Acorn Badge Demo

By Acornsoft

Originally published in EUG #69

The Acorn Computer Badge Demo originally comes from a rather curious BBC PD disc of demos called the Arabic Demos and, if you've never seen them before, they are certainly worth a look. Most of them use colour switching to give the illusion of movement and, considering they were written as long ago as 1984, were evidently quite ahead of their time. This demo is simply a Mode 2 screen and achieves its scrolling text simply by changing an invisible colour to white using the VDU 19 command.

The full version, on the Arabic Demos disc, does continue three times as long as this one and reveals an animation of birds and a man on a magic carpet flying past an archway window. However, I have stripped out this particular short because the complete disc was obviously meant to be run on a promotional computer - in that it constantly loops through demos in lots of different Modes - and so the demos are their own distinct little entities.