Code Like It's 198x

The Lyra II

A Polish Spectrum megademo on a British covertape

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A 1991 ZX Spectrum megademo by ESI (Ethanol Software Inc) of Toruń, Poland, coded by Kaz and Mat with music by Ziutek. Sinclair User put it on its December 1991 covertape, and by 1992 it had been converted to disk as far away as Ukraine.

In December 1991 Sinclair User gave its readers a Polish megademo. The covertape carried “the rad LYRA 2 music demo”, with a warning in the loading instructions: “48K owners can load it but they won’t hear any music.” The magazine pitched it at readers who had “heard all the 16 bit owners braggin’” about their graphics. The Lyra II came from ESI, a group in Toruń, and it had been out in Poland since the summer.

Fast facts

  • Group: ESI (Ethanol Software Inc), from Toruń, Poland.
  • Credits: code by Kaz and Mat; music by Ziutek; graphics by Ziutek, Kaz, Mat, Muad’dib and Rackne; English translation by Muad’dib (credits as listed on Demozoo).
  • Platform: ZX Spectrum; the music needs the 128K machine’s AY sound chip.
  • Released: 1991. Demozoo gives 9 August 1991 and Pouët June 1991; Sinclair User published it in December 1991.
  • Form: a megademo in separately loaded parts.

Part by part

The archived tape holds a short loader and nine parts, from about 11 KB to 36 KB each. The loader brings them in one at a time, and the first part’s scroller explains the controls: “IN THIS PART U CAN USE KEYZ Q’N’A TO CHANGE SCROLLERSPEED AND SPACE TO LOAD NEXT PART.” It adds a challenge: “TO FIND OUR ADDRESSES U HAVE TO READ ALL TEXTS IN ALL PARTS OF THIS DEMO”. That first part shows the title in big yellow and green letters beside a planet, while giant letters scroll up through a starfield above it.

The parts carry Ziutek’s music, marked in the code as compiled with Sound Tracker. One Polish scroller insists that “ST” means Sound Tracker, not an Atari ST.

What the scrollers say

The texts switch between English and Polish, and much of them is the group talking about itself. In one part Rackne describes the group’s new base, a house they called “The Last Service”, with “NO GAS, NO PHONE, NO WARM WATER”, no neighbours for 500 feet and “NO PARENTS IN 10 MILES”, but with power, five computers and five days of free time. The same scroller lists the members: “THIS TIME ‘ETHANOL SOFT INC.’ (E.S.I.) IS COMPLETED: MAT, ZIUTEK, KAZ’N’RACKNE”.

A later “special part” is given over to insults. It accuses other sceners of reusing Ziutek’s music and Kaz’s routines in their own programs, and it sends rude messages to the people at the Polish computer magazines Bajtek and Top Secret, telling one of them that the Spectrum is not dead. The group ranked its own work a year later: in the scroller of its 1992 Music Bank 5, The Lyra II comes third among the Spectrum demos of the day, behind its successor Shock, but “it was the first megademo”.

East as well as west

Sinclair User ran more of the demo on its January 1992 covertape. The demo also travelled east, and it was converted to TR-DOS disk at least twice. One disk version, dated 1992, is signed by ASC of Dnepropetrovsk in Ukraine. Another is signed by Vasilyev Anton, whose loader, he wrote, works on both 48K and 128K machines.

Sources

See also

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