Hey now... I have a some demos effects stashed away for a demo... one day. Can't be showing them willy nilly without presentation
That's going to be one heck of a demo when you finally get the time/desire to work on it!
No, the above effect you can easily do on the PCE with the background and overlaid sprites... or with a bit more difficulty with just the BG and dynamic tiles.
Haha. I only say that because I had a similar working demo effect, but with overlapping moore-spiral effect and with translucent text over it.
OK, you guys shamed me into actually thinking about how it could be done just like that video (or better).
I get it now. The sine-wave and semi-transparent text is (relatively) easily achieved by writing into separate bitplanes within a BG tileset and then organizing the palette properly.
If you're doing that in the BG, then there's no problem in making the screen 320 pixels (or 512 pixels) wide ... and then doing multiple layers and also something else with sprites.
Neat!
But ... what a fraking waste of programmer time!
It also makes me even less impressed with the "demo" video and the crew at "insane" than I was before.