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Second Reality

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A recording of Second Reality (60 fps)

Second Reality (originally Unreal ][ - The 2nd Reality) is a demo for DOS made by the Finnish group Future Crew. It was shown on July 30, 1993 at the Assembly 1993 demoparty,[1] where it won first place in the PC demo competition.[2] It was released in October 1993.

It is said to be one of the best demos from the early 1990s for PCs. Slashdot named it one of the "Top 10 Hacks of All Time" in 1999.[3] Its source code was shared to GitHub and made public domain using the Unlicense license[4] on its 20th anniversary in August 2013.[5]

Description

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There are many popular demo effects of the time, including real-time 3D graphics, image scaling and warping, and moiré patterns. It is known for being synced to the background music, which was rare at the time.

Entering 2, 3, 4 or 5 into the command line starts the demo at different parts. "u" shows an effect where stars move towards the screen.

Technology

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There was a legend about Second Reality directly accessing the MMU using its own memory manager. However, the source code was shown to use DOS's normal memory management functions.[6]

Second Reality was made for 486 (but also works on 386) PCs with a Gravis Ultrasound or Sound Blaster Pro (or register-compatible clone). The first version had a problem that made it slower. A patch was later released to fix this.[7]

  • Second Reality C64 (pouët.net) by Smash Designs – Runs on the Commodore 64.
  • Flash Reality (pouët.net) by The Scampers – Runs in Flash. Many scenes were recreated using ActionScript.
  • Second Reality 2013 (pouët.net) by Checkpoint – Runs on the Atari ST.
  • 8K Reality (pouët.net) by Fulcrum – Runs in 8 kilobytes on Windows. It was made for the Revision 2015 demoparty, where it won second place. The two-dimensional drawings were made using metaballs.
  • Rocky Reality (pouët.net) by Bedrock Bros. - Runs on Pebble, a smartwatch. It was released at the Evoke 2016 demoparty, where it won second place in the alternative platforms category.
  • Holo Reality (pouët.net) by Bedrock Bros. - Runs on the Looking Glass holographic display. It was released at the Demosplash 2018 demoparty, where it ranked first in the modern category.
  • First Reality (pouët.net) by Holo Sapiens - Runs in 3D through augmented reality.
  • Second Reality X16 (pouët.net) by Team FX - Runs on the Commander X16.

References

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  1. ↑ "Assembly 1993".
  2. ↑ "Assembly 93 results". pouet.net. 2011-01-02. Retrieved 2011-01-02.
  3. ↑ "Slashdot's "Top 10 Hacks of All Time"". Slashdot. 1999-12-13. Retrieved 2010-12-25.
  4. ↑ Tuomi, Mika (3 August 2017). "SecondReality: Source code and data of Second Reality by Future Crew in 1993" – via GitHub.
  5. ↑ Smith, Ryan (2013-08-01). "Happy 20th Birthday Second Reality". Anandtech. Archived from the original on August 3, 2013. Retrieved 2013-08-21.
  6. ↑ Sanglard, Fabien (2013-08-16). "Second Reality Code Review: Part 2 (Engine)". Retrieved 2013-08-31. There were many legends about Second Reality using an elaborated memory manager via the MMU but there is no trace of this in the engine. Memory management is actually delegated to DOS : The engine starts by deallocating all the RAM and then distribute it on demand. The only fancy trick is the ability to allocated RAM from the end of the heap: This is done using the return value of DOS malloc when too much RAM is requested.
  7. ↑ 2ndpatch.zip on scene.org

Other websites

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