- Thomas Pytel
Tomasz (aka Thomas) Pytel is a Polish-American programmer, better known as Tran / Renaissance in the
demoscene . He is notable for the creating the Timeless demo in 1994, and for co-creating thePMODE DOS extender withCharles Scheffold (a.k.a Daredevil). He was also the designer of the PC gameZone 66 . After that, he went to3D Realms and was one of lead programmers on Prey. Eventually, he moved to Palo Alto, California and became one of the lead programmers of the engine behindPayPal .Lon Matero, " [http://www.apogeegames.com/prey/history.htm The History of Prey] ", accessed 2006-07-03]Demos
After leaving Renaissance, Tran created a trilogy of unique demos on the PC. All three looped indefinitely with
ambient music in the background.Timeless
"Timeless" is a demo running on the PC written in 1994. In the demo, images in the background morph and slide sideways, while the color scheme changes and other objects move around the screen. This made "Timeless" popular as a DOS
screensaver , both inside and outside thedemoscene . Music in the demo was composed by Tomasz Pytel himself.Tran released the source to the demo, written entirely in Intel
i386 assembler code. It features extensive use of unwound loops and complex use of instruction registers to reduce CPU cycles as much as possible. All data files, for artwork and for the graphics effects, appear in the source code as data statements. The demo features a DOS extender PMODE.ASM which evolved into a standalone product Tran licensed for money. The screenshot shown is from a work in progress linux port of the demo, written in C and using the SDL library, and therefore portable to other architectures."Timeless" was featured on the rave culture website [http://www.hyperreal.org Hyperreal] as "eyecandy" software.
Ambience
Released November 1994, this was Tran's first demo in which he used his pseudo 21-bit, 100Hz VGA mode. Music in the demo was Drops in Time by Ryan Cramer/Renaissance.
Luminati
Released January 1996. Music in the demo was The Zen Garden, by Basehead.
References
External links
* [http://www.linuxmotors.com/timeless Open source version of Timeless ported to modern systems]
* [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2878 Timeless] atPouët .
* [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2879 Ambience] atPouët .
* [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2880 Luminati] atPouët .
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