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Equinox DistoLogo applet

Equinox oldschool demomaker DistoLogo applet.

See the following screenshot. On the applet, the rasters (horizontal coloured lines) are moving around the Equinox logo. The logo itself is shaking. And on the bottom, a small text line is scrolling.

screenshot

DistoLogo

what is it exactly?

Just a small graphic animation, that's all. If you are old enough, you might remember the glorious days of demomakers in 90's. These people were developping, on their computers (mostly Atari ST and Amiga, but also Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64) small graphic programs called "demos" just to bluff the audience. They were gathering in parties, where they were showing their latest productions.

To know more about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene or type demoscene on youtube to get an idea. The demoscene is still alive, now on PC, but new productions are still released on old computers.

One of the groups that were active at this time was Equinox. After the declines of the Atari and Amiga computers, they decided to port some of their demos to java applets. This way peoples could enjoy demos on a web browser. Their site was https://equinox.planet-d.net/java/

Nowadays java is forbidden on web browsers, so you won't be able to enjoy the demos. I'm not even sure the java archive file are still there.

Anyways, years ago (around year 2000 if I remember correctly), I was chatting on IRC on a demoscene related channel, and I received some jar files from someone claiming to be one of the Equinox members. At this time I believed him, but after having looked at the code I doubted it was some real member of the Equinox demogroup. Why? Because the code was heavily obfuscated so I doubt the real members of the Equinox demogoup was willingly giving their code. I think now it was some guy who ripped the jar files and html embedding it who gave it to me. It stayed on one of my harddrive for a long time but now I decided to study it again. Here you will find the original code, and the commented one. Everything will be explained. You will learn demoscene effects! My goal is to port them to javascript, but that will be done in another git repository.

This repository contains one of the java applet that were on the Equinox home page.

To launch it, use an old web browser that does not block java applets or use the java appletviewer (it comes with the JDK environment, not with the JRE). If you are not a java developper, you probably do't have the Java Development Kit installed on your computer, but you might have the Java Runtime Environment.

Enjoy!

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Equinox Demomakers effects: DistoLogo applet

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