TRSI Intro

TRSI Intro is a homebrew demo by Ayatollah of TRSI (Tristar & Red Sector Inc.), released on 25 April 1999. It’s consists of a 3D animation and a bitmap with dynamic lighting. It was initially released for the Presence of Mind ’99 competition, where it ended up in 11th place.

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

There’s not much I can really say about this. Most of the demo is a plain black static screen. I tried running the TSRI Intro on different emulators and even on my real N64 hardware but they all appeared like this, so it must be by design.

After exactly 30 seconds, some actual video appears. At last! I don’t really know how to describe it, it’s kind of like the camera is travelling inside a giant pink artery straight from the Microcosm FMV game. Inside the tube, there is a weird object which I also don’t really know how to describe. It’s something like a gold ring with a diamond encrusted in the centre. Or it could also be some kind of flying saucer. The world will never know.

The scene then progresses to a purple TRSI logo under a spotlight. The spotlight moves around showing off different parts of the logo with a pretty impressive shading effect. It doesn’t look like the rendering was done in real-time, but rather with a pre-rendered set of bitmaps.

Once the TRSI logo segment is done, it moves back to the black screen for the rest of the demo, just with the audio still playing in the background. That is, until the song finishes in which case it will just play the last second of the audio in a loop meaning that it’s still reading from the audio buffer but not updating it.

I can’t really identify the music, but it does sound like a remix of the Terminator theme, especially at the beginning. Do you know what I mean?

Overall it’s a very basic demo. Its biggest downfall is that it starts off with 30 seconds of no visuals before showing us what they made. Most demos from this era would show us what they made and then loop it around so that it continues running in perpetuity. It’s unfortunate, this demo could have been a classic if only it got its timings a bit better.