Hard POM

Hard POM is a homebrew demo for the Nintendo 64 by Team Hard released on 19 April 1999. It’s a text scroller with the ability to choose your own background. It was released to compete in teh Presence of Mind ’99 competition, where it won 13th place.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password pomithard.

About Hard POM

The name of the demo is an initialism for “Hackers Against Rap and Disco: Presence of Mind”. However when seeing this particular demo on most homebrew ROM lists, I usually misread it as “Hard porn” in lowercase letters. It’s just kind of weird that way, so I prefer to keep it uppercase.

The demo itself is a rather unremarkable bitmap/scroller type. What makes it slightly different is that it includes three different bitmaps to choose from; you can switch between them by pressing the A button.

The first bitmap is a pattern of blue circles that give the appearance of being inside a tubular structure. Its 3D text are then letters in “HARD” rotating about all axis independently.

The second one is a similar in its tubular shape, but this time with heavily distorted squares. The text here is just a plain bitmap that says “H.A.R.D.”, no 3D effect.

The final one is an image of a sunset. The 3D effect is text that says “POM ’99” that rotates all together about the X-axis.

Texts

What is more interesting about this is all the text. Not the scroller itself, since that is pretty much just a long chain of thanks and greets. I’m talking about the HARD.NFO file that is included alongside it. This is because it give us some insight into how the demos of the era were made. It tells us about the kind of software that they used, primarily that they used the PsyQ C compiler which is a PS1 compiler collection rather than the N64’s native LibUltra which was used by professionals (and made public much later).

… A HArd Production …

Mash -A- to continue 3 parts: none hidden.

Programming: TS_Garp
Graphics: Cyrix
Music: Vogue of Triton

I would like to thank Cforman, Refreid, JL_Picard and WT_Riker for lots of help and support. To LaC for allowing me to use LaCmod. To IMMO and Kid Stardust for great graphic tools. H.A.R.D. Hackers Against Rap and Disco.

This demo is based on the Dynamix sources – Thanks Dynamix. Thanks also go out to Actraiser for providing Dextrose to the N64 programming community – it really is appreciated.

If you’re sick of watching this scroll, just mash the -A- button to continue. Individual greets: Buff, Zodi, Jazz, Mr_bean, Cyrix, Microman, Leftwing, SF_, Newfster, Twinsen, Acid, Actraiser, Evilcupid, Segmond, Voodoo64, Widget, Duddie, Spaman, Thumper64, Stumble, MrPips, Titanix, IMMO, Subice, Skywalker, Jerk, Seiya, Rancid, Catflap, Danman, Kornz, Frac, Hetero, Jillybean, Neo-cheese, Silver, Locke, Angelo.

Group greets: Dextrose, Napalm, Hitmen, Gridlock, Future Crew, Phrozen Crew, Triton, Asphyxia, Kcos, Blackbag, Dynamix

Repeat

Review and conclusion

This is really a very basic N64 demo, and the only one that was ever made by Team HARD. It does show that they can make a ROM that runs well, and even have some 3D rendering even if there’s nothing really special to it.

As mentioned, the most interesting thing about this ROM in particular is the detail given in the attached documents. There are also a few names in the greets that I haven’t seen before so that’s also really exciting.

As you can see I’m really grasping at straws to say something about Hard POM, but I’m really struggling. It’s just very unremarkable.