In June 1996 a Spectrum owner who signed himself Reb of Technium 220 took LSD’s Jesus on E’s, a half-hour Amiga rave demo from 1992, and brought pictures from it to the 48K ZX Spectrum. He did not rewrite the effects. He pointed a video digitiser at the Amiga’s picture and saved what he saw as Spectrum screens. The title screen says so: “AMIGA ORIGINAL - LSD”, “SPECTRUM - REB OF TECHNIUM 220”, “VIDEOFACE DIGITISED 6/1996”.
Fast facts
- By: Reb (also known as Rebel) of the group Technium 220.
- Converted from: LSD’s Amiga demo Jesus on E’s (1992).
- Platform: 48K ZX Spectrum, on tape.
- Released: June 1996, the date on the title screen.
- Made with: a VideoFace video digitiser.
Pictures from a video signal
The VideoFace was a small interface that turned a video signal into a Spectrum screen. The Dutch firm Data-Skip advertised it in Your Sinclair in May 1987 for £69: plug in a video recorder, a camera or “even another computer” (“What would you think of a Commodore screen in your Spec??”), and it would capture a 256×192 picture in 0.27 seconds. Romantic Robot, the makers of the Multiface, also sold it, and by 1990 their advertisements in CRASH promised that the pictures “can be frozen, saved, printed, altered, animated”.
Reb used it for exactly that. The tape carries a short BASIC program and one block of machine code of 26,629 bytes. Once loaded, the program shows a title screen and then works through a list of 75 steps in its BASIC. Each step calls one of sixteen machine-code routines that put pictures on the screen, and some steps also change the border colour. Some pictures repeat several times in a row and some alternate, which gives short bursts of movement. When the list ends, it starts again. The screens range from black-and-white line patterns, such as a warped set of nested squares, to the coloured “Loading” logo from the Amiga original. There is no music: the soundtrack that made the Amiga original famous stayed on the Amiga.
Where it fits
Reb made several other digitised slideshows for the Spectrum in 1995 and 1996, according to Demozoo, including ones based on The X-Files, Rugrats and The Snowman. As Equinox he was still making Spectrum graphics in 2020. Jesus on E’s belongs with that work: a fan’s tribute to a famous Amiga demo, made with the tools a Spectrum owner had.
Sources
- Jesus on E’s, ZX Spectrum tape (1996): the title screen text, the BASIC program, the 26,629-byte code block, the sixteen routines and the 75-step sequence; on a 48K Spectrum the animation plays without sound. https://files.zxdemo.org/files/Jesuses.zip
- Demozoo, production entry for Jesus On E’s (ZX Spectrum) (web, secondary): 1996, credited to Rebel. https://demozoo.org/productions/13218/
- Demozoo, scener entry for Equinox, also known as Rebel, Reb and Paul H., of Technium 220 (web, secondary): the digitised slideshows of 1995–1996 and later productions. https://demozoo.org/sceners/9030/
- Data-Skip advertisement, “Videoface digitiser”, Your Sinclair issue 17, May 1987: £69, video sources, 256×192 screens, 0.27 seconds per picture, also available from Romantic Robot.
- Romantic Robot advertisement, CRASH issue 75, April 1990, p. 16: VideoFace “turns pictures from video camera/recorder into Spectrum hi-res screens. They can be frozen, saved, printed, altered, animated”.