** PD/Shareware review / 229 words **
Amok
89%
Freeware, all Ataris, 2Mb memory minimum
Demo

** AMOK.JPG here **

Of all the high quality entries to the Orneta '97 Demo Convention, perhaps this was the most noteworthy of them all.

It's the first significant demo created on the ST for a long time, and is surprisingly contemporary in the type of effects it shows on-screen, keeping up with the Falcon, albeit in a chunky pixelled fashion.

The design of this demo is subdued and dark, with a mostly understated colour palette used. A contrast to the garish "flags of emerging third world countries approach" used by the old school ST demos. The music is classic soundchip.

You get to see some very smooth plasma and rotating effects, bump-mapping (the flavour of the month on "big" machines, and an environment mapped or lightsourced 3-D Torus or doughnut, which is very impressive on an ST and never seen previously on a machine assumed to be not up to the processing demands such an effect makes on the hardware. If it is cheating, it is very clever cheating, but I have the feeling the coder was not cheating on this occasion!

The even better news? Well the main coder of this demo won a Falcon as first prize at Orneta and has now started work on a new Falcon demo!

** Italics on **
Chris Holland
** Italics off **