News Ray Tracer ported to an x86 boot sector in only 483 bytes, run on Pentium Pro and faster CPUs

[Admin]

An x86 boot sector Ray Tracer, inspired by Ray Tracer for Atari 8-bit Basic, brings some real-time RT rendering to 90s-era hardware.

Ray Tracer ported to an x86 boot sector in only 483 bytes, run on Pentium Pro and faster CPUs : Read more

 

[kyzarvs]

Ray tracing demos were all the rage on the indy scene for the Commodore Amiga in the late 80's / early 90's. As was VR in some arcades in the mid-90's which is why I'm underwhelmed by either after a 30 year wait...

 

[usertests]

Still one of my favorites.

 

[digitalgriffin]

Solution has been around over 13 years. I saw the code myself.

 

[bit_user]

Here's one of the best 4 kB intros I've seen:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o

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[bit_user]

Still one of my favorites.

Definitely a classic, but by no means small (for the time)! I seem to recall it wouldn't even fit on a single 1.44 MB floppy. I'm sure it was at least a MB!

Some friends and I used to enjoy downloading the top demos from each new party, watching them, and then trying to figure out how they implemented all of the effects.

According to the Wikipedia page, members of the Future Crew went on to do some of the following notable things:

• Futuremark (3DMark)
• Remedy (Death Rally, Max Payne, Alan Wake)
• Bugbear Entertainment (FlatOut, Glimmerati, Rally Trophy)
• Bitboys (a graphics hardware company)
• Recoil Games (Rochard)
• contributed graphics to the game Ken's Labyrinth published by Epic MegaGames
• Skaven contributed music to Unreal Tournament 1999

 

[dalauder]

Why don't the orbs reflect the floor? A halfway reflected scene just seems really off.

Vampire floor?

 

[BogdanH]

Why don't the orbs reflect the floor? A halfway reflected scene just seems really off.

Hmm.. at least to me that video has nothing to do with ray tracing: what we see is two "chrome" circles (with static content) slowly growing, which gives the impression of coming closer (because floor is "moving" away from observer). In short: is just an optical illusion.

 

[usertests]

According to the Wikipedia page, members of the Future Crew went on to do some of the following notable things:

You can clearly feel the demo vibes playing Death Rally.

 

[Xenophage]

Ray tracing demos were all the rage on the indy scene for the Commodore Amiga in the late 80's / early 90's. As was VR in some arcades in the mid-90's which is why I'm underwhelmed by either after a 30 year wait...

I came to comment basically the same thing. I had a 3D ray-tracing demo on my Amiga 1000. That's a Motorola 68000 CPU, which was a 32-bit CPU introduced in 1979. Still one of the best CPU designs ever.

 

[bit_user]

Motorola 68000 CPU, which was a 32-bit CPU introduced in 1979. Still one of the best CPU designs ever.

I'm genuinely curious why think so. Care to enlighten us?

For me, I basically stopped at the part where it's big endian.
: P

 

[kyzarvs]

I'm genuinely curious why think so. Care to enlighten us?

For me, I basically stopped at the part where it's big endian.
: P

For me it was the chipset & OS that was special rather than just the 68000.

Sound and Grapics could access memory without bothering the CPU, true multi-tasking that wasn't just a crude time-slicing solution - the platform design was decades ahead of its time. Also the base OS (window / cursor handling etc) was on-chip so always accessible to the system.

 

[bit_user]

For me it was the chipset & OS that was special rather than just the 68000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Original_Chip_Set
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Yeah, I've read about that.

Sound and Grapics could access memory without bothering the CPU, true multi-tasking that wasn't just a crude time-slicing solution - the platform design was decades ahead of its time.

There's no doubt it was advanced for its day, but decades?? Not sure about that. Amiga launched in 1985, but IBM's VGA came just 3 years later that leapfrogged Amiga's 64-color mode (12-bit palette) with a 256-color mode (18-bit palette). While lacked a Blitter or Copper, VGA would soon be followed by SVGA "Windows Accelerator" chipsets that accelerated bit block transfers (AKA blitting), line-drawing, polygons, and more. It would be a while before 24-bit cards became common, but I'd point out that some clever demo coders found a way to emulate the Copper hack used to enable 4096 simultaneous colors (although max of only 64 per scanline) on plain old VGA!

The biggest problem we faced on the PC was a lack of standards. VESA VBE came along too late, IMO. Usually, to take advantage of SVGA chipsets' features, you'd have to be using Windows. Otherwise, there were just too many of them! It wasn't really until Windows 95 introduced DirectDraw & other technologies that Windows started to become viable as a gaming platform. Before that, some games would have support for the enhanced features on a specific video chipset, but that was the exception much more than the norm.

As for sound, even the original Sound Blaster could play PCM data by DMA'ing the samples directly out of RAM!

 

[dalauder]

​

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Original_Chip_Set​

​

Yeah, I've read about that.


There's no doubt it was advanced for its day, but decades?? Not sure about that. Amiga launched in 1985, but IBM's VGA came just 3 years later that leapfrogged Amiga's 64-color mode (12-bit palette) with a 256-color mode (18-bit palette). While lacked a Blitter or Copper, VGA would soon be followed by SVGA "Windows Accelerator" chipsets that accelerated bit block transfers (AKA blitting), line-drawing, polygons, and more. It would be a while before 24-bit cards became common, but I'd point out that some clever demo coders found a way to emulate the Copper hack used to enable 4096 simultaneous colors (although max of only 64 per scanline) on plain old VGA!

The biggest problem we faced on the PC was a lack of standards. VESA VBE came along too late, IMO. Usually, to take advantage of SVGA chipsets' features, you'd have to be using Windows. Otherwise, there were just too many of them! It wasn't really until Windows 95 introduced DirectDraw & other technologies that Windows started to become viable as a gaming platform. Before that, some games would have support for the enhanced features on a specific video chipset, but that was the exception much more than the norm.

As for sound, even the original Sound Blaster could play PCM data by DMA'ing the samples directly out of RAM!

Well are you counting "decades" from 1979 or 1985? Either way, "generations" would be a better word choice.

 

[bit_user]

Well are you counting "decades" from 1979 or 1985? Either way, "generations" would be a better word choice.

When I look at it, generations is hard to count. I give Amiga's graphics acceleration about a 5 year lead on the PC, before SVGA chipsets started to come onto the market with accelerated drawing functions that duplicated most of the functions in its original chipset. That's still a massive lead, in the tech industry! Very impressive, just not quite decades.

If you want to stretch it, you could say maybe an entire decade, given how most of those accelerated drawing functions went unused in games, before Windows 95. However, even before then, the CPU in something like a Pentium was already faster at drawing in software than Amiga's hardware. So, that does give a somewhat distorted view of Amiga's lead.