Many years ago, when a friend of mine had convinced me
to buy a used Amiga, I got my hands on a small
program named Tunnel. It was originally a demo program
for some Modula-2 system; thus source code in Modula-2
was included. The program was so cool, my brother and I
used to turn off the light in the room and watch the
psychedelic colours flickering by.
The program didn't work on my new AGA Amiga - there was
no synchronization and the colours shift much too fast.
I wrote this quick hack to produce a similar effect,
but enhanced to make use of all the 24 color bits of AGA.
The 'tunnel' is a very simple effect, but it is cheaper
than hallucinogen drugs - unless there are Psilocybin
mushrooms growing where you live anyway ;-)
On the other hand, watching ambient videos on MTV late at night
is rather cheap too...
As it is, AGATunnel will open a screen in the same resolution
as the Workbench and make some simple colour cycling effects,
giving the impression of a moving multi-color tunnel.
Stop the program by feeding it a CONTROL-C signal
(with the C:Break command for example).
This is a quick hack, but it's fun to watch. Some caveats:
It is 3.0-only, CLI/Shell-only and AGA-only
The number of bitplanes and speed of the color cycling
is hard-coded. If you want to change it, you have to
recompile the program.
The speed is hard-coded with respect to my own
machine, an A4000/030. The effects _may_ look a
bit strange in some screenmodes on A1200s and A4000s.
I don't know.
The program looks ugly while it draws the initial
tunnel. Once again, this isn't high-quality software.
The algorithms for generating the color sequence
could be enhanced, giving a much cooler effect.
This archive is in the Public Domain. Do what you want with it.
Jörgen Grahn
Wetterlinsgatan 13E
S-521 34 Falköping
SWEDEN
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