Persistence Of Vision Demos

Persistence Of Vision wrote several demos as both disk fillers for compilations and as complete demos on their own.

Fuzzbox International Rescue demo. This was our first demo as POV, it was released as POV demo compilation 2.

POV 4 (Ghostbusters), POV 5 (A-Ha), POV 6 and POV 8

In July 1989 two further POV demos were released. The first was a sample demo of Ghostbuster tune, the second was a sample demo of 'you are the one' by A-Ha.

POV 6 was released with our first filler demo, this was the first POV code written by Boris.

POV 8 contained our second sampled sound filler called 'Living on Video'.

Demos were released thick and fast so POV compilations disks came a little quicker. The compilations took over for a while so we were unable to get time to write demos of our own.

By May 1991, Boris was at university in Manchester, England. He and some friends got together and wrote a mega sample demo called 'Invisible Man'. The demo spanned two disks but contained nearly all the original song by Queen.

Not long after in August 1991, Boris finished his degree in computer science and wrote the 'Kinky Boots' demo - another sampled sound demo. This time he managed to fit the whole song on a single disk plus an intro.

In December 1991 a demo called 'Knock Knock' was released under the names of 'Erik Plankton and Blind Bastard'. The names related to Mac Sys Data and Boris respectively. The demo was a sampled sound demo like Kinky Boots and was the last sampled sound demo to be produced by POV.

knock knock

By May 1992 POV had released 100 demo compilations. We made POV 100 a special one by making it a multipart demo all by POV. At this time Boris was writing games professionally for the ST and Amiga. He converted the game called 'Leander' to the ST and so used the main character of the game for the main menu. Like all decent demos, there was a hidden screen to find.

Somewhere in between 1991 and 1992 OZ Slideshow 1 and 2 were released by Mac Sys Data. The date is unknown as a hard disk crash lost the source code.

Around the end of 1992 Oz went to university and the pictures stopped arriving. Boris was busy writing games for Amiga/Megadrive and the work of POV was down to Mac Sys Data.

POV concentrated on their compilations until July 1993 when Mac Sys Data bought a house. The house needed quite a lot of work to make it occupiable. For sometime there was no activity from POV, at the same time the Atari scene slowly died. Contacts stopped writing, magazines went bust and many crews moved to the Amiga, PC or SNES.

In May 1995 Mac Sys Data had a Falcon up and running and finished a new demo called 'Poverty'. The demo only worked on the Falcon and was basically an Oz slideshow 3 using hardware scrolling, DMA sound and hardware overscan only found on the Falcon. Shortly after in June 1995 the STE version was finished complete with hardware scrolling and DMA sound.

Mac Sys Data is presently working on a Falcon only demo based on the music of Jester of Sanity (Amiga). All the music from Sanity's Jesterday demo will be in the demo. Present coding has the picture displayer and mod play code all working. The production is relatively slow due to the lack of decent graphics.