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This is awesome on so many levels. The bottom part of the read me says Jez San of Argonaut agreed to MIT the BRender part of it. Argonaut rang a bell, and su

This is awesome on so many levels. The bottom part of the read me says Jez San of Argonaut agreed to MIT the BRender part of it. Argonaut rang a bell, and sure enough - Jez developed Starglider, one of my all time favourite games on the Amiga. I can still remember it today, nearly four decades later: It was the first time I visited a new friend, who was the first in our neighbourhood to get the Amiga. He fired up Starglider- and I was simply blown away. My C64 didn't cut it anymore - I just had to get the Amiga. An involvement in the Norwegian demo scene followed. This later had a big impact on my career as a SWE; thanks very much for this, Jez, if you're here!

lproven 4y ago
Oh yes, Starglider was stunning at the time. But wireframe only, I think? I think Starglider 2 was inspired in part by Zarch on the Archimedes, and the free Lander demo that came with every Archie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFwpsb75omg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFwpsb75omg It is hard to put into words how amazing it was to see this running, live and playable, on a home computer in 1987. Jez San also co-designed the SuperFX 3D accelerator chip in the SNES game Starfox. That evolved into the ARC RISC CPU family. An ARC core was the Intel Management Engine chip in Intel CPUs before they switched to an x86 ME controller running Minix 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Hardwa... And that ARC core ran ThreadX, which is the same OS that runs on the GPU of every Raspberry Pi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX San offered me a job once, nearly 30Y ago. I should have accepted it. :-D
- JezSan 4y ago
  am sure you did fine without that job ;-) btw, the arc core got used in lots of things that you never hear about... like in Sandisk memory cards (no relation), and various set top box chips (mpeg etc), and wifi chips (at the time, most intel wifi chips used arc)
- JezSan 4y ago
  interesting anecdotes about argonaut design methodology... pt 2 we used the opposite approach to design the Super FX chip (we called it the Mario chip - likely the first ever gpu) Carl & Pete would write code to do 3d math and render polygons... and write and re-write the code hundreds of times, using an imaginary assembler language. they would invent new instructions on the fly to let their code get tighter. they would keep coming up with new instructions, new registers, new ways of forming instructions and referencing registers etc... until the code was the tightest... and THEN, we designed a microprocessor from scratch to execute those instructions. Also, likely the opposite way that microprocessors were designed... because (in the past) the designers had no idea what their cpus were going to be used for, whereas we knew what we wanted to achieve, so got to use software to drive the hardware design. this was the first time that a cpu was able to be designed using programmable gate arrays. literally Ben & Rob could make a change to the hardware design - the netlist, and email it off to the usa, and actel would Fedex back the next day a working chip for us to try out. this was before you could program your own fpga's yourself (and Xilinx at the time wasn't large enough to fit a whole microprocessor). this iterative approach allowed us to design the optimum 'gpu' for the task.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    That is amazing. What was the design process like in terms of tooling? Schematic capture or was one of the proto HDLs in use?
    - JezSan 4y ago
      I don't remember which tools the Super FX chip was designed with but maybe some other ex-Argonauts can chime in on that. I know it was pretty basic gate level stuff and wasn't designed with a high level language (Ben Cheese was an old skool chip designer)... we started using VHDL later on, when we designed the ARC etc.
    - sundvor 4y ago
      @Dang, really strange to see the dead comments (sibling to this, and elsewhere) as they are 100% relevant and straight from the source. If I missed something then apologies.
JezSan 4y ago
guess I am here, now ;-)
- sundvor 4y ago
  It feels a bit surreal, small world and all that - so cheers! Many thanks again for your efforts, and pioneering work. Even my (younger) brother remembered Starglider well; he's also gone on to do well for himself with a leading role in IT administration in the health sector.
dubswithus 4y ago
Jez launched a crypto startup, FunFair, btw. Unfortunately, it failed. https://funfair.io/ https://funfair.io/
- JezSan 4y ago
  failed is a strong word. we've pivoted to something else. not every idea works out the way you want. we thought that if we built a trustless casino technology that used smart contracts to power the games and generate provably fair random numbers so that no customer would ever have to play an unfair game.. and that no funds had to be held in the custody of the casino... that there'd be a market for that. we wuz wrong. the market doesn't seem to care about something that's non-custodial or guaranteed fair. we shuttered it about 18 months ago. so we've pivoted. we're experimenting with NFTs, and driving games. And investing in other worthy projects.

lproven 4y ago

Oh yes, Starglider was stunning at the time. But wireframe only, I think? I think Starglider 2 was inspired in part by Zarch on the Archimedes, and the free Lander demo that came with every Archie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFwpsb75omg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFwpsb75omg It is hard to put into words how amazing it was to see this running, live and playable, on a home computer in 1987. Jez San also co-designed the SuperFX 3D accelerator chip in the SNES game Starfox. That evolved into the ARC RISC CPU family. An ARC core was the Intel Management Engine chip in Intel CPUs before they switched to an x86 ME controller running Minix 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Hardwa... And that ARC core ran ThreadX, which is the same OS that runs on the GPU of every Raspberry Pi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX San offered me a job once, nearly 30Y ago. I should have accepted it. :-D

JezSan 4y ago
am sure you did fine without that job ;-) btw, the arc core got used in lots of things that you never hear about... like in Sandisk memory cards (no relation), and various set top box chips (mpeg etc), and wifi chips (at the time, most intel wifi chips used arc)
JezSan 4y ago
interesting anecdotes about argonaut design methodology... pt 2 we used the opposite approach to design the Super FX chip (we called it the Mario chip - likely the first ever gpu) Carl & Pete would write code to do 3d math and render polygons... and write and re-write the code hundreds of times, using an imaginary assembler language. they would invent new instructions on the fly to let their code get tighter. they would keep coming up with new instructions, new registers, new ways of forming instructions and referencing registers etc... until the code was the tightest... and THEN, we designed a microprocessor from scratch to execute those instructions. Also, likely the opposite way that microprocessors were designed... because (in the past) the designers had no idea what their cpus were going to be used for, whereas we knew what we wanted to achieve, so got to use software to drive the hardware design. this was the first time that a cpu was able to be designed using programmable gate arrays. literally Ben & Rob could make a change to the hardware design - the netlist, and email it off to the usa, and actel would Fedex back the next day a working chip for us to try out. this was before you could program your own fpga's yourself (and Xilinx at the time wasn't large enough to fit a whole microprocessor). this iterative approach allowed us to design the optimum 'gpu' for the task.
- sitkack 4y ago
  That is amazing. What was the design process like in terms of tooling? Schematic capture or was one of the proto HDLs in use?
  - JezSan 4y ago
    I don't remember which tools the Super FX chip was designed with but maybe some other ex-Argonauts can chime in on that. I know it was pretty basic gate level stuff and wasn't designed with a high level language (Ben Cheese was an old skool chip designer)... we started using VHDL later on, when we designed the ARC etc.
  - sundvor 4y ago
    @Dang, really strange to see the dead comments (sibling to this, and elsewhere) as they are 100% relevant and straight from the source. If I missed something then apologies.

JezSan 4y ago

guess I am here, now ;-)

sundvor 4y ago
It feels a bit surreal, small world and all that - so cheers! Many thanks again for your efforts, and pioneering work. Even my (younger) brother remembered Starglider well; he's also gone on to do well for himself with a leading role in IT administration in the health sector.

dubswithus 4y ago

Jez launched a crypto startup, FunFair, btw. Unfortunately, it failed. https://funfair.io/ https://funfair.io/

JezSan 4y ago
failed is a strong word. we've pivoted to something else. not every idea works out the way you want. we thought that if we built a trustless casino technology that used smart contracts to power the games and generate provably fair random numbers so that no customer would ever have to play an unfair game.. and that no funds had to be held in the custody of the casino... that there'd be a market for that. we wuz wrong. the market doesn't seem to care about something that's non-custodial or guaranteed fair. we shuttered it about 18 months ago. so we've pivoted. we're experimenting with NFTs, and driving games. And investing in other worthy projects.