Fishy

Fishy is a Nintendo 64 homebrew demo made by NaN and released in January 1998. In it, you can view and animate three 3D fish models.

You can download the file on the page for it here by using the password “fishybyNaN”.

<<<<www.dextrose.com>>>
 Fish Demo by NaN
       v0.314159265

This is a fairly basic demo in terms of what it can do practically, but I believe that the technical proficiency that was required to make it is what stands out.

The 3D models in this demo stand out in particular because of two things: The texture/shading and animation.

Fishy has three fish models in it, each one having their own polygon texturing applied to them. Looking at them from the front, the leftmost fish has no texture on it, it only has a plain grey colour with what looks like Gouraud shading. The second one has no shading, but does seem to have some kind of colouring, probably some kind of colour combiner mixing with a light source, or shifting vertex colours. The third fish has fully textured scales along with some shading.

The fish are also animated, they sway left and right in a swimming motion. Pressing the Z button accelerates the animation, they swim more vigorously. Fish 1 and 3 stay mostly the same throughout, but the middle fish has its surface change considerably throughout.

The joystick in Fishy rotates the fish/camera around, but in the most bizarre fashion imaginable. Each full tilt turns it up to 23 degrees and then stops. To turn it again, you need to return the joystick towards the middle and push outwards again. It’s really hard to explain, especially if you’re using an emulator and keyboard… but it’s really weird and makes the video look very jerky.

The start button brings up a few menus.

The first has a lot of variables that don’t seem to change. The labels seem to be related to vertices, but I’m not sure. ‘Swim’ represents the stage of the swim animation, and ‘swiminc’ is the increment or speed of swimming that goes between 5 and 40.

The second menu has two values labelled staticsegment and fish. My guess is that these are related to memory locations like in the Spec file.

Menu number three again had variables that don’t change, except for one called cfb which I suppose stands for Clear Frame Buffer.

Finally, the fourth menu has two variables bx and by that (judging by the icon spinning in circles) is meant to coordinate where the fish’s eyes are looking towards.

Overall Fishy is a one of the best 3D model based demos out there. It shows different kinds of shading at the same time, the z-buffer poses no problems at all and the animation is as smooth as Gruntilda’s two-liners. Just be careful with the C-right button. It can mess things up pretty badly.