Thomas Pytel

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Tomasz (aka Thomas) Pytel is a Polish-American programmer, better known as Tran / Renaissance in the demoscene. He is notable for the creating the Timeless demo in 1994, and for co-creating the PMODE DOS extender with Charles Scheffold (a.k.a Daredevil). He was also the designer of the PC game Zone 66. After that, he went to 3D Realms and was one of lead programmers on Prey. Eventually, he moved to Palo Alto, California and became one of the lead programmers of the engine behind PayPal.^[1]

1 Demos
2 References
3 External links

[edit] Demos

After leaving Renaissance, Tran created a trilogy of unique demos on the PC. All three looped indefinitely with ambient music in the background.

[edit] Timeless

Screenshot from the Linux port

Timeless is a demo running on the PC written in 1994. In the demo, images in the background morph and slide sideways, while the color scheme changes and other objects move around the screen. This made Timeless popular as a DOS screensaver, both inside and outside the demoscene. Music in the demo was composed by Tomasz Pytel himself.

Tran released the source to the demo, written entirely in Intel i386 assembler code. It features extensive use of unwound loops and complex use of instruction registers to reduce CPU cycles as much as possible. All data files, for artwork and for the graphics effects, appear in the source code as data statements. The demo features a DOS extender PMODE.ASM which evolved into a standalone product Tran licensed for money. The screenshot shown is from a work in progress linux port of the demo, written in C and using the SDL library, and therefore portable to other architectures.

Timeless was featured on the rave culture website Hyperreal as "eyecandy" software.

[edit] Ambience

Released November 1994, this was Tran's first demo in which he used his pseudo 21-bit, 100hz VGA mode. Music in the demo was Drops in Time by Ryan Cramer/Renaissance.