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In 2006, the user 'Rovove' added on pouet.net an Oric demo nobody ever heard of, from a group nobody knew of with the following comment:

"This is the intro wizball Bulgarian group Tetra Knight Squad 348.
As indicated on the image, it was surely done at the end of the Eighties.
I found given it in old diskettes for Pravetz 8d by a friend who moved.
I found this site while seeking on Internet.
I hope that you like!
(Sorry for English, I used an engine of translation of languages)"

Interestingly the posted screenshot shows a 'Madara'87' message on the left side, but when running the intro itself the message is not visible.


What's visible in this short intro is a hires picture with a 'TETRAKNIGHT SQUAD 348' logo with a shield, a banner, and four interleaved swords.

After a brief pause then appears the animation of a bouncing green 'Wizball' sprite over a 'TETRAKNIGHT' scrolling message.

I wanted to know more about this intro so I started to dig a bit more:

It appears that 'Rovove' has never posted anything else, and does not have a visible email or country (http://pouet.net/user.php?who=20103)

Most search engines would not return anything remotely interesting about the name of the group, but then using some black magic (the internet time machine) we managed to find the following link a page from may 2003 which shows the following text:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030509094213/http://m4nkind.com/index.php3?ReadArticle=21

At this point we can more or less assume that at least some members of the group Mankind knew of TetraKnighs, or at least knew they existed and probably go hold of their productions and got them running on Oric Atmos (which is almost 100% compatible with the Pravetz 8D).

This also hints at some other existing demos, better technically than this simple scroller (personally I never displayed more than 256 dots in a frame, but I did not try that hard so I guess 900 is doable by cheating a lot -- that's only 22 cycles per dot)

The game Wizball was released in 1987, so it seems possible for TKS to have made such an intro with the Wizball character (either ripped from the Spectrum version or redrawn from a picture in a magazine?)

Still digging a bit more I found out that there are apparently two different versions of the intro, both called 'WIZ.TAP' one having the pink logo on the title picture, using sound effects, the other without the logo and being totally silent.

When I compared the two files I found some interesting differences: Most of the code and data seems identical, but the version with the name on the picture also has a string embedded with names in it: "Devastelion-Madara-Lancelot-Darknight", it also have many 'UUUUU' in it (which is the default values in memory when the Oric is initialized).

Code wise it seems very similar, so I almost have a theory: It looks like the one with the logo and messages is the original, but that the code was disassembled, the names removed, and then reassembled. (But then why keep the title picture and the main message in the scroller?)

So there you are: The mystery of TetraKnighSquad 348.

If any of you in eastern europe has any information to share, please do!