3 ms·
Yeah, I wrote a set of 3D demos for Acorn, to showcase the new RiscPC at Acorn World '94. There was a landscape flyover and a virtual textured talking head. All
by taylorius 3y ago
Yeah, I wrote a set of 3D demos for Acorn, to showcase the new RiscPC at Acorn World '94. There was a landscape flyover and a virtual textured talking head. All rendering was done entirely in software of course, using integer maths. I developed a type of Bresenham's Algorithm to trace the hyperbolic curves in texture UV space that translate to scanlines, when one is doing perspective correct texture mapping.
Subsequently I wrote a sample implementation of the Xerox Rooms paradigm for Acorn. It was a 3D office environment, with clickable destinations that would "teleport you" into new spaces. I'm not sure what became of this though tbh.
Next they wanted me to write a version of SGI's GL API for RiscOS, however - for whatever reason that project never really got started, so I had to go and get a proper job! :-(
Cheers
- fidotron 3y agoAmazing, thanks! A GL implementation for RiscOS in 1995 (presumably as a RM?) would have been curious. My recollection of the Acorn Worlds was that a huge proportion of Acorn staff seemed more interested in running NetBSD than RiscOS itself, and I couldn't help thinking they knew something we didn't.
- taylorius 3y agoYeah, the whole idea was a bit nebulous tbh. I remember the main guy I was speaking to at Acorn talking about creating an ASIC. I believe it was aimed at being some sort of early GPU. But the project never really went anywhere, anyway.
- lproven 3y agoI don't know if it counts as OpenGL exactly, but Jon Kortink's Viewfinder card implemented true native hardware graphics acceleration on RISC OS. https://www.zeridajh.org/hardware/viewfinder/index.html https://www.zeridajh.org/hardware/viewfinder/index.html
- rbirkby 3y agoI “founded” and ran the acorn computer user www server at this time. The remains of the site still have a Taos press release on it. http://www.poppyfields.net/acorn/docs/acorndocs/taos2.shtml http://www.poppyfields.net/acorn/docs/acorndocs/taos2.shtml
- xyzzy3000 3y agoI gave your site a mention/link on my Galileo/Turbo Nutter thread yesterday - I still visit your site occasionally, so I'd just like to thank you for all the work you did on that. It really was a very useful and pioneering resource (and remains so to this day, for people with an interest in Acorn history).