My first Wordstore+ demo: The LOUP demo

I'll try to explain something about the background of this LOUPDEMO and my attempts to reconstruct the remains of this early demo.

The LOUPDEMO was one of my first demo's I ever made for MSX and that was way back in 1989.
While searching for part that could fit in the reconstruction, I found out that I wrote my first MSX-Basic programs just a year earlier, now 25 years ago.

Okay, back to 1989.
At that time I had already a Philips Music Module, but to make demo's with sounds and music in MSX-Basic, you had to use PLAY and SOUND.
Phillips was forgotten to make a Basic driver/loader for their Music Module programs (Musicbox/Music Creator/Drum System).

I wonder, what would happened if you could have played Music Creator songs in MSX-Basic, should FAC Soundtracker and Moonsound still be released, or maybe just some years earlier ?

So I was not able to use the Philips Music Module to play samples or to use Music Creator songs in MSX-Basic and still wanna make demo's with music and sounds...

From a MSX-er who lived in the same city as I, I  got  the disk-version of Wordstore+ of Aackosoft. At that time we all played those Aackosoft MSX-Games with intro-samples of Ronald van Putten, like Oh Shit, The Meaning Of Life, Jetbomber and lots more.

And with Wordstore+ finally I could sample sounds and use them in MSX-Basic, a great plus for Wordstore+, cause MuSiX (to make PSG-music) couldn't.

After I record some sounds I found out that music could be recorded too, just simple music with some instruments. So, I was at that moment a great fan of The Beatles and Paul Mc Cartney & Wings and recorded a lot of intro's of songs in Wordstore+.

Music and singing was not a good combination to record, so mostly it were instrumental parts that I recorded.
One that sounds the best to loop, was LOUP, the sound you heard in the demo's.
After recording it with a Philips Datarecorder I created LOUP1.LDR, which was a screen 0 MSX-1 demo.

Then I found a picture (ARMSTRON.PIC) and created LOUP2.LDR, a MSX-2 demo with the same sounds and a screenswap.
I used Philips VIDEOGRAPHICS to create the titles.

So when I made the LOUPDEMO, only Wordstore+ could sample.
Peter van Overbeek of PTC Print (the Philips Thioscomputer Club) was figuring out how to use the Music Module in MSX-Basic and the FAC had not yet released their FM-FAC Sampler, which I later used to make a couple a sample-demo's.

I made more Wordstore+ demo's, like a Lily Was Here demo (together with
 a Music Module sample) and a Dutch demo, which tried to some Text 2 Speech Dutch.
This last attempt fails badly, cause I had to sample my own voice and Wordstore+ could only handle 25 different samples, never enough to make a good sounding TTS.
The result of all these was me saying words like "Bbu Aaa Ddd" instead of "Bad".

Ok, now back to the LOUPDEMO.

When I was busy creating a better version of my first MSX Moonblaster Housemix "2 The Limit In2 A Twisted Reality", I thought: "if I release this mix, it should be nice to give something extra than the original package. Maybe some disks with my own demo's and utils I made for MSX-1 and 2."
So I collected a lot of stuff and found the LOUPDEMO.

Earlier I mentioned the LOUPDEMO was original 2 parts,
1) MSX-1 screen 0 and 2) MSX-2 screen 8 demo.
But the screen 8 demo pics were damaged and I could not find the original picture ARMSTRON.PIC. 
I asked on MSX.ORG for the screen 8 picture and got 2 fast and good responses.
So now I could rebuild the original LOUPDEMO on screen 8.

But I thought, "why not try to create an MSX-1 version of the same
MSX-2 LOUPDEMO, I already had the necessary picture..."
And because the screen 8 demo had some Dutch language, I made the screen 2 counterpart in English, so more than just a few Dutch can enjoy it ;-)

During the programming process of the screen 2 demo. lot of ideas came up, and I created the LOUPDEMO the way it is now released.

Every demo has a loading page, And I tried to make every one of them something special.
But I haven't changed 1 thing at the LOUP1.DEM, it was good enough in it's original state.

Unfortunally the MSX-Basic loader was not programmed for use directly in the MSX-Basic listings, so you have to be a little interactive and press some  function-keys in the right order.
The demo's itself are not that interactive, you can speed up and slow down the digitized sound with the cursorkeys.

Special keys in every LOUPDEMO:
* the cursor-keys for sound-speed (already mentioned)
* CTRL + STOP to quit a demo or ESC in the text-reader

I couldn't help it, so I recorded the LOUP 2 DEMO (the MSX-2 version of LOUP).
And if you want all the MSX-stuff about the LOUPDEMO, here it is:

* Depositfiles
* Mediafire

But there is more, I created an complete package with the programs I mentioned
in the text and some videos.

* Depositfiles
* Mediafire

NB: there are more than 2 demo's on the MSX-disk...