I have some ideas that probably work better in my head than in reality
I was thinking some data could be precalculated to allow one level of lookup to be removed, but I suspect the resulting animation won't be as complex. It might be useful for something though. I don't wish to abuse the board by posting loads of half baked code so I'll PM you some source if I can figure it out. (Plus anyone else who's interested)
I've now updated the attachment to my earlier post. There is a new source and Dragon binary that updates at 50fps. The animation isn't as varied as the original but there might be a parameter tweak in there somewhere that gives a better effect.
The screen drawing routine might find some other uses as it hurls lines at the screen at a fairly respectable rate.
Certainly nice & fast - the pattern is a bit predictable though as you say.
Sort of thing you could get away with in a larger demo by showing it for a short bit then cutting away - maybe use a different precalc table when you come back to it... Showing for too long would let the viewer realise what's up
I noticed (edit: after SJ pretty much pointed it out two days ago - d'oh!) that the offsets into coltab were the same each line, so now I precalculate those each frame. Pulls a full update down to less than 2 PAL frames (still a touch over 2 NTSC frames though sadly, so it'll be slower on those machines).
Edit: scratch that. By directly storing the offsets as 8-bit indexes, that's down to less than 2 NTSC frames now, too.
Last edited by sixxie on Thu Jun 12, 2014 3:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Hah, actually I think Simon pointed out this exact possibility on IRC previously - so all credit to him! Took me a while to realise it would actually work, obviously