6 ms·

I installed BeOS a long time ago on a PC. It was something ahead of the times. I still remember how incredible it was the rotating cube demo where you coud dra

by eb0la 7y ago

I installed BeOS a long time ago on a PC. It was something ahead of the times. I still remember how incredible it was the rotating cube demo where you coud drag and drop images and videos on the cube faces... it worked without a glitch on my pentium. Just found out the demo video shows the application with a GL wave surface playing a video over it: https://youtu.be/BsVydyC8ZGQ?t=1074 https://youtu.be/BsVydyC8ZGQ?t=1074

cptnapalm 7y ago
By all the stars in heaven, that was an impressive demo.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  It's about making a virtue of a necessity. When Be wrote that demo the situation is that the other operating systems you might plausibly choose all have working video acceleration. Even Linux has basic capabilities in this area by that point. BeOS doesn't have that and doesn't have a road map to get it soon. So, any of the other platforms can play full resolution video captured from a DVD for example, a use case actual people have, on a fairly cheap machine and BeOS won't be able to do that without a beast of a CPU because it doesn't have even have hardware colour transform acceleration or chromakey. But - 1990s hardware video acceleration can only play one video at a time, because "I want to play three videos" isn't a top ask from actual users. So, Be's demo deliberately shows several different postage stamp videos instead of one higher resolution video, as the acceleration is no help to competitors there. And then since you're doing it all in software, not rendering to a rectangle in hardware, the transform to have this low res video render as one side of a cube or textured onto a surface makes it only very slightly slower, rather than being impossible. Audiences come away remembering they saw BeOS render videos on a 3D surface, and not conscious that it can't do full resolution video on the cheap hardware everybody has. Mission success.
  - anthk 7y ago
    Eh, multithreading decoding could help a lot. And by the population of DVD video in computers (and the PS2), most people had a Pentium3 450MHZ at homes, which was more than enough for DVD video with an ASM optimized video player such as MPlayer and a good 2D video card. 2D acceleration was more than enough. http://rudolfs-place.nl/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html http://rudolfs-place.nl/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html On Linux you didn't need OpenGL, just Xv. Source: I was there, with an Athlon. Playing DVD's.
  - smallstepforman 7y ago
    BeOS R4.5 did have hardware accelerated OpenGL for 3dfx Voodoo cards. I played Quake 2 in 1999 with HW OpenGL acceleration. For R5 BeInc wanted to redo their OpenGL stack, and the initial prototypes seeded to testers actually had more FPS on BeOS than under Windows.
  - forwhomst 7y ago
    Not to disagree much but when Be was going around the country doing their "demo days" on the bebox nobody had a DVD player in their computer. DVD wasn't even on the market until after Be had ported BeOS to x86. People thought that playing the VHS-quality music videos that were included in Windows 95 was a hot demo (on a PC).
kccqzy 7y ago
Impressive. But it makes me think how far we've come; it's long been possible to do a rotating cube with video using pure HTML and CSS.
- rusk 7y ago
  Remember when the Amiga bouncing ball demo was impressive? Ironically 3D graphics ended up being the Amiga's specific achilles heel once Doom and co came on the scene.
  - all2 7y ago
    That's curious to me. Doom is specifically not 3D. Was it a publishing issue (that Doom and co weren't produced for the Amiga), or a power issue, or something else?
    - joakleaf 7y ago
      The Amiga had planer graphics modes, while the PC/VGA cards had chunky mode (in 320x200x256 color mode). It means that, to set the color of a single pixel on the Amiga, you had to manipulate bits at multiple locations in memory (5 in 32 colours), while for the PC each pixel was just one memory location; In chunky mode you could just do something like: videomem[320*y+x]=158 to set the pixel at (x,y) to color 158, where videomem would point directly to the graphics memory (at address 0xa0000) -- It really was the simplest graphics mode to work with! If you just copied 2D graphics (without scaling/rotating) the Amiga could do it quite will using the blitter/processor, but 3D texture mapping was more challenging because you constantly read and write to individual pixels (each pixel potentially requiring 5 memreads/writes on the Amiga vs. 1 on the PC). Doom's wall texture mapping was affine, which basically means scaling+rotation operations were involved. The sprites were also scaled. Both operations a problem to the Amiga. As software based 3D texture mapping games became the new hot thing in 1993-1997, the Amiga was left behind. Probably wouldn't have been a problem if the Amiga has survived until the 3D accelerators in the late 90s. This is quite well described elsewhere. Google is your friend if you want to know more! :-)
ng7j5d9 7y ago
Agreed, I remember trying BeOS in the late 90s and I felt the way Tesla fans report feeling about their cars - "it just feels like the future". The responsiveness of the UI was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Unfortunately BeOS fell by the wayside, but I have such fond memories I keep meaning to give Haiku a shot.

by eb0la 7y ago

cptnapalm 7y ago

By all the stars in heaven, that was an impressive demo.

tialaramex 7y ago
It's about making a virtue of a necessity. When Be wrote that demo the situation is that the other operating systems you might plausibly choose all have working video acceleration. Even Linux has basic capabilities in this area by that point. BeOS doesn't have that and doesn't have a road map to get it soon. So, any of the other platforms can play full resolution video captured from a DVD for example, a use case actual people have, on a fairly cheap machine and BeOS won't be able to do that without a beast of a CPU because it doesn't have even have hardware colour transform acceleration or chromakey. But - 1990s hardware video acceleration can only play one video at a time, because "I want to play three videos" isn't a top ask from actual users. So, Be's demo deliberately shows several different postage stamp videos instead of one higher resolution video, as the acceleration is no help to competitors there. And then since you're doing it all in software, not rendering to a rectangle in hardware, the transform to have this low res video render as one side of a cube or textured onto a surface makes it only very slightly slower, rather than being impossible. Audiences come away remembering they saw BeOS render videos on a 3D surface, and not conscious that it can't do full resolution video on the cheap hardware everybody has. Mission success.
- anthk 7y ago
  Eh, multithreading decoding could help a lot. And by the population of DVD video in computers (and the PS2), most people had a Pentium3 450MHZ at homes, which was more than enough for DVD video with an ASM optimized video player such as MPlayer and a good 2D video card. 2D acceleration was more than enough. http://rudolfs-place.nl/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html http://rudolfs-place.nl/BeOS/NVdriver/3dnews.html On Linux you didn't need OpenGL, just Xv. Source: I was there, with an Athlon. Playing DVD's.
- smallstepforman 7y ago
  BeOS R4.5 did have hardware accelerated OpenGL for 3dfx Voodoo cards. I played Quake 2 in 1999 with HW OpenGL acceleration. For R5 BeInc wanted to redo their OpenGL stack, and the initial prototypes seeded to testers actually had more FPS on BeOS than under Windows.
- forwhomst 7y ago
  Not to disagree much but when Be was going around the country doing their "demo days" on the bebox nobody had a DVD player in their computer. DVD wasn't even on the market until after Be had ported BeOS to x86. People thought that playing the VHS-quality music videos that were included in Windows 95 was a hot demo (on a PC).

kccqzy 7y ago

Impressive. But it makes me think how far we've come; it's long been possible to do a rotating cube with video using pure HTML and CSS.

rusk 7y ago
Remember when the Amiga bouncing ball demo was impressive? Ironically 3D graphics ended up being the Amiga's specific achilles heel once Doom and co came on the scene.
- all2 7y ago
  That's curious to me. Doom is specifically not 3D. Was it a publishing issue (that Doom and co weren't produced for the Amiga), or a power issue, or something else?
  - joakleaf 7y ago
    The Amiga had planer graphics modes, while the PC/VGA cards had chunky mode (in 320x200x256 color mode). It means that, to set the color of a single pixel on the Amiga, you had to manipulate bits at multiple locations in memory (5 in 32 colours), while for the PC each pixel was just one memory location; In chunky mode you could just do something like: videomem[320*y+x]=158 to set the pixel at (x,y) to color 158, where videomem would point directly to the graphics memory (at address 0xa0000) -- It really was the simplest graphics mode to work with! If you just copied 2D graphics (without scaling/rotating) the Amiga could do it quite will using the blitter/processor, but 3D texture mapping was more challenging because you constantly read and write to individual pixels (each pixel potentially requiring 5 memreads/writes on the Amiga vs. 1 on the PC). Doom's wall texture mapping was affine, which basically means scaling+rotation operations were involved. The sprites were also scaled. Both operations a problem to the Amiga. As software based 3D texture mapping games became the new hot thing in 1993-1997, the Amiga was left behind. Probably wouldn't have been a problem if the Amiga has survived until the 3D accelerators in the late 90s. This is quite well described elsewhere. Google is your friend if you want to know more! :-)

ng7j5d9 7y ago

Agreed, I remember trying BeOS in the late 90s and I felt the way Tesla fans report feeling about their cars - "it just feels like the future". The responsiveness of the UI was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Unfortunately BeOS fell by the wayside, but I have such fond memories I keep meaning to give Haiku a shot.