More Wordstore+ Picture Demo's (Introduction)

It has been a long time since I released the last Wordstore+ Karaoke demo. 
To be precise, 7th of December 2014. In the meantime, I was now and then working on the Wordstore+ Mixer Demo's, cause I didn't know what to do with the other Demo's, 
with the working title Wordstore+ Mega Demo.

As you may know, when you play a Wordstore sampler with the Basic replayer, 
you can't execute any other Basic commands. So any animation during playing the sample is impossible. I already tried a couple of ideas for creating some kind of animation and make it interactive, like in my LOUP demos. I just could not find fresh ideas for those demos for the Mega Demo. Until last year, 2017.

After creating some kind of workflow for my Mixer Demo's, but it seemed so much work 
I did not dare to start building it. Instead, I throw away the idea of a Mega Demo and start to create a Picture Demo. I searched for pictures, convert them to SC2 and SC8, just like in the LOUP demos, made a better loop for each Wordstore+ sample and collect them on separate disks. Each demo was not more than 1 SC2 or 2 SC8 pictures that were shown while the sample was played. A bit boring. 

So I had the idea of creating a Mega Picture Demo on 1 disk, with a nice menu and where you could choose between 1 Picture Demo or all Picture Demo in any order. 
There were 5 Picture Demos, so the menu had to show 5 pictures, I used Photoscape album page function to do the trick, but I had to edit a lot to get the names of the demos at the right position. Then all fall down. 
The Picture Demos and the menu pictures didn't fit on a single 720kb disk, which is my standard format (2DD if you like). 


I had the rethink the whole project and I felt like I never gonna finish it.
After a while, I realized it could be a 2 disk Picture Demo so some demos would be on disk 1 and other on disk 2. However, this was also the end of playing all demos in sequence.
You can only play 1 demo at the time, then you had to start the menu again.
Not the best solution, but I believed it was the only way to release those 5 demos.

And more trouble was coming my way. I had to check somehow which disk was in the drive and I want also the Picture Demo to work with 2 drives so it could start any demo from any drive.I searched in my toolbox, checking on diskname and number of drives. 
Checking on disk name means editing the boot sector and starting a demo on disk 2 from disk 1 and otherwise, were new obstacles for me. 
I did not like the idea that you had to modify the boot sector, before the demo would work on a new disk. And starting a demo on disk 2 from disk 1 was too much for my computing skills. I didn't know what to do with it. 

This was all done in 2017. Then it was March 2018 and I had just finished some small videos and a disk of Fourseasons MSX Software, with a new menu I made from scratch.
I found my Wordstore Demos map again, start my latest unfinished software and saw what went wrong. No so much and I liked the menu as it was. 
New ideas came up for a much easier disk check and I disabled the 2 disk support.

First I made the SC8 menu (which was maybe 70% already made in 2017) complete, 
then I found out I need to make a SC2 menu too. So again I started to collect new ideas how to create a nice SC2 men, without the MSX-2 features I used.
The colorspill on SC2 was always a bit of a problem, but it look okay now, I think.
When the SC2 and SC8 menu were finished, I had to look at the AUTOEXEC.BAS.

Yeah, well, it tried to perform some tests to make sure it's a MSX-1 or higher with at least 64kb ROM, but how can I test it in Basic ? I decided to display a warning if the computer was an MSX-1. Wordstore+ works only on 64 Kb ROM MSX computers. 

And because all Picture Demos were also made for MSX-1, the AUTOEXEC.BAS will ask, 
when you have a MSX-2 computer, if you want to see the MSX-1 versions.

BTW: If you choose l (instead of y or n), you will go to the secret LOUP Demo menu.

I add it to disk 2, cause there was so much diskspace left and somehow the LOUP Demos seemed to be in its place on a Picture Demo disk. I included also the hidden ones, before nobody would notice them.


So on Disk 1, you find the Picture Demo's : ( Mediafire / Pcloud )
- 99 LUFTBALLONS
- VALENTINE'S DAY
- RECEPTION

On Disk 2, you find the Picture Demo's : ( Mediafire / Pcloud )
- OLD SIAM SIR
- TUG OF PEACE
- LOUP

I will go into details about each song in other posts, except  the LOUP Picture Demo's