Nostalgia: Two Animations From The 90s

12Feb/251

Nostalgia: Two Animations From The 90s

I don't know where to start... was it the eBay auction for a cheap DX4/100 in Canberra, perfectly timed to end the weekend that I was in town... or the random discussion of what olive-oil-naming conventions ACTUALLY mean, at work, that lead me to remember a random video on a random cover CD from the 90s that lead me to try and think of the brand that sponsored that 3D animation demo on a CD from the past that I've long lost and long forgotten?

Either way, here are the two vivid memories, of two pieces of animation from the family 486 DX2/66, purchased from Harvey Norman Fyshwick (even though Woden had already opened, replacing Normal Ross, when it was above The Model Shop... damn I miss that shop and thank you for repairing (removing the track nail from the electric motor's brushes) my HO Scale Hornby Maroon Princess Elizabeth which I bought at a basement-bargain price from Mr Odd, father of David who lived off McTaggart Crescent in Kambah back in the 1990s when we went to St Anthony's and... well... he also had Load Runner going on his Apple II which I drooled over.. but he also wanted to sell me a full Candy set Lima XPT in HO which I have also just been recently re-buying) on a 24-month loan from let-us-take-all-your-money-if-you-fail-the-interest-free-period shitty finance company.

Can you believe Gerry Harvey is still going and still offering the same shit? No computer repair corner though... where we took our copy of Free DC which had already been virus-trashed...

I do believe I might have digressed.

The mission today is to find two animations which are most-possibly lost to time...

The first is something that ran on Windows 3.1+. It was an EXE and was literally a demo app for windows. An encapsulated animation in an EXE that ran when you executed it, took your whole screen... played the animation and then returned you to where you were prior. This is what I remember:
- A red parrot is flying on a blue sky background (no clouds) left to right.
- It is a simple cartoon animation and it has a yellow beak.
- From the right, a bi-plane zooms in, chews up the bird and just the beak is left.
- The beak then falls through the bottom of the viewport.
- The credits scroll and the authors are Huon and Maverick.
The second is a sepia-toned 'birds-eye view' of a bird flying into a spanish/greek vineyard/olive-plantation, discussing the qualities of the olive-oil/wine that the company produces. It was a movie file (not an EXE!) sitting in the videos/movies/demos folder on a magazine cover CD. Maybe it was quicktime? But I think it was AVI as I don't recall codec issues when watching it. Either way, the hints are:
- From a Cover CD from an Australian Magazine in the 90s.
- Sepia-toned landscape, dry, vineyard/orchard ... somewhere middle-europe.
- Following right on the tail of a bird (maybe a swallow?)
- Either an Olive Oil or Wine advertisement.
- It's actually meant to showcase the video compression technology, fitting on a Cover CD with all of the other bloatware.
- The brand could be: Martelli, Martell, Mortell

With all of this in mind, I started scouring the web. I quickly landed on the APC Mag Cover CD Stash on Archive.org. Sheesh, I definitely bought a few of those mags and used their CDs... but they didn't have what I was after. A quick goog' of "aus mag cover cd" brought me to Australian PC User (now TechLife) and ... woah.. I think I was a subscriber? This was 30 years ago. Am I meant to care/remember? Either way... One of those cover CDs hit me like a sack of bricks. Maybe I wasn't a subscriber and maybe I might have only bought one of those mags from Wanniassa Newsagency with its cover CDs?!

Why do I have this photo? I bought the same fkn Cover CD from eBay 4 days ago. It's all still circulating... But I actually bought it as I want to archive it all. archive.org has a good selection, but it's not as clean-and-tidy as the APC Mag CDs are.

Anyway! The CDs I could find did not contain the olive-oil/wine (herefore known as OOW) demo.. nor the BIRD demo. At this point I was chatting to my Brother, Rodger, who is awake when I sleep in Amsterdam. I do believe I triggered a dragon when I mentioned I was looking for a bird flying on a blue background in Windows 3.1... He proceeded to go for a stroll down memory lane and list the games he remebered from our childhood, but none matched what I was digging for. I thoroughly enjoyed adding to his memory games like Xenon 2 Megablast, but it didn't get me to where I needed to go. One thing though... during his search of nostalgia-ware... he mentioned that I might be thinking of something from "one of those 100000'in'one shareware compilations....".... oh.

Walnut Creek

This actually hit a nerve. At this point I would've written a new blog post asking about a "random shareware operator in the late 90s with a wizard on the cover." and ... well ... I don't expect any comments on this post, let alone a ficticious wizard post. Fortunately, buried in the depths.. I had a hint of "Warlock" software, with a wizard.. then "Walmart".. and then ... don't ask me how, but I came up with "Walnut CD". A quick search of that lead me straight to a suite of CDs on archive.org. Get out of here...

It's that #$%#$%#$%#$% wizard. Time to digress: Back in Canberra in the 90s, we had BitStorm in the Canberra Centre, ACTCom in Belconnen Mall and Boomerang Software in the Tuggeranong Hyperdome. The first sold me Screamer. The second showed us Doom I running on a demo PC in the store and the last sold me countless shareware floppies, Settlers I, a Dreamcast and so much more. Whatever happened, Boomerang Software, when it was in the Hyperdome near The Candy Shoppe and Cafe Rendezvous, was at its peak selling shareware with its own branding. It also had an amazing selection of second-hand software and hardware and I'd check it out every friday night.

It was at Boomerang that I bought a Walnut Creek shareware CD and I could not tell you why... but I'm sure there was something lucrative on the title. The cover art was navy/purple and the wizard was on it, and this was all I had to go by as I had no method to check the quality of the media as the cases were shrink-wrapped. I vividly remember their price-tags being 20mmx20mm and split horizontally. Top half having the current sale price and bottom half showing the price you'd get if you traded the same item in?

Either way... this CD had the bird animation on it. I'm only sure now as I went through the entire ISO collection on archive.org looking for a file with BIRD in the name. I had expected BIRDFAIL or BIRDDIE or BIRDPLANE... but it seems I should have been searching for BIRD_ANM. It was just this name that appeared on the September 1994 version of Walnut Creek CICA Windows Shareware. Interestingly, I don't remember the CD art in that listing's shot... however I do click with the cover art from April 1994.

Regardless, I ripped open the zip archive and inspected the BIRDY.TXT text file...

FINALS WEEK PRODUCTIONS
=======================

PROUDLY PRESENTS THE 1RD INSTALLMENT OF THE "NATURAL SELECTION SERIES"

TITLE: Survival of the Fittest!!
COMPLETED: May 1, 1993
AUTHORS: Jeffrey Cubillos and Alfredo Rojas

Bird, vs. Plane?, Survival? How can this not be it? The names don't match... but... wait... how do we even test this? Install Virtual Box, Install Windows 95...

It'll crash when trying to boot.. so install the "Fix CPU" patch...

And keep fighting...

So, Windows is running... mount the CD and..

It has an interactive text menu? and it UNZIPS THINGS FOR YOU? WHY DOn'T I REMEMBER THIS PART? Screw the animation... this is actually the systems integration part that pays the bills!

Because I'd found the location of the ZIP in archive.org, I knew which folder and which ZIP to extract. It was quickly deployed to C:\

The moment was then upon us... was this the file?

No way. It was. That's it! I got the names slightly wrong and the bird was also flying in the wrong direction... but the rest wasn't far off... at all?

The worst part? It was all of 4 seconds of animation! Those 4 seconds, on a CD-ROM, in ~1994 stuck.. and somehow in 2025 (do the maths.. that's 31 years?) I wanted to see it again... and.. it existed?

.. now to find the other animation! ... but in the meantime, here's the backyard tree that has also had 40 years to grow: