THE MAKING OF GREENDAY 
It's the end of 1994. In the German town of Tarmstedt, resides a productive and much known Amiga coder, with the same name of an old video game! Tron, free from the friendly clutches of Sanity, had decided to stay independent for a while. The young coder looks out of the window, noticing the winter rain tickling against the glass panes. Before we could admire the nice blonde on the other side of the street, the scene quickly moves over to a ringing telephone. 
"It was my old friend Damion", told us Tron! 
"He asked me wether I wanted to join a new German group, he was trying to build up! I warned Damion, that I was passing through a period of absolute laziness and that I would most probably never code any demo, again."

But Artwork, the name of the new group, knew how to convince potential members to join their forces, and in no time Tron became an official member.

It's Christmas, and just like every year, it's time for another The Party. Tron was there too; 
"At The Party 4 I met some old friends, and really had a funny time. All this gave me enough energy to start a new production together with Bailey of Lego."

In the beginning, the demo we come to know today, had no particular name. Tron started to code a basic system for multi loading demos, which he called TDS. After using this system in his SuperUnknown demo for Mainzel Maennchen Produktion, the first effect in Greenday, a gouraud shader, started to take shape.

There was the smell of a big production in the air, so a capable graphician had to tackle the job.


"I got in contact with Fiver and he agreed to do all the graphics. I was now in a good position to get some proper music for the demo." Tron wanted to have a module with many different styles, hard breaks and a good flair, since he admires the style of Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. But unfortunately, this only seemed to be a kind of weird dream! 
"Nobody in this scene was too eager to compose such a tune. I got 2 modules from The Loop, but they couldn't be used because they didn't fit well with the animation and with the other routines I had in mind."

But fortunately enough, the German music wonder, Virgill, came to rescue. 
"Virgill asked me if he could do the music, and I immediately accepted. I got the first version of his module in the first week of February. It fitted the main animation very well, even though it wasn't in the exact style I had imagined"

It's the middle of February, Chaos of Sanity calls an official SCALA meeting. 
"This occasion was the first time I had personally met Fiver and together with Bailey we made the first plans for the demo", says Tron. 
"I knew Virgill for years, and he and Tron also knew each other, but I had so far, only spoken with Tron on the phone", told us an excited Fiver. A name was also found; 
"It's GREENDAY", shouted the trio!

Tron spent the next weeks coding his parts of the routines. Everything was going according to plans, but for some strange reason, Bailey didn't manage to finish his half of the demo! 
"I had to code nearly all parts by myself", told us a tired Tron. Fiver was passing through a busy school period, and had to do his final examinations. 
"So far I had only, a half finished logo, but Tron liked it and so I continued the drawing. Unfortunately most of Tron's effects were still raw mathematics but some days later he sent me some watchable routines and so I could begin to draw the needed textures", says Fiver. But the miracle TRSI man managed to paint all the bitplane graphics we saw in the final demo, in only 2 weeks' time.

Being the perfectionist he is, Tron was still looking forward to alter the music. 
"Virgill was very helpful and he made all the necessary changes in the music"

It's Easter time. Tron is currently doing his civil service so his free time isn't as it used to be in the days he was attending school. The Greenday crew looked for a big Easter event, but the Saturn Party had just been postponed. But wait a second? What is this? The Black Box Symposium proved to be the right event at the right time! 
"So we had one more week - and probably we wouldn't have made it in time for the Saturne Party", continues Fiver.

It's party time. Tron is currently working at Silicon Motion, and he is only off at 13:30. Our hero takes a second look at the clock. He quickly gets into his car, and drives to the party place. He makes it in only 5 hours - a true scene record! The party organisers proved to be very kind hearted people, and Tron was given a separate room. The deadline for the demo competition had been set for midnight, so our German star had less that 6 hours to complete Greenday! Luckily, Crash the Polka Brother, came in to give a helping hand (after once again, escaping from his fans!). 
"At the party I couldn't manage to fix a good movement for the voxel and the tunnel effects. It was also impossible to make the demo run from floppies, because the loading time would have been too much", explains Tron. And that's the reason why the great picture from Fiver is shown for so long.


"Unfortunately Tron had some problems in using my logo in the beginning, because being a high resolution picture, it was too big to fit together with the animation. This proved to be no problem on machines with fast RAM, but Greenday had to run on every AGA Amiga, so a low resolution logo had to be done. As time was rare, I couldn't do the drawing by myself, so Tron took a logo by Noogman. And it did fit the demo very well"

The final deadline was approaching, and one music part had yet to find it's place in the demo. Crash had just finished coding his Fire Doughnut effect and the final version of the demo was assembled and crunched in place!

Tron carefully packs all the necessary bytes on 2 disks. The deadline is still some minutes away, and the man that was kept in hospital since friday, runs towards the organisers with the fatalistic blue disks in hand. The organisers take a look at the clock, and accept the contribution!

It's time for the competition. Greenday is shown on the main screen, and the party attendants cheered and applauded. However, a second demo joins the contest - it's Sanity's comeback with the final version of their previously, half-finished project, the Roots demo!


"Due to the great contributions from Oxyron and Sanity, the voting was quite exciting, but in the end Tron had a great finish with a slight lead to Chaos and Greenday was the winning demo! About three months of hard work paid off in just one second", told us Fiver.

Tron became a happy man, and topped the competition! 
"I'm very happy to have released GREENDAY and of having come first, especially when I see Sanity with ROOTS final coming only second!"

Since there was no time for an end scroller in Greenday, just like the scene tradition wants, ROM is proud to bring you the full statistics, of Greenday's routines;

The Texture Cube with Zoomers is 192 by 192 pixels wide, in 16 colours, and features a 2 x 1 pixel zoom.

The Doughnut is 160 by 160 (1 x 1) pixels wide, in 256 colours and has 576 faces.

The Genlock Cube is 192 by 192 (2 x 1) pixels wide in 16 colours.

The 2 ZBuffer Texture cubes are 160 by 160 (1 x 1) pixels wide, in 256 colours.

The Tunnel effect is 256 by 200 (2 x 2) pixels wide, in 16 colours and has 32 faces.


"All effects include a chunky to planar routine, which is not very useful for gouraud and normal texture mapping, but.... in all the routines I have done a mistake, so CPU cache is not effective and all effects take a lot of memory space" But Tron has already fixed these "bugs" and all the effects in GreenDay are now running at the speed of light!

Many think that coders like Tron release their bigger productions at parties just for the sake of the competition prizes. 
"All sources of GreenDay are for sale for just 60 DM!" So there we go, Tron has also proved our point!

Even though Tron is the main man behind the demo, many other German sceners have contributed with background tasks. 
"The Twins of TRSI have supplied me with the map of my Voxel. ATD of Complex came up with the colours, idea and object for the Gouraud Doughnut. Tracy is the one behind the nice raytraced animation. And Argon of Polka had the main idea for the Genlock effect."

Since Greenday also had no greetings at all, Tron 
"would like to send deep respects to Gengis, Dr. Skull, Simple and Debug, SHD, Dweezil, Tsunami and Touchstone"