21–30 of 35 posts
For some context, this was the first raytracer that ran on any personal computer. Some more context here: http://home.comcast.net/~erniew/juggler.html and a bit more here: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=10776 The source code is refreshingly simple and easy to read: both the original C code and the ported JS code.
i'm surprised to see so much badness in the original code. it kind of takes away from the rose tinted view i have of the past being dominated by awesome programmers who got the most out of the hardware...
Rendering times become exponentially slower with more objects in the scene (100% native Javascript, hence 0 hardware acceleration) but it's fun to play with if you're in the mood!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few years later 1992 "State of the Art", Spaceballs demo shows off Amiga 500 pretty well. That whole thing fits on 880 kB floppy and it's rendered realtime. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89wq5EoXy-0 A year later same group released "9 Fingers", also running on Amiga 500. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPoYzwib7JQ
Did those run on a stock Amiga 500?
I was the only one from my friends having a PC at home instead of an Amiga, but luckily we had lot of scener parties at their places so I got to learn lot about the system.
It was an environment ahead of its time with dedicated hardware for sound and graphics, pure multitasking even if lack of MMU meant occasional crashes and the whole libraries concept was great.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the amazing capabilities of the Amiga were influenced by one of its architects: Carl Sassenrath. He has since gone on to create the Rebol language which is even more astounding once you begin to look into it. He's currently at Roku where I can only begin to imagine what he's working on. My only wish is that they'd replace the horrific BrightScript with Rebol.
The hardware owes it all to Jay Miner and Ron Nicholson (rhn). Jay Miner passed a long time away from a long term kidney condition and is still out there doing lots of stuff: http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/photo-cv.html Notice how he was the guy behind the IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) for the Mac and the beautifully minimized Apple //c in addition to being one of the key persons in creating the essence of Amiga hardwar…
Like he'd let a little thing like death stop him! :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the amazing capabilities of the Amiga were influenced by one of its architects: Carl Sassenrath. He has since gone on to create the Rebol language which is even more astounding once you begin to look into it. He's currently at Roku where I can only begin to imagine what he's working on. My only wish is that they'd replace the horrific BrightScript with Rebol.
The hardware owes it all to Jay Miner and Ron Nicholson (rhn). Jay Miner passed a long time away from a long term kidney condition and is still out there doing lots of stuff: http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/photo-cv.html Notice how he was the guy behind the IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) for the Mac and the beautifully minimized Apple //c in addition to being one of the key persons in creating the essence of Amiga hardwar…
Dave Haynie, one of Commodores hardware engineers, films the last day at the Commodore plant. And the layoff party afterwards. Hilarious, informative, and sad at the same time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the amazing capabilities of the Amiga were influenced by one of its architects: Carl Sassenrath. He has since gone on to create the Rebol language which is even more astounding once you begin to look into it. He's currently at Roku where I can only begin to imagine what he's working on. My only wish is that they'd replace the horrific BrightScript with Rebol.
The hardware owes it all to Jay Miner and Ron Nicholson (rhn). Jay Miner passed a long time away from a long term kidney condition and is still out there doing lots of stuff: http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/photo-cv.html Notice how he was the guy behind the IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) for the Mac and the beautifully minimized Apple //c in addition to being one of the key persons in creating the essence of Amiga hardwar…
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Five_Different_Ma...
(and lots of other pages.)
It's interesting that they chose to port the source to JS by hand, rather than compiling the C to asm.js with emscripten. It'd probably have been easier, and the resulting code faster, if this approach was taken.
Ironic that compute has come so far yet real time movie quality graphics are still only a dream.
We have GPU based ray tracing, and if you stuff a 44u rack full of them it becomes more tolerable, but still nothing approaching 24fps for complex scenes and effects,
This has a lot to do with the content being more complex compared to say, what was done for a movie like Tron. But it's more than that. How many other problem domains could eat 5 orders of magnitude of performance increases and easily make use of it for everyday consumer applications? That still might not even be enough to get us out of the uncanny valley.