- tldr: nobody knows! but it's a fun read :)
- VRML was everywhere in 1995. At least, everywhere in the media. Any time a TV show had to mention the Internet they would show some 3D avatars moving around a virtual world. Made for much more interesting footage than the grey Mosaic browser background.
- Yes! I ran a very high end CAD tool on SGI computers at that time and it could output whe assemblies to VRML!
And that capability preceded other tools and file formats by a decade easy! And offered as many features, and a few we still don't see today given things like Siemens JT, or PTC and whatever they use now.
We would display them three ways:
Netscape was the easy way, and one got a cool view manipulation GUI that way. This performed pretty well on higher end 90's hardware. Could display most of the front of a car with full dimensions and other annotations at reasonable frame rates.
Or, use the dedicated Java viewer the program output in addition to the raw file, which is what the browser used.
Or, buy a viewer tool, and we had one. Cosmo something....
On SGI, using the Java viewer, one could view the VRML in actual 3D with shutter glasses and pull up predefined views useful to shop people.
Really cool. Very few used the real 3D capability.
And that remains true today!
I have another high end CAD tool on my laptop, and it can display 3D on my 60 inch plasma at home. Does it 60hz per eye, which is crazy for both being more than a decade old!
There are at most a handful of companies able to employ similar capability today. Space X is one who does use it however. Go Space X!
I do, and will model complex surfaces in 3D. Pure joy to use.
But, it has to be that most users either do not care, or 3D bothers them, or something...
Also, same goes for viewing files. A small number used VRML back in the day. Today, a smaller, though also a larger than back in the day number use those tools today.
The rest are on paper or static PDF.
FWIW: Open WRL will display the 90's era CAD VMRL data. Kudos to them!
- Yes, it was. I remember writing code to output a network diagram in VRML and it was possible to manipulate the diagram in the web browser (I think Netscape Navigator).
- Wow. That's all I have to say. This is the level of detail we can all wish for in our emulators.
- Indeed. The level of dedication, time and skill it required for this guy to analyze and fix the dozen+ incredibly arcane and minuscule differences between the emulator and actual hardware just so he could remove the small mod that detected this one demo is simply unbelievable. All just for this one demo which does truly insane, deeply unnatural things no other demo (or game) ever attempted. Plus the existing mod already allowed the emulator to play the demo perfectly down to the pixel and millisecond. It just bothered him that a special case mod was needed, so he spent well over a year on research, debugging and analysis - including writing several quite sophisticated visualization tools to specifically identify these incredibly minor divergences.
It's double amazing because the demo is incredible for identifying these insanely challenging tricks and getting them to run on primitive hardware no one thought could display this level of colors or animation AND then a software emulation of the vintage IBM 5150 PC (and monitor) being so precise it's able to recreate this one-off insanity in cycle-accurate real-time with NO case-specific hacks. It blows my mind that either one of these actually exists. Both together is the stuff of heroic retro legends. I'm confident none of the 1970s designers of the 6845 chip would have ever believed their chip was capable of generating these graphics.
- The amount of custom hardware for this thing is amazing. And considering how few units of this beast must have been manufactured.
I love coin-ops. When I win the lottery, there will be signs. And by signs, I mean a large aircraft hangar filled with absurd coin-ops.
I'm very partial to these giant arcade monstrosities every since I tried out the R360 in ~1990 in London: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R360
- The move to multi-core designs was particularly hard on game developers who were used to a single core they owned completely. Games aren't very suited to parallelism, which made the task even harder. Sega got burned by this again and again with the Mega CD, 32X and then Saturn.
- I'm 100% convinced those books will never get finished now. I wish I hadn't read the first five.
- Facts. We can only hope that George appoints a successor like Robert Jordan did for his Wheel of Time series. I mean even Dune got finished eventually....
- I was amazed when I got to the end of Dune to find that there was an ending completed by his son. I'm still suspicious about the story of finding a loose 5.25" disk containing the plot. Regardless, I actually loved the writing of the final books and felt that his son's books were actually toned down a little in a such a way that made them more enjoyable to read.
- That one was a lot of work! Hat off to the guy for managing to finally get it working.
- This was a really fantastic, really in-depth examination of the Family BASIC cart.
- Thanks! I would like to do more with it, but I think I may want to start looking at doing my own cart (with more RAM, and maybe SD) first.
- Yeah. You should add both. The BASIC appears to deserve it.
This is a bit off topic, at least for this thread, but I am doing some similar activities related to pocket computers.Sidebar:Back in the day, what I really wanted was a Model 100 by Tandy. I have one now, and yeah. It would have done the work back then. Well.
My use case was manufacturing. Actually still is! I have an opportunity to make some parts similar to ones I did then. At the time, I used a combination of a Tandy PC-6, I believe? The folding one. And also a Casio scientific.
The Tandy had just enough to be useful, but no graphics. Only 20 character, one line display too. Ugh.
But that was enough to help lay out parts and crank out some g-code, which I would just type into a machine and run.
Well, little didnI know, but SHARP was flat out killing it in this space. They got really good at designing little, fast organizers that ran an bit CPU of their own design I think, and button cells!
Their displays were often super too. Clear, fast, respectable pixel counts.
The SHARP G850VS is basically a whole darn workstation. Battery requirements went up to AA cells, but worth it!
Display has 20x5 lines too. Pixel addressable.
But get this!
It has a huge system ROM containing:
BASIC with graphical, scientific, statistical and robust logic commands.
System Monitor
Z-80 Assembler
C Compiler! ! ! (Seriously?)
PIC Assembler
And one other pseudo machine assembler for education I do not fully understand other than the consensus it it being useless.
System Bus, like for cartridges or and / dock.
10 Pin GPIO block, similar to the Raspi machines.
IR comms capability.
That is nuts! And back then it was easy to miss this kind of thing. No Internet meant a lot of us just did not get info. Heck, I learned 6502 out of the magazines in the grocery store magazine racks!
I am on the hunt. And they are not too hard to find right now, so I really just gotta save my pennies and pull the trigger on a good one.
That kind-of capability would have enabled a little CAM system with back plotting to verify g-codes!
Seems to me you found enough here in your exploration to want the same thing. Flesh it all out and go! Bet you it ends up worth it. :)End SidebarVery enjoyable write up, BTW.
- Thanks! I happen to have have a G850V (non-S,) but the zebra cables on the LCD have gone spotty. I'm going to see if I can reflow it somehow, or simply put a block of foam behind to re-establish contact.
Truly impressive machines, but vulnerable to the classic Sharp durability issues. I'm still hopeful I can bring it back :)
- The only change I would make are these three links at the bottom of the user page which always seem like an afterthought -- just needs a little CSS to make them not look out of place:
> submissions comments rss
- The Jupiter Ace was a massive fumble. What a shame. I bought one from a charity shop for a quid in about 1988, but I couldn't figure out the Forth syntax :(
- More
That resolution was dead on point for the CRT Apple used. It was capable of a bit more, say 700 lines, maybe even 800 horizontally. Vertically, maybe 400 to 480 would be pushing it.
Say they used 640x480. The user would have been happy with a pixel in the horizontal direction, and maybe less happy with it in the vertical one. And it would have been a bit less crisp all 9bwr the screen, IMHO.
Monochrome CRTs can be over driven to a crazy amount and they just work. And often, unless the overdrive is just crazy, the user will probably see the differences as the GUI changes too. I have run 1024x768 on a 7" amber screen.
Worked, but not well.
It is much happier with about 500 vertical lines and more like 700 horizontal ones.
PAL ish monochrome 720x586 looks fantastic and is 50hz. Slow phosphors = 50hz being no big deal. NTSC ish 720x480 at 60hz looks good too, maybe a bit more crisp.
All I am saying is for that CRT, the resolution Apple chose will look great! And that is due to that particular CRT and drive circuit.
I think Apple could have pushed it to 640, lime the GS machine could do, and go 400 lines vertical and that CRT would perform almost as well. We may not even be able to tell.
Maybe they did not do that as an overall balance between what the 68K could pixel wrangle, RAM and CRT performance.