Kasparov is a tool-based demo. Powa of Elitegroup wrote a spline / event / effect editor, and I think it would have been impossible for Elitegroup to reach this high quality of movements and timing without this aid. Unfortunatly constructing the "editor" took so much time that no time was left to write a "player". Powa decided not to write a seperate player, he used the editor for the final demo. He just hided all user-interface elements, but he forgot to disable the timeline. So if you move the hidden mouse in the lower part of the screen you can drag in the hidden timeline and "scratch" the demo. Even more, if you type kasparov -s edit in the commandline, you can see and use the whole editor.

You can even wittness the unique occlusion culling: use the "render visibility" option in the "event timing" menu, and you will see the demo in color-coded mode. Each color is a mesh. The image is read back from the screen, and a list of visible objects is stored for each frame. With a little bit of hacking and crunching, the demo will always know what is visiable and what not, at the cost of a few kilobytes. (unfortunatly, on modern 3d-cards screenbuffer readback is even worse than back in 1999, so it might crash after one frame. To be safe, seek to a position where 3d-objects are visible, not just the test-logos, press "play" and then "record visibiltiy". Note that occlusion queries were not available 1999.)

The Engine is written for 3d-ccrds without hardware transform & lighting, that's NVidia TNT, ATI Rage and Matrox G400 cards. To speed up the 3d-calculations, everything is done in 16 bit Integer math. Furthermore, if a vertex is needed with two different UV-coordinates, the 3d-Position is read and transformed only once, and then two vertices are output to the dynamic vertex-buffer. All these optimisations payed out well on old hardware, but they are worthless today.

It is told that the mysterious makers of this demo have died in a horrible plane accident. The connection between Elitegroup and some Farbrausch members has never been completly uncovered. For some strange reason, Kasparov takes the same commandline parameters (like "-f 1280 1024 32" or "-w") as some old VCC-Entertainment Games I wrote.