The source and the binary is available on the download page.
After nearly 16 years of not making any changes to this demo I decided to rebuild it
with Visual Studio 6 on Windows 10.
After seeing the amazing CODEF remake I decided to use the original sprites and their wave-form.
Changes:
1. Rebuild in Windows 10,
2. Fix background alignment in upper right and lower left corners,
3. Replace my awful sprites with sprites from the original demo,
4. Replace my awful sprite wave-form with something very close to the original,
5. The executable is no longer compressed with UPX as I no longer have that program on my system.
Note: You may need to enable 8-bit colour compatibility mode to run this on modern versions of Windows.
Right click the executable, select the compatibility mode tab and tick:
Settings > Reduced colour mode: 8-bit (256) colour.
14/6/2004
Build 9. Cosmetic changes.
1. Uses new template project rather than old example,
2. Bound all graphics as resources to the executable rather than loading from bitmap files,
3. Updated graphics.
13/1/2002
Build 8. Partial rewrite.
The aim of this was to get the demo running at a smooth frame rate on my old P200. It works, but is only smooth when the music is not playing. It's as good as it'll get.
1. Lowered resolution to 320*200,
2. Background graphics recreated. They were blocked up at 640*480 before, only the lines looked better at the high resolution,
3. Sprites changed to look less blocky,
4. To super optimize the program I render the frame into a system memory surface first and then blit the lot to double buffered video memory in one go.
This is upto 4 times faster on my old P200!
5. Error messages are displayed when the DirectX surfaces are closed.
Now runs fine on my 3 test systems (P200\98, P3-800\98, P3-800\XP). On the old P200 the demo was jerky with the music running. To prevent this rename Ronken.mod to something else. The module player will not start but the demo will run.
13/1/2002
Build 7. Major bug fix.
1. All offscreen surfaces are created in system memory and not video memory.
On Windows NT 4.0, the gigantic offscreen surfaces could not be created. I thought that DirectX 4 was too old so I said DirectX 6 was required. It failed with the same error on a friend's PC with Direct6.1a with a Voodoo3-3000 video card. I was worried because my P3-800 has a virtually identical Voodoo3-3500. The error was DDERR_INVALIDPARAMS when creating a 640*480 offscreen surface.
To solve this problem I checked MSDN Library and found a solution in Ask Dr. GUI #46. I now use DDSCAPS_OFFSCREENPLAIN | DDSCAPS_SYSTEMMEMORY when creating my offscreen surfaces. I also check the DDCAPS_BLT of ddcaps.dwSVBCaps to ensure that the video card supports system-to-video memory blitting. I still don't know why it failed on my friend's card with 16Mb of RAM but it is conceivable that other processes were using lots of video memory when the program was tested. It should work fine now. On NT4.0 and my old P200 they only have 4Mb of RAM and that would be exceeded by the program and operating system memory usage.
Next aim: get it running at full frame rate on my old P200!
I don't create hardware dependent profiles, such as the ability to run TechTech at different resolutions. This goes against
the DirectX documentation, but these programs are just for fun. Looks as if I will have to lower the resolution to run my
demo at full speed on my old machine.
4/1/2002
Build 6. Minor changes.
1. Error code displayed with general error description if a surface cannot be created,
2. Bug fix. Did not clear DirectX surface structure before calling CreateSurface as in the documentation.
Could cause unexpected problems.
3. Icon added,
4. Version information added.
27/12/2001
Build 5. Released.
1. Load Techtech.dsw into Visual C++,
2. Goto Build\Rebuild All,
3. It should run.
DDRAW.LIB must be in the project, so go to the FileView and remove my reference and add a reference to DDRAW.LIB on your build machine if there are build errors.
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