Guess what happens again this year?

   Christmas?

     The carnival in Rio?

       Your birthday?



 No, that's not quite it. What happens this year again is the greatest party.


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 The same crew that organized The First Real Big Decent Cool Ruling Demo Party
 in this part of the world invites you (erm, pre-invites you) to YALP98.

 It's gonna happen in the same old place, the Fest club in the Zemun area in
 the Belgrade city in the Yugoslavia state on the Europe continent on a slimy
 little blue-green-gray planet (take it as a challenge - if you can't find the
 planet, then you're not really the sort of creature we'd want on this party.)

 It's gonna happen some 364 days after the previous one, i.e. May 24 1998 AD.
 There's just something yalpish and demo-partyish in general in the position
 of the planet in question around that time of the year.

 It's gonna happen in the same way it happenned last year, just a little bit
 better. What this means is cool compos, but just a little bit better. Great
 party atmosphere, but just a little bit better than that. Best fun possible
 with pants on, but just.. ok, let's not go too far.

 Speaking about compos (who's speaking about them?) this is what we'll have:

  PC demo
   Amiga demo
    C64 demo
     256 bytes demo
  PC intro
   Amiga intro
  4ch music
   Multichannel music
    C64 music
  Amiga/PC pixel gfx
   C64 pixel gfx
    Raytraced gfx
     Photoshop gfx
  Wild compo
  Useless utility

 No need to bother you about rules too much, not in this preinvitation. Just a
 few, not to keep you on your toes:

  - Officially, there's no problem in putting animation in your demo or intro.
    There's even no problem in making it all one big animation. But the people
    who come to Yalps are not idiots, and nobody will vote a stinking codeless
    lame animation in a demo compo. If you don't want to embarass yourself,
    bring your animation to the wild compo.

  - The 256-byte demo compo is meant for PC demos, but if a few of you would
    bring some 256-byters for another platform, making a separate category
    for them would be no problem at all. Or they could go together with the
    PC ones. Tell us if you're interested, so maybe we can plan another 256b
    compo ahead of time (and motivate other people to make non-PC 256-byters).

  - There'll positively be a thousand module entries, so we will just have to
    pre-select some 10 or so for each compo. In other compos we won't weed
    anything out, except for the most obvious crap.

  - Raytraced compo is for pure raytraces only. Trace them in any program, but
    don't do any Photoshop-type effects on them. You can also bring other
    program-generated pictures (fractals, whatever) to this compo, as long as
    they haven't been modified that way. On the other hand, Photoshop compo is
    for all sorts of pictures that have gone thru heavy photoshopping, no
    matter whether they were completely painted in such a program, or started
    as scans, raytraces, whatever. Only don't bring _slightly_ modified scans,
    traces etc. Oh, and pixel entries can't go above 256 colors.

  - Bring Wild compo entries on VHS tapes. No exceptions.

  - Don't break the party atmosphere with complicated useless utilities. They
    should be easy to demonstrate on the beam. Go for laughs.

  - One entry per author/group. This should go without saying by now.

 Oh, and we plan two surprise compos. One of them you will all be fighting to
 take part in, but from the other one you'll try to run away. Hehe, just come
 and see them ;)

 Look out for the final invitation, it will include more technical details,
 including ways to come to the party place.

 Finally, just in case you got your news reports wrong, there's no war here in
 Belgrade, and in fact there has been none ever since 1945. Food is OK and
 cheap if you don't count the burger kiosks, and public transportation is free,
 in spite of what the city officials may say.

 If you've got any questions, or too much chocolate, mail mrki@ns.gov.yu (Han
 Solo) or spider@fonoc.darkwood.co.yu (Spider) and we'll see what we can do.

 You could as well join the mailing list/conference (send a message with a
 "subscribe yalp" body to listserv@dv.co.yu, or look for the dv.yalp conference
 on DataVoyage-connected boards), but keep in mind that talk is generally in
 serbian there, and that it's meant just for Yalp-related discussions, not
 getting rid of chocolate.

   See you at the party

  MindEscapE & Black Plum