Does anyone remember a 2D water surface simulation demo from an Acorn magazine disk?

[dhr2]

Hello everyone,

I'm pretty young compared to everyone on this forum (about 34) but still Acorn computers were a really important part of my childhood. We had a BBC Micro and later an Archimedes as our only computers from when I was a baby until I was about 11.
I spent a lot of time playing with stuff that came on Acorn User etc magazine disks, as well as various other public domain software on the Acorn.

I vividly remember, there was one disk that came with a small BASIC program demo that simulated a water surface, you could click on the screen and it'd create ripples. I loved that demo so much and I played with it a lot, I didn't know anything about programming at the time yet but I liked to edit the code randomly to make weird fun stuff happen.

Today and yesterday I programmed my own demo based on the same concept:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4tD_DYEsMg
The code is here if anyone's interested https://github.com/dusthillresident/Joh ... tersurface

Now as an adult, having learned BBC BASIC pretty well, I'd love to see that demo again and check out how it worked. So I was wondering, does anyone remember it and would you happen to know what magazine disk it would've been on?

Thank you,

[jubber]

You may be thinking of !2DWaves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCGiJHEX0YY

It's an amazing bit of code, but it's a bit too smooth to be just BASIC, so this might not be the one you're thinking of. It uses the same sort of principles as your cool little demo, so definitely worth tracking down.

Give me a shout if you can't find it. My Acorns are in bits at the moment, but when I've had a chance to reassemble them, I can send you a zip file.

It may also be available here - https://arcarc.nl/apps.html

cheers,

Robin.

[baz4096]

I’m sure I remember a 3d version with animated dots. Can’t remember the name though…

[jubber]

!2DWaves has two main graphics settings - 3D dots or 2D. You can switch between them with P

cheers,

Robin.

[baz4096]

!2DWaves has two main graphics settings - 3D dots or 2D. You can switch between them with P

That’ll be the one then. Thanks Robin!

[dhr2]

Hi Robin,

!2DWaves is really cool! Though it's definitely what I'm thinking of -- I vividly remember it was a standalone BBC BASIC file (not a !app) and from what I remember it came on a magazine disk, sometimes some of the magazine disks had miscellaneous standalone BASIC programs included in an extra directory with little graphics demos or fun little things (eg. a national lottery simulator, I remember there was one like that)

Is there an archive of all the acorn user or archimedes world magazine disks online? I'd love to search through them.

Thank you a lot for the info and for the Archimedes archive link, this is really cool to search through.

PM

[Rich Talbot-Watkins]

There were a few of these in Acorn User.

August 92:

September 92:

February 93:

Any of those look like the one?

[dhr2]

Hi Rich,

There were a few of these in Acorn User.

Any of those look like the one?

This is great info!! Thank you a lot for finding these for me, I'm looking forward to reading and analysing these and experimenting with that formula from the first page. That's also really cool to see that you're mentioned on that page too heheh.

I don't think any of these are the specific one I remember, though the first one seems very close. The one I remember from my childhood presented a flat blue screen of big pixels (possibly 8x8 text characters) and once you clicked on it to start the ripples going, it'd be different shades of blue from bright to dark, nothing colourful or psychedelic like the ones on that page.

PM

[dhr2]

There were a few of these in Acorn User.

August 92:
AU1.JPG

Thank you again for this awesome info. I took that formula/algorithm from the August 92 magazine page and played about with it, and made this with it. This is now pretty much exactly how I remember the demo from my childhood looking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yUrUkzD5s0

PM

[Rob_hawk]

That looks superb.

[jubber]

Very slick!

[dhr2]

Thank you!

I've uploaded the code to github if anyone's interested:
https://github.com/dusthillresident/Joh ... _ripple.jo

[wmd]

Does anyone happen to have the Wave8 and Wave32 BASIC programmes from those Acorn User magazines?

[SToS]

Does anyone happen to have the Wave8 and Wave32 BASIC programmes from those Acorn User magazines?

Just to jog my memory and try to narrow my search through what I have, were these also by Michael Attenborough?

An explanation as to what these two examples were/are supposed to do?

It all helps at this stage in life with memory being untrusted!

[SToS]

Ok wmd, a quick find & grep produced this with the exact phrase "Wave32". Does it help?

So many files with the same name, how did we manage on the 8.3 format

[wmd]

Thanks, yes, that one works and is probably the more interesting of the two.

[iainfm]

There was !Wibble as well. I think it was a magazine listing, but not 100% sure. I slightly modified it to load digitised pictures, and 'wibble' those. I think I made it automatic as well for demoing Acorns at computer shows. It fair drew the crowds in!

I spotted it on a machine the other day, so I could post it if required

[iainfm]

Found it! Author is Alistair Turnbull, and it was published in the February '94 edition of Acorn User.

The original drew a demo image (PROCsetupsetupscreen), which is commented out in these in favour of loading some digitised pictures, which I think came from the 'unroll' dealer demo disc (apart from the desktop screenshot).

Attached as a zip containing two spark archives.

Left click/drag wibbles, right click loads a new (random) image.

[wmd]

Very nice, thanks for uploading!

[wmd]

Slightly OT, but I am also on the lookout for a very early Archimedes animation demo. It's a Newton's Cradle animation, but is different from the one on the David J. Hoskins demo discs (mentioned in this thread). The one I am looking for I think had a blue background, which is all I can remember about it. Anyone have any recollection of this? It isn't to be confused with the Computer Concepts Newton's Cradle from an early RISC User disc, which looks like a pre-rendered video as opposed to Render Bender frames.