EGOZAP! By Digital Vortex Welcome to EgoZap, the "End all, Be all" of GS demos. What you see before you is a pioneer in GS demos. Not only does it push your GS to new limits, but it also provides many features normally only found in hi-quality applications. Such features include full GS/OS and GNO support, hard drive installable, documentation, error tolerance, and a high degree of professional quality. I hope you enjoy it! 1.0 What is EgoZap and what does it require? EgoZap is a 3200 color viewer demo with scrolling text, and SoundSmith music with some other neat demo oddities as well. The demo's main purpose is to make fun of a well known IIGS celebrity - Ian Schmidt and his antics on IRC. But other people get their due share of criticism as well. THIS DEMO IS MEANT TO OFFEND PEOPLE. IF YOU ARE NOT OFFENDED BY IT, THEN WE DID NOT DO OUR JOB! Because of this, I will tell you straight out that if this demo were to be rated by the motion picture system, it would be rated X. So please, IF YOU HAVE THE SLIGHTEST CHANCE OF BEING OFFENDED BY ANYTHING, DELETE THIS DEMO NOW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! Also, do not let your children see this either. If in the future time permits, I will release a tamer version that everyone can enjoy. EgoZap requires a GS running System 6.0 or greater. It can run on a 1.25 Meg GS provided you Shift-Boot (No DA/INITS) and run it from the System 6 mini launcher. EgoZap comes on three (3) 800k disks and is hard drive installable. 2.0 Installing EgoZap By running the EgoZap program on the first disk, EgoZap can be ran from the floppies it comes on. (Even for single disk users!). The demo will prompt you to change disks as they are needed. EgoZap is also hard drive installable. You can either install the program on your hard drive using the installer script or if you feel cool enough, you can do it yourself. If you install it yourself, place EgoZap in your desired directory, and copy the bin folder from the first disk into the same directory as well. In this bin folder, you copy the act files from the other two disks' bin folders. IMPORTANT!!! Egozap can not be ran from the RAM drive. If you have a single disk drive GS with enough memory to support a RAM drive, and wish to use it, please install the system on the RAM drive and run the demo from the disk. 3.0 Running EgoZap. Before you run EgoZap for the first time, please run the program called fliphz. If you had used the installer, it will be located in the Utilities folder in the EgoZap directory. If you are install the program yourself, it is located in the utilities folder on disk 3. It will set your monitor to 50 Hz and display some text. Make sure that this text is readable as EgoZap uses the 50 Hz mode of the monitor. You can adjust your monitor with the knobs located at the back of the unit. (This is for the Apple RGB monitor, other monitors may vary.) [Author's Note : This program can be useful for getting out of 50 Hz if you are ever stuck in that mode.] Other than that, just launch EgoZap like you do with your other GS programs. 4.0 Getting around EgoZap When EgoZap has loaded, you will be in the introduction section. If there was a problem launching EgoZap, you will be told what went wrong and the program will then politely quit. Or if there was a reason why the introduction could not be loaded, it will say so and go straight to the main part of the demo. Eventually if everything goes correctly, you will see a Rated X screen appear. You can press any key to advance through the stages of the introduction. Eventually you will enter the main section of the demo. You will know that this has happened as the font will have gone from a mixture of white and blue colors to a solid white color. The main demo is made up of 8 acts. You can skip to any act you wish by pressing that # on the keyboard. So if you wish to go to act 5, you can press "5" and it will take you there. You can not jump to the act that is currently being shown. Sometimes the demo might be doing an important background task, such as decompression or a screen fade, and it may miss your key press. Just wait a moment and try again. You will know that it has acknowledged your selection when the font text fades and the appearance of the "now changing acts" message. If you wish to quit, you can press the key "Q" at any time and the demo will stop and quit. 5.0 Other goodies included with EgoZap. To further help the GS community, I have released the source code for EgoZap along with the demo. So if you have been wondering how to write 3200 color viewers or use resources, play rSounds, or other neat things that EgoZap has (Music drivers and LZSS decompression code has been omitted) you are free to find out! So now Ian doesn't also have to whip out his "nifty" dissembler to find out how it works either. The source code is located on the 3rd disk and includes the utility programs that I used to create the demo. (Minus the LZSS programs) The code has been commented to the best of my current time constraints, and if there is enough desire, I will further improve the educational part of the demo in 1994. 6.0 Troubleshooting Given the complexity and size of EgoZap, it is difficult to foresee all the possible problems one might encounter. This is the largest demo ever written for the GS, and has the most demands of any as well. I have tried to give EgoZap as robust of an error handler as possible, but there may be some situations I did not foresee. Below is an additional list of things you can do in case EgoZap is giving you problems. o Insufficient memory to run EgoZap. EgoZap is a very large program. If you need as much memory as possible, run your GS with no DA's/INITS and run the program from the system 6 mini launcher. This worked from a system I used that had 1.25 meg of memory. If you have less, I do not know how much of the demo you can run. o Desktop programs gives rainbow menubar after EgoZap is ran. I do not know what is causing this bug. However, by quitting the application program and rerunning the application again, your problem will disappear. Sometimes the desktop application may crash before are able to quit. o EgoZap is sometimes unable to run. The resource manager sometimes acts a little flakey. Rebooting your GS and rerunning the demo will solve this problem. If it doesn't, get another copy of the demo and try that. o The Music Player goes wacko. This was a bug that was found in the day before the demo was released. The problem has to do with memory management and Megatracker. I have changed the way memory is allocated for the songs. If during the demo, a music song starts stuttering, quit the demo and try rerunning the demo. If that fails, try rebooting, and if that fails, try shift-booting. These are the only major known problems I have had while developing this demo for the past year. If you are having additional problems, free to contact us for help. 7.0 Ian the Ego Profile As mentioned before, Ian Schmidt is the reason why Digital Vortex wrote this demo. For those of you who are still unfamiliar with this person, he is an Apple IIGS developer who has written such programs as AudioZap, ModZap, MidiZap, RezZap, and Megatracker (formerly called SoundSmithZap). As you can see, Ian has a creative mind when it comes to naming his programs. He spends a lot of his time on IRC on #AppleIIGS (the GS channel) using the IRC nickname IRSMan (its his initials). Sometime long ago, Ian fell under the delusion that all other GS'ers must heed his every childish whim, and has become obsessed with total domination of the Apple IIGS computing world. Some areas of where Ian has expressed his delusions are: - The self proclaimed GS Sound God. which extends to... - bragging rights on the 6 & 8 voice mod player - ragging rights on any other GS sound programmer - The self proclaimed Best GS/OS Compatible Demo Programmer - The self proclaimed ruler of #AppleIIGS. which allows him to: - kick people off for no valid reason. - throw a tantrum when does not have channel op - Automatically be the IRC Jeopardy Host - decide how many IRCbots the channel can have. - And act in any (childish) manner he feels fit - The self proclaimed master programmer for GS<>IRC. Yet somehow spends his time complaining about Dave not doing the actual programming. - Self proclaims any of his programs to be the best. Now Ian is not a bad programmer as he has written many useful programs for the Apple II. But he fails to reach the level of excellence in his programs that he brags about. Ian needs to put quality before quantity so that what he does release is not loaded with bugs. The overlooked 10 lines of code to make sure that his bordermenu demo for the GS<>IRC demo would not crash from GNO is a perfect example. Ian's favorite game on IRC is to take what we say, and then misquote us for his own entertainment. For example, Abaddon (Ian's favorite target) would say something on IRC like: I wonder how much longer it will be before Jawaid comes back from the Rush Concert. And Ian would take that and make it into the following: I wonder how much longer it will be before Jawaid comes. Most of the time, these quotes are perverted and quite rude. By putting multiple misquotes together, Ian writes little stories of around 3-6 quotes in length. Ian plays this quoting game every chance he gets. He loves the game so much that he has written his own IRC bot so that it will play random storylines at his bidding. So what we have done in this demo is taken what Ian has said and misquoted him and made much longer storylines from them. They say that the only way to truly beat someone is at their own game. We hope that we have succeeded in our goal. 8.0 Reaching Digital Vortex. You can reach us at the email address : dv@vegiwopr.calpoly.edu. Please let us know what you think of the demo (no flame mail please, you were warned about the demo, its not our fault if you chose to run it anyways!)