Persistence Of Vision Demos

Persistence Of Vision wrote several demos as both disk fillers for compilations and as complete demos on their own.

Fuzzbox International Rescue demo. This was our first demo as POV, it was released as POV demo compilation 2.

POV 4 (Ghostbusters), POV 5 (A-Ha), POV 6 and POV 8

In July 1989 two further POV demos were released. The first was a sample demo of Ghostbuster tune, the second was a sample demo of 'you are the one' by A-Ha.

POV 6 was released with our first filler demo, this was the first POV code written by Boris.

POV 8 contained our second sampled sound filler called 'Living on Video'.

Demos were released thick and fast so POV compilations disks came a little quicker. The compilations took over for a while so we were unable to get time to write demos of our own.

By May 1991, Boris was at university in Manchester, England. He, some friends and MSD got together and wrote a mega sample demo called 'Invisible Man'. The demo spanned two disks but contained nearly all the original song by Queen.

Not long after in August 1991, Boris finished his degree in computer science and with MSD wrote the 'Kinky Boots' demo - another sampled sound demo. This time we managed to fit the whole song on a single disk plus an intro.

In December 1991 a demo called 'Knock Knock' was released under the names of 'Erik Plankton and Blind Bastard'. The names related to Mac Sys Data and Boris respectively. The demo was a sampled sound demo like Kinky Boots and was the last sampled sound demo to be produced by POV.

knock knock

By May 1992 POV had released 100 demo compilations. We made POV 100 a special one by making it a multipart demo all by POV. At this time Boris was writing games professionally for the ST and Amiga. He converted the game called 'Leander' to the ST and so used the main character of the game for the main menu. Like all decent demos, there was a hidden screen to find.

Somewhere in between 1991 and 1992 OZ Slideshow 1 and 2 were released by Mac Sys Data. The date is unknown as a hard disk crash lost the source code.

Around the end of 1992 Oz went to university and the art stopped arriving. Boris was busy writing games for Amiga/Megadrive and the work of POV was down to Mac Sys Data.

POV concentrated on their compilations until July 1993 when Mac Sys Data bought a house. The house needed a lot of work to make it occupiable. For sometime there was no activity from POV, at the same time the Atari scene slowly died. Contacts stopped writing, magazines went bust and many crews moved to the Amiga, PC or SNES.

poverty

In May 1995 Mac Sys Data had a Falcon up and running and finished a new demo called 'Poverty'. The demo only worked on the Falcon and was basically an Oz slideshow 3 using hardware scrolling, DMA sound and hardware overscan only found on the Falcon. Shortly after in June 1995 the STE version was finished complete with hardware scrolling and DMA sound.

To date

In 1997 Boris moved to America with work to continue writing games for the N64. Oz didn't bother writing after the 2nd year of his degree and only once got in touch. The only active person on an Atari is Mac Sys Data (the author of these web pages).

After many years I have finally tracked down Boris and Oz. Boris working for Kush Games in California and Oz now lives in London and creates web pages Click to go there.

MSD released a couple of compilations from some old demos that had been packed a number of years earlier. The need for demo compilations has virtually died out as most people have access to the internet and can download them without having to send for a disk via snail mail.

Jan 2000 and Mac Sys Data released a Falcon only demo based on the music of Jester of Sanity (Amiga). All the music from Sanity's Jesterday demo is in the demo.