Re:What is the Demoscene? An obscure but influential art form
by qingcharles on Wednesday October 18, 2023 @04:47PM
(#37934551)
I think all of my code is lost now. My artist friend says he has a hard drive which might have the binaries on it.
I did find one of my commercial releases on the Internet the other day because it was on a magazine cover disk in 1994 which saved it from obscurity :)
Re:What is the Demoscene? An obscure but influential art form
by thibaut_barrere on Wednesday October 18, 2023 @05:44PM
(#37935183)
I mixed TurboPascal (or C++) with Assembly for critical loops, and it changed everything :-) (high level for overall scripting, low level for rendering triangle loops).
I would love to be able to properly decompile my old demos, but it would require a bit of work.
For phong rendering, I remember I interpolated the full vector along each line (with an "integer" square root table stored in memory, taking 512k or something), it was fun times :-)
Is your old code posted anywhere? I think many of us were working from the same example projects/tutorials. I wouldn't be surprised if the code is incredibly similar.
> I had to open your triangle renderer, and there it was - you'd inlined your x86.
Being able to inline asm was amazing. The code:
https://github.com/bhouston/3DMaskDemo1997/blob/master/src/N...
Being able to access C++ variables on the stack directly from assembler to read and to write to them was so nice. You get the speed benefits without adding significant complexity.