Demo Effect - "Old School" Effects

"Old School" Effects

These effects were typical in the 1980s and the early 1990s and were first implemented on either the Commodore 64, Atari ST or the Amiga. They often relied on the systems custom hardware or were considered difficult because of it. For example, 3D objects rendered in dots are somewhat tricky on systems without byte-per-pixel displays or limited video memory bandwidth, or systems with slow and/or limited (e.g. 8 bit, no FPU) CPUs.

• Raster bars, also called copper bars on the Amiga.
• Scrollers of various kinds.
• Moving sprites, with the competition usually focused on the number of visible sprites per frame.
• Starfields, such as parallax-scrolling and perspective starfields.
• Smooth horizontal waving of graphics images in a per-scanline basis
• Shadebobs
• Infinite bobs
• Plasma effect
• Kefrens bars
• Moire patterns, particularly circles
• Text zoomers
• Simple rotating 3D objects rendered in dots, lines or filled polygons.
• Spline effect
• Vector graphics
  • Glenz, partially see-through models with a "diamond-like" look. Named by Photon from the Swedish word "Gläns" (glisten or glitter)
  • Blenk, shiny metallic aluminum-like models, from Swedish "Blänk" (shiny)
  • Rubber, Twisting and/or elastic models. Also sometimes referred to as Gel