing and demo writing crew.The crew was formed by Mac Sys Data who wrote virtually all the POV menus.
Most people will recognise the name but relate it to the now famous
ray tracing program that took the same name. All I can say is that we were here first and
I wish I'd copyrighted the name!
Mac Sys Data, Boris and Ozymandias were the most productive and long
lived members of POV. Not only did they create over 130 compilations but wrote several
demos, graphic slideshows and a few utilities. The three went undercover for some of their
more 'dodgy' work, relying on aliases to keep the POV name clean.
Many of the game hacking/packing crews used POV menu code written by
Mac Sys Data but released under the aliases of 'Spaceman Spiff' or 'Ivor Biggun'. You can
visit one such crew POV wrote for by following this Adrenalin link.
Boris moved to America in 1987 and is writing games for the PC and Oz didn't bother writing after the 2nd year of his degree. The only active person on an Atari is Mac Sys Data (the author of these web pages).
Although the popularity
of the Atari ST range is dwindling, POV are still active releasing packed demos on
compilations. The recent compilations are compatible with the Atari Falcon where possible
and most disks should work with the Pacifist emulator.
There is interest at
present of POV disks as the Pacifist emulator will not accept some protected demos. All
POV demos were cracked/packed and so work with Pacifist. Some of our demos were linked
using an in-house file linker.