Elysium State by Stardust (final version)

Release date: 04-12-2022
Release party: CAFePARTY2022
Compo: ZX Spectrum Demo
Platform: ZX Spectrum
Ranked: 1st
Pouet: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=...
ZXART: https://zxart.ee/rus/soft/demoscene/d...

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Elysium State by Stardust
rollerbob - kowalski - diver - n1k-o - sq - psndcj

Phew! After one month and a few days we havefinally made a final version of this demo!

It took us too long to make all the fixes we wanted and needed, and we know that, so, sorry and that's why here is the brief list of the changes:

Autodetects and fixes for the most common ZX models (128K/+2/+2a/+2b/+3 and Pentagon)
Some bugs were fixed
Sync was improved a lot in almost every part
Some parts were refactored for stable working
Pictures and effects were polished a bit
New credits screen was added
A lot of small details were fixed and updated

Although Elysium State should work properly on all classic machines, it makes heavy use of our custom Beta Disk trackloader. Thus it's quite impossible to make a .tap version not ruining the whole demo flow. So you would need to have Beta Disk interface or DivMMC to run the demo. Sorry for that.

Please also note that the "Selfie Girl" part may look strange on some hardware or emulators due to inaccurate timings emulation (e. g. Fuse) or inner hardware processing pecularities (e. g. ZX Evolution). In some cases this could be circumvented, but we decided to leave it as it is.

During our tests, we found a flaw in the WD1793/VG93 emulation on ZX Evolution/Baseconf, due to which the demo didn't run from the SD card, but worked fine with real disk drives (and Gotek). We have informed the authors and the flaw was immediately fixed in the latest firmware. So, if this demo doesn't run on your ZX Evolution/Baseconf, please update your firmware to the latest version.

And at the end as the most important thing we desperately want to say our HUGE thanks to the following people we adore and respect:

iq (Inigo Quilez) for kindly permission to use his incredible Selfie Girl picture: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/WsSBzh (yes, it's a tribute to that amazing shader!)
rook and wbcbz7 from SibCrew for competition and supporting around
personally wbcbz7 for bughunting and on a real machine
introspec for helping with model detection and interrupt alignment routines
savelij/NedoPC for quickly fixing the firmware
jtn/4d for testing on a real machine
Ized/Quite for support
George Patsouras for original "Medusa" picture
Oxygene for STNICCC2000 (yes, you recognized it right!)
nodeus for helping with video capture
CAFePARTY organizers and visitors for such a great party
And you for the patience in waiting this one!

Cheers,
Stardust