Better Than Life Demo Repack

Background

The Better Than Life Demo was the first mega demo to be made by A CLockwork Orange and Flair in STOS.

This demo was made before The Cunning Demos (although it was in development at the time), Pandora's Box and The Misty Demos.

It was made before The Missing Link Extension so I think most of the screens used the Bitcopy routine and assembly routines loaded in memory banks.

Problems

There were a few problems with the demo:

  1. The fullscreen bootsector does not work on STE computers.
  2. The original disk is 82 tracks, 11 sectors and 2 sides which was unreliable to copy and slow to access.

Fixes

  1. Use a Medway Boys Protector 4 bootsector.
  2. Fix the fullscreen bootsector code so it runs on STFM and STE as a standalone program.
  3. Recompress all the demos and menu using Pack-Ice 2.4 so it fits on 82 tracks, 10 sectors and 2 sides.

The bootsector fix with GEM startup, executable header was reduced from 1067 bytes to 1024 bytes to fit on the last 2 tracks on the disk.

I made a video of this process for YouTube.

Download the demo here.

Notes

I wish I had the source code to the Flair screens. The clipped bobs in the intro are amazing and if they could be improved to 50fps these days that would be great.

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