Browsed by
Category: Programming

Programming 90’s demoscene effects

Programming 90’s demoscene effects

Comments 0 Comment


NCOT Technology has a number of retro-programming videos. Bonus points for using old school DOS Borland C++ to compile the examples.

This gives you an idea of how things were done, but the reality is that demo scene code was a LOT more complex – full of inline assembly, crazy lookup tables, direct framebuffer manipulation, and every programming and hardware trick known to man. You had to be a wizard of not only coding – but expert at tricking the hardware to do what you wanted too.

Putting spell check in 64k of RAM

Putting spell check in 64k of RAM

Comments 0 Comment

Abhinav Upadhyay walks us through a wonderful bit of computer history. He talks about how Steve Johnson at AT&T wrote one of the first spell checkers. His method could encode a word in just 14 bits of memory; so a dictionary with 30,000 entries would take up a fraction under 52 kB. This is even better compression than gzip – and it can perform fast lookups.

Once the dictionary grew to 30,000 words, the Bloom filter approach became impractical. Douglas McIlroy’s solution was to store differences between sorted hash codes , after discovering these differences followed a geometric distribution. These followed a distribution that could be easily run length encoded with something called Golomb’s code.

It’s a fantastic examination of applied computer science. Definitely worth a read

Articles:

What the demo Scene teaches us

What the demo Scene teaches us

Comments 0 Comment

Plastic 195/95 is a 20mb demo made by a demo team on their picoEngine v2.1b in 2009

Not to be outdone, RGBA 195/95 is the same demo – done in 64k

These were shared in a presentation on lessons learned from Demo Scene coding:

Re-creating PS1 graphics with modern hardware

Re-creating PS1 graphics with modern hardware

Comments 0 Comment

Acerola has a bunch of great graphics videos. In this one, he talks about why PS1 graphics looked the way it did.

I learned that PS1 actually had realtime camera distance tessellation – something that wasn’t available to desktop GPUs until the introduction of tessellation shaders.