Crystal Dream asked very little of a PC. Its README said it needed a 286 running at 12 MHz with a VGA card, and it drew its pictures in 16 colours. “Sometimes that might be an advantage,” the group wrote. In July 1992 the Swedish group Triton entered it in the PC demo competition at the first Assembly party in Finland, where it came second to Future Crew’s Unreal. A year later Triton’s sequel, Crystal Dream 2, won the PC demo competition at The Computer Crossroads in Gothenburg.
Fast facts
- Group: Triton.
- Platform: IBM PC compatibles running MS-DOS.
- Credits: code by Vogue and Mr. H, music by Vogue.
- Released: July 1992; second in the PC demo competition at Assembly ’92.
- Sequel: Crystal Dream 2, first in the PC demo competition at The Computer Crossroads, May 1993.
Making it
Triton meant to show the demo at Hackerence 5, a party in Härnösand in the north of Sweden, but “we ran out of time and couldn’t show a 100% version”. About six weeks later it was finished. The README describes “many hours spoiling the schoolwork and other necessary dutys, sleepless nights, lots of fun developing, lots of hard work”.
The ray-traced pictures came from Synthetic Image, a ray-tracing scene editor Vogue had written as his final project at upper secondary school. Mr. H wrote the music software, and the README explains what it had to cope with.
Sound on a 1992 PC
In 1992 a PC had no standard way to play sampled music. Crystal Dream supported the Sound Blaster, in stereo on the Sound Blaster Pro; a digital-to-analogue converter plugged into the printer port, in mono or stereo; and the PC’s own speaker, which, the README warned, had “VERY poor sound quality”. Mr. H had rewritten his player since Triton’s previous demo, Vectra, and it could now play at 38 kHz on a 12 MHz 286. On the Sound Blaster it used DMA, the card fetching the sound data from memory by itself, which, he wrote, took less processor time than feeding it sample by sample.
For readers without a sound card, he drew two converters. The simple one was eight resistors, one on each of the printer port’s eight data pins, joined at a single output. Each resistor had twice the value of the one before it, from 25 kΩ on the most significant bit to 3.2 MΩ on the least, so each bit added half as much current as the bit above it and the joined output followed the byte the program wrote to the port. Played through an amplifier, those bytes became music. The better design used a proper converter chip, a PM7528, and an LM324 amplifier, with pin 1 of the port choosing the left or right channel. “It should work (it does for me), but don’t blame me if you burn your parallell port…”
The README’s advice for watching the result was a true 486, a stereo converter or a Sound Blaster Pro, “a dark room with a cold cc in your left hand… and your bottom pressed into your most comfortable chair”.
Assembly ’92
Assembly ‘92 was the first Assembly party, and the organisers’ closing note claimed “over 700 people showed up”. In the PC demo competition Unreal came first and Crystal Dream second, ahead of EMF’s Internal Damage. Two years later a British public-domain library was still selling Triton’s work by post: its advertisement in PC Gamer in October 1994 listed “CRYSTAL DREAMS (2) - Triton Demo - excellent”, on the same list as Unreal and Second Reality.
Crystal Dream 2
Crystal Dream 2 came out at The Computer Crossroads, held from 29 to 31 May 1993 at the Swedish Exhibition Centre in Gothenburg. A later compilation of the party’s results, drawn from party reports and results packs of the time, records 1,600 visitors, coverage on Swedish television and a 486-33 as the competition PC, and gives Crystal Dream 2 first place in the PC demo competition, ahead of Extreme’s Lunatic and Yodel’s Mayday. Demozoo credits the code to Vogue and Mr. H, the music to Lizardking and Vogue, and the 3D objects to Loot, with fonts and objects also by Vogue.
The programs that played its music grew into Fasttracker, and later Fasttracker 2; see Triton.
Sources
- Triton, README file distributed with Crystal Dream, July 1992 (web, secondary copy in the scene.org archive): requirements, 16 colours, Hackerence 5, Synthetic Image, the music routine and sound devices, the converter circuits. https://files.scene.org/view/demos/groups/triton/cd_trn.zip
- Assembly ‘92, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): PC demo placings, “over 700 people”. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1992/assembly92/results.txt
- The Computer Crossroads 1993, results compiled from party reports and results packs (web, secondary): dates, venue, attendance, competition machine, PC demo placings. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1993/computer_crossroad93/results.txt
- Public-domain library advertisement, PC Gamer (UK) vol. 1 no. 11, October 1994: “CRYSTAL DREAMS (2) - Triton Demo - excellent”, with Unreal and Second Reality.
- Demozoo, production entries for Crystal Dream and Crystal Dream II (web, secondary): credits. https://demozoo.org/productions/174/ and https://demozoo.org/productions/175/