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1.6 Megahertz per Pixel: TMDC6

Posted by jamie on from the get-your-demo-on dept.

TMDC Organizing writes "The sixth pseudoannual text mode demo competition is on. The goal is to make cool audiovisual demos that run in an NT console. Deadline for submissions is 12.12.2003 (Slashdot has covered TMDC before). An invitation demo and all the entries from two last contests are available." The FAQ has some static screenshots.

136 comments

  1. NT Console? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ick! At the very least, 4NT is the way to go.

  2. Re:How long... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Never.

  3. Doesn't seem to run in a browser even - slashdot'd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    eep

  4. Cool Logo by bacon-kidney-pie · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    I wonder what it would be like to have two opposable thumbs.

    1. Re:Cool Logo by |/|/||| · · Score: 3, Funny

      I have two opposable thumbs. It's pretty cool.

      --
      [javac] 100 errors
  5. Old Good Days by Baron+MoEbiOuS · · Score: 0

    Aahhh, I still remember running the SecondReality demo from FutureCrew on my old 80486 SX computer... it was running pretty well!

    1. Re:Old Good Days by Fux+the+Penguin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I remember seeing my first "loader" back in 1992, I had just started drawing ANSI for a local 206 art group called RaT. I remember it quite clearly, it had an ANSI logo that faded in and out and text that scrolled from right to left that faded from dark grey (or more accurately, bright black) to dark white to bright white then back again with really horrible fire effects at the bottom.

      I've always loved textmode demos, they bring me back to a world before the internet was the gargantuan beast it is now, when I called 64 BBS's a day (and would have called more except my modem program only supported 64 entries).

      It's great to see people still doing this.

    2. Re:Old Good Days by John+Courtland · · Score: 1

      Your phone bill must have looked like the national debt. I once wardialed a block of 100 numbers, for the hell of it, and that alone cost $5.

      --
      Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
    3. Re:Old Good Days by yerricde · · Score: 1

      Local telephone calls are unmetered in the United States.

      --
      Will I retire or break 10K?
    4. Re:Old Good Days by John+Courtland · · Score: 1

      At $0.05 a call, calling 100 numbers becomes $5.00. You are right, most local plans are non-metered rates, but you still have to pay the for the connection. Then you get to deal with their "Band" trickery where you get into local long distance that costs even more than traditional long distance.

      --
      Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
  6. Mirror to invitation by SeanTobin · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is quite possibly the only site that could be completely mirrored in text mode... and here I am posting a link... Anyway.. here is a mirror of the invitation:

    http://slashdot.isthatdamngood.com/tmdc6inv.zip

    Be nice. Its dsl.

    --
    Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
    1. Re:Mirror to invitation by pc486 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Here's a .EDU mirror of the above:

      http://people.ucsc.edu/~twilly/tmdc6inv.zip

    2. Re:Mirror to invitation by fahrvergnugen · · Score: 2, Funny

      You are so boned.

      Bandwidth: SELECT `Available_Kbps` FROM `raped_dsl` WHERE 'dsl_bridge_reaction'="Cry_like_little_bitch";

      --
      Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
    3. Re:Mirror to invitation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Much better, thanks. :)

    4. Re:Mirror to invitation by anaphora · · Score: 1

      I'm getting .3k/sec. I think you=slashdotted.

  7. Type-R? by wo1verin3 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    >> 1.6 Megahertz per Pixel: TMDC6

    Lets see, my laptop has a resolution of 1600x1200 that gives me 1920000 pixels.

    1920000 pixels X 1.6 MHz = 3072000 MHz

    I think I can beat that G5 cluster with my laptop now. This is sweet.

    1. Re:Type-R? by freeweed · · Score: 1

      I think they're referring to the NT console window, by default 80x25 characters. 80*25 = 2000, 2000*1.6 = 3.2 Ghz, which is about right for high end x86 these days.

      However, it's certainly not pixels. NT characters (again default) are 8x12 pixels, so you're talking 8*80 = 640 wide and 25*12 = 300 high, for a grand total of 192,000 pixels.

      That'd still be one hell of a fast computer!

      --
      Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
    2. Re:Type-R? by seanadams.com · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm not sure exactly what kind of math you're trying to do there, but just for shits and giggles here are some interesting numbers for DVI - did you know that the DVI channel to your monitor is running at a few Gbps? Check it out:

      DVI has four high-speed differential pairs: red, green, blue, and clock. Assuming 1600x1200, that's 1.9M pixels, as you said. Now mutiply that by 60Hz, and you've got 115M pixels per second. w0w.

      Each of those RGB channels carries 8 bits per sample, so that's 0.92Gbps...

      So for all three channels (clock doesn't really count) you have roughly 3Gbps - and even higher resolutions are possible.

      Did you know that DVI was designed from the very beginning to be sent over fiber? There are some neat products coming out for extending DVI, and the HDTV market is finally driving some volume to bring them down in price a little. Soon you won't have to worry about how loud your PC is... just put it on the other side of the house!

    3. Re:Type-R? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      I'm not sure exactly what kind of math you're trying to do there

      He was doing +1 funny math. :)

    4. Re:Type-R? by Keck · · Score: 1

      Soon you won't have to worry about how loud your PC is... just put it on the other side of the house!

      Fine for video, but what about keyboard, mouse, if I want to load a cd/dvd in/out, etc? :)

      This could also have been "I live in a house so small that I can still hear the computer on the other side of it, you insensitive clod!".

      --
      A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
    5. Re:Type-R? by jovlinger · · Score: 1

      I dunno. I seem to recall that 3.2 Gbps was the limit for DVI. Notice that no video card advertises more than 1600x1200 DVI (even though I've personally run one at 1920x1200; Sony was unable to suggest even one DVI card that worked with their 23" LCD--turns out a lowly radeon 9000 worked just fine)

      If you look at the NICE IBM monitors, they usually require multiple DVI channels.

      [speculation]

      I've long wondered why the video information isn't at a higher level; high-bitrate MPEG (or even MJPEG), run length encoding (in 2D, perhaps), even block move/copy would all be easy to implement in the monitor, and massively cut down on the bandwidth needed. With any of these schemes alone, you could probably replace your video cable with ethernet (even 802.11b).

    6. Re:Type-R? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Soon you won't have to worry about how loud your PC is... just put it on the other side of the house!

      This is already becoming standard in the audio world - DVI video, USB key/mouse, Firewire for both a CD-R and a professional audio card. These days its really cheap to remove the whole computer from the studio.

    7. Re:Type-R? by bhtooefr · · Score: 1

      WiFi peripherals, anyone? Or maybe a dumb VNC terminal, and an ethernet-connected CD-RW/DVD?

    8. Re:Type-R? by Dave2+Wickham · · Score: 1
      This could also have been "I live in a house so small that I can still hear the computer on the other side of it, you insensitive clod!".

      One of my machines is on the other side of my room. I can hear it. It is on the other side of the house :-/.
  8. "Pseudoannual"? by TrollBridge · · Score: 2, Funny

    Is that geek-speak for "whenever the organizers decided to drop the bong and get things started again"?

    --
    There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
  9. Whoopie? by BadCable · · Score: 0

    "Slashdot has covered TMDC before"...

    And nobody cared then....nobody cares now.

    --
    Google Toolbar is SPYWARE!
  10. Static screenshots by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Accent on static.

  11. Cygwin Legal ??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Cygwin is just bash in the "console", right?

    Is cygin legal ?

    1. Re:Cygwin Legal ??? by fishbowl · · Score: 1

      Cygwin is much more than just "bash in the console", which you would discover if you bothered to check. It's actually getting to the point where it is often hard to make the argument for a unix-like system in terms of userland apps, because lots of stuff runs under Cygwin. There's even a fairly decent XFree86 server. You can compile and run GTK apps, for instance. It makes the filesystem transparent. All kinds of good things.

      I still can't get anything close enough to linux Virtual Consoles (160x60 Framebuffer consoles, not 80x50!, and I want 10 of them!), but if I could have that, I'd probably end up running windows more than I do -- something Stallman would no doubt call GNU/Windows...

      Is it legal?

      Are you inferring its bastardy? The source is there, with explicit copyright, authorship, and revision history, it's all GPL, and it's pretty much a straightforward port of the GNU userland into the Cygwin runtime. Which does a pretty good job, not just "a good job considering."

      I *really* wish XP (or 2000) had close-to-the-hardware consoles, just like linux has. It's my favorite feature of linux. The console.

      --
      -fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
    2. Re:Cygwin Legal ??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Doesn't the program 'screen' run on cygwin?

    3. Re:Cygwin Legal ??? by typobox43 · · Score: 1

      I'm assuming that by "legal" he meant that he wanted to know whether it was legal for use in the competition.

    4. Re:Cygwin Legal ??? by Haeleth · · Score: 1

      If you use the native Windows port of rxvt supplied with Cygwin instead of Windows console, you can have your 160x60 consoles without problems. (Same goes for the X11 version, but Cygwin/XFree is a touch slow for console work.)

      I already think of my Cygwin box as GNU/Windows... as with the Linux case, I have Windows providing a kernel, and Cygwin providing all the utilities necessary to turn it into a real operating system.

    5. Re:Cygwin Legal ??? by fishbowl · · Score: 1

      "If you use the native Windows port of rxvt supplied with Cygwin instead of Windows console, you can have your 160x60 consoles without problems."

      No I can't! I can get pretty close I guess, and maybe even close enough to be workable. But can you sit me down at a windows box and tell me it's linux? No. Because there are video modes that apparently cannot be duplicated on the same hardware running windows. And I don't know what you're going to do about switching VC's. Yes, I know to use screen.

      There's something about SVGA and/or framebuffer consoles that I like *a lot*, that rxvt does not give me. There is something that my hardware can do for me under one OS, that it cannot do under another. It's actually one of the few things that I can put my finger on as a specific feature, and I see it as a limitation of Windows.

      --
      -fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
    6. Re:Cygwin Legal ??? by fishbowl · · Score: 1

      >Doesn't the program 'screen' run on cygwin?

      Yes it does, and I use it routinely. I also know about, and I use, rxvt.

      Now, does it give me indistinguishable characteristics from the same machine running linux on consoles with fbset 1280x1024-75 ?
      NO.

      Do I have an equivalent of alt-Fn to switch virtual consoles, with a separate user environemt and separate shell on each one? NO.

      Can I easily switch between this mode and graphics mode? No.

      Perhaps there is a way to get the NT console into a vesa mode, but I want more than just vesa!

      My whole point is that here is a feature I enjoy on linux that does not exist on windows, and cannot even be emulated on windows to my satisfaction. I'd like to be told I'm wrong. But it's hard enough just to find people who understand what the hell I'm talking about.

      I *really* like the shell on a framebuffer console. It's the main reason I use Linux.

      --
      -fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
    7. Re:Cygwin Legal ??? by bhtooefr · · Score: 1

      He wasn't asking if Cygwin was legal as in according to US law. He was asking if it was legal in TMDC6. AFAIK, you just have to be able to zip into 2.8MB, and unzip into 5MiB. If you can fit your app compiled for Linux AND Cygwin in 5MiB, you're fine. (and DON'T try expanding Cygwin on the fly - you'll just increase your zip size)

    8. Re:Cygwin Legal ??? by bhtooefr · · Score: 1

      Which it IS, but only if it fits in 2.8MB zipped and 5MiB (yes, there's a difference - they said 2800000 bytes and 5MB, but I could tell) unzipped. With the app.

  12. Here's my text demo by nacturation · · Score: 4, Funny

    I demo this to my coworkers about 10 times a day. It always makes them laugh. I guess that means I have a chance of winning?

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    Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
    1. Re:Here's my text demo by Uber+Banker · · Score: 1

      Maybe HAL.DLL is just starting?!

    2. Re:Here's my text demo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      96 MB? You deserve to die 10 times a day. Get out $49.95 and solve 1/2 your problems.

    3. Re:Here's my text demo by bhtooefr · · Score: 1

      Couldn't it be an OLD NT4 box? That's what it looks like to me. 96MB is plenty acceptable in the days of NT4. Keep in mind, 16-32MB was the norm on Win95 boxes, and 32-64MB was the norm on Win98 boxes.

    4. Re:Here's my text demo by Junks+Jerzey · · Score: 1

      Wow, nostalgia! I remember the blue screen of death. I used to see it back when I used the old pre-NT Windows kernels. I haven't seen it a single time in the three years since I upgraded to Windows 2000.

  13. Textro for a new generation! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Quick! Someone raise OTM from the dead!

    I feel all warm and fuzzy inside :D

  14. Slashdot effect by kamukwam · · Score: 1

    "Slashdot has covered TMDC before"... And they still are not able to handle the slashdot-effect...

  15. IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL by swb · · Score: 1

    I have never seen a blue screen that didn't have that on there. Is that the "standard" message, or is it like the bad old days of MacOS when "BUS ERROR" or something came up for lots of variable error conditions.

    What does IRQL... mean, anyway?

    1. Re:IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL by stratjakt · · Score: 1

      I forget exactly what it means, something like an irq vector not pointing to the interrupt service routine.

      It's nearly always caused by a memory failure or timing error, though a bad driver could cause it, it's doubtful.

      It's really common these days what with kids overclocking a system made out of second hand shit they bought on eBay.

      They get this error and blame windows.

      I love overclocker forums, reading posts like "Yeah I got my P4 2.4 runnin at 3 ghz, and my compusa ram is runnin at 500mhz now. My Radeon 9500 overclocked and modded to the performance of a 9800xt, and I have no stability problems. Windows gets bluescreens 4 or 5 times a day, though, I think I need to upgrade to XP."

      --
      I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
    2. Re:IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      There are a million zillion things which can cause that error. Bluescreens are useless, it would be much better if the system would simply reboot by default. You can find out more about this error by visiting support.microsoft.com and searching on "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL".

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL by DrEldarion · · Score: 1

      Er, on new versions of Windows, it DOES reboot by default. You have to change a setting in order for it to NOT reboot when it bluescreens.

    4. Re:IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 1

      Another poster did a good job with the technical explination so I won't rehash it. What it comes down to generally is a driver problem. Buggy drivers are great at causing this one, for a couple of different reasons. Usually, Windows should note the DLL that caused it. Find out which driver that is a part of, you have your culprit. As noted that's not the only thing that can cause it, but it is by far the most common.

  16. It's already Slashdotted.....damn..what can we do. by zymano · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    What can we do about slashdotting ?

    Come on Commander Taco...in case of slashdotting ,lets cache the front page of the website atleast .

    Does anyone else agree ? Enough emails to Taco and maybe he will do it.

  17. Fried by sharkey · · Score: 1

    It appears that they're running their webserver on NT.

    --

    --
    "Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
    1. Re:Fried by anotherone · · Score: 1
      Nope, it's using Apache on Linux.

      Ooops!

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      Username taken, please choose another one.
  18. it's purdy, but is it useful? by laurent420 · · Score: 1

    distributed folding is, granted not as appealing to the eyes, but makes up for that with productive results. also makes a decent benchmarking util. win32 screenshot. i like using it with multi-gnome-terminal w/ transparency turned on ontop of a snazzy desktop background image.

  19. robbIE's here for you/US/stuff that matters? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    it doesn't seem that way. it l00ks like the only stuff that matters is monIE. maybe that's just the way it is for sum greed/fear/ego based LIEforms?

    can't say we're surprised buy that.

    1. Re:robbIE's here for you/US/stuff that matters? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Can't say I'm surprised by the fact that you're a dope-gobbling tool, either.

  20. my entry would be... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://www.lynn3686.freeserve.co.uk/crashnt.html

  21. Re:It's already Slashdotted.....damn..what can we by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You must be new here..

  22. No they won't. Taco hates the readship! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


    Suggest that the site is better off NOT caching those poor sites and he's do it right off, taking credit in his journal and everything.

    He hates the readers and is nothing more than another disinterested clock-puncher squatting on a domain with tons of potential. Let go, Rob. Walk away, and let someone with passion make this baby sing again!!

    1. Re:No they won't. Taco hates the readship! by zymano · · Score: 1

      i wonder if it has to do with a website taking legal action because they want all the hits.

    2. Re:No they won't. Taco hates the readship! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, have slashdot give the hitlist to the slashdotted site....

      Slashdot gets its hits from the news page and comment page, the slashdottee gets wide exposure and can then afford more bandwidth in the future....

      Maybe nobody trusts slashdot to do a good job of reporting hits?

  23. you've completely missed the point by proj_2501 · · Score: 1

    this is an artistic competition, not a number-crunching competition.

  24. Sure you've seen the Paris Hilton video... by mikeophile · · Score: 4, Funny
    but have you seen it in text-mode?

    On weed?

    1. Re:Sure you've seen the Paris Hilton video... by damiam · · Score: 1

      Yes. mplayer -vo aa hilton.avi works great if you have AALib installed on your system.

      --
      It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
  25. Slag Iron by dannyelfman · · Score: 1

    Looks like the lumeta system is toast.

    They started a project to map the Internet and probably didn't expect the entire Internet to come to them.

  26. What is IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL by sgasch · · Score: 5, Informative
    IRQL is "Interrupt Request Level". This is a DWORD in the NT kernel that cooresponds to a system state and determines what can preempt the currently running code. For example, raising the IRQL causes different priority device IRQs (interrupts) from the PICs to be masked off and ignored until the IRQL is lowered again. But the IRQL is not just to mask off interrupts, the NT kernel uses it for synchronization, communication between different CPUs on MP machines, to determine whether DPCs can run, to determine whether its ok to run user mode code, etc...

    Any code running in kernel mode (x86 ring 0) on NT (drivers or the kernel) can change the IRQL by making a call. Code typically raises the IRQL when it needs to do something critical and cannot afford to be preempted. The IRQL has to be at a certain level to acquire certain system locks, etc. So with all this raising of the IRQL people have to remember to put it back before they return.

    Invariably what happens is that someone forgets to lower the IRQL after they have raised it... maybe on an error path or something. They leave it raised, returned to whoever called them etc... and eventually you get to code that requires that the IRQL be below some level. For example, you try to acquire a spinlock, take a page fault, try to allocate memory (pool), try to schedule the next user mode job etc... All of these actions have code that basically asserts that the IRQL is where it should be. When it's not, the machine is bugchecked and you get the bluescreen.

    This kind of bugcheck is not ususally caused by hardware, it's almost always software related. Someone raised the IRQL and forgot to lower it. There are ways to find out who, basically by logging all calls to KeRaiseIrql, KeLowerIrql and some other routines that change the IRQL as a side effect.

    1. Re:What is IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wow, someone that knows what they're talking about. And whaddaya know, he has a low /. UID... draw your own conclusions.

    2. Re:What is IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL by nacturation · · Score: 1

      Damn, that's the singularly most informative post I've read here in a long, long time. My hat's off to you, sir.

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    3. Re:What is IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL by m_pll · · Score: 2, Interesting
      By the way, you can get detailed descriptions for almost all possible bugcheck codes if you install NT debugging tools. The docs even have basic debugging/troubleshooting steps for most common problems.

      For example, this is the explanation of the 4 bugcheck parameters on the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL blue screen:

      The following parameters are displayed on the blue screen.

      1 Memory referenced
      2 IRQL at time of reference
      3 0: Read 1: Write
      4 Address which referenced memory

    4. Re:What is IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL by VAXGeek · · Score: 2, Funny

      you think that is low?

      --
      this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
  27. Pixels are old-hat. by jd · · Score: 1

    I want voxel-based displays! Let's make "32-bit deep" mean something a whole lot more!

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  28. ASCII Matrix by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Somebody threw together a

    Matrix clip in ASCII.

    1. Re:ASCII Matrix by SmackCrackandPot · · Score: 2

      And it's got Pan and Zoom ... who needs DVD!!!

  29. 1337 h4x0r stuff by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is teh 1337 h4x0r stuff 1ve dr34m3d 0f d01ng

  30. Bitmapped text mode by Jhan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The last time this competition came up, I got to wondering what's to stop you from doing "bitmapped" text mode? Standard 80x25 text mode is 30 KHz ie. 30,000 lines per second, each 640 pixels wide. That's about 24 million pixels per second. These day we have multi giga-op processors, and interrupt hardware can't be far behind (?).

    Simply set the screen to 80x25 space characters then trigger interrupts a bit before each pixel and change the background color. Hey presto, 16 color bitmapped mode. Then use temporal anti-aliasing to yield even more colors. Kudos to the first person who makes a X driver for this mode.

    Sure, this will eat a lot of CPU time, but that's what this sort of competition is all about.

    --

    I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.

    1. Re:Bitmapped text mode by BetterThanCaesar · · Score: 1

      Hey presto, 16 color bitmapped mode.

      If I remember correctly, standard text-modes offer the ability to change the palette with six available bits per channel, giving you a total of 2**18=262144 possible colors in text-mode. That's the way the "copper bars" effect is made, although it usually just used simple shades of red (for simplicity). (Look up copper bars here)

      --
      "Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
    2. Re:Bitmapped text mode by Jhan · · Score: 1

      Please snort less cocaine.

      Text mode is 16 colors (8 primaries + half bright). 6 bits per channel is probably some misplaced memories from EGA days. The page you cited is all about VGA.

      --

      I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.

    3. Re:Bitmapped text mode by Bastian · · Score: 1

      You can do it, but it would be virtually impossible to keep the whole mess synced up with the monitor's scan rate.

      Much easier to do something like copper bars, where you change the color during the monitors horizontal retrace.

      What I can't figure is, I had a copper bars program that depended on changing colors during horizontal retrace, and it worked perfectly on the LCD panel of a laptop. Are the LCD panels designed to act like a computer monitor complete with a little pause after drawing each line?

    4. Re:Bitmapped text mode by Jhan · · Score: 1
      What I can't figure is, I had a copper bars program that depended on changing colors during horizontal retrace, and it worked perfectly on the LCD panel of a laptop. Are the LCD panels designed to act like a computer monitor complete with a little pause after drawing each line?

      If you have a passive matrix LCD, yes. Active matrix supossedly only flip pixels as needed.

      --

      I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.

    5. Re:Bitmapped text mode by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Please develop social skills.

    6. Re:Bitmapped text mode by pclminion · · Score: 1

      Palette shifting is against the rules.

    7. Re:Bitmapped text mode by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Considering the competition, any alteration of the textmode is forbidden in the rules.

      And besides, the idea you are proposing is old. Some variations have been used in old 8-bit computers, but it's almost impossible to do on a PC due to hardware and operating system concerns when it comes to precise timing.

    8. Re:Bitmapped text mode by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Jeez, go easy on the guy, he probably really was thinking of VGA palettes (262144 or so colours to choose from) and not EGA palettes (64 colours (6 bits)) to choose from (pick any 16, it's text mode).

    9. Re:Bitmapped text mode by Bastian · · Score: 1

      The LCD in question was active matrix.

    10. Re:Bitmapped text mode by bhtooefr · · Score: 2, Informative

      You CAN change the palette, but TMDC6 doesn't allow changing the palette OR changing the character map.

    11. Re: Bitmapped text mode by JasonDoucette · · Score: 1

      I should mention that the Copper Bars sample on my page does NOT change the palette in the horizontal retrace of a text or graphics mode. It uses 320x200 256-color mode (mode 13h) and uses a certain optimization to redraw every pixel every frame, allowing the bars to rotate, as well as zoom in and out.

      But, BetterThanCaesar is right, as someone has mentioned. On a VGA card, in text mode, you can set the palette using the same code to modify the palette in 256-color mode (obviously because it uses the same registers), and thus you can have any 16 colors of the 262,144 possible colors. If you do this during the retrace, you can modify one or more colors for each horizontal line, making a total of 400 different colors (400 scan lines) for just 1 of the 16 colors in text mode. I think I was able to change 6 colors per line on a 200 Mhz system, although this program no longer runs well in Windows XP, so I cannot showcase it.

      Another trick you can use to make more colors is to flicker between two screen pages. Take a look at my Color Wheel / Fake 12-Bit Color sample on my page. It uses 320x400 256-color mode (Mode-X), and swaps between two screen buffers every retrace. Using a palette of only 256 colors, it makes it appear to have 12-bit color (4,096 colors). (Actually, it only has 16*16*15 = 3,840 colors, but it's close enough that no one really notices that extra shade gone from blue.)

      Of course, none of these tricks are allowed in TMDC.

  31. THANKS! by swb · · Score: 1

    That was a great post. Highly technically informative, but not obfuscationist.

    I added you to my friends list.

    1. Re:THANKS! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree that it was a great post. I shudder to think of how many thousands of dollars he had to pay to Microsoft to learn that information.

    2. Re:THANKS! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think you have it wrong. Microsoft probably pays him money to learn these things.

    3. Re:THANKS! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dude, there's a book all about the internals of the Win2K operating system. It'll run ya about $50, and will teach you everything that was in that post, and pretty much everything else about what makes Windows tick. The title is "Inside Microsoft Windows 2000, Third Edition", and the authors are David Solomon and Mark Russinovich. It's a fantastic book, and pretty much debunks your "thousands of dollars" claim.

  32. Demo Music in Ogg by Pyro226 · · Score: 1

    The music for the invitation demo is in Ogg Vorbis format.

    I for one welcome the repeal of our old MP3 overlords!

    --
    This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
  33. Ahhh......Line Printer Art by G4from128k · · Score: 1

    This contest brings back fond memories of creating line printer art on a CDC6600. Better than ASCII art, it relied on the ability to to use carriage returns (without line feeds) to create especially dark overprinted characters for a much wider pallette of gray values ("8" "X" ":" was pretty dark if the ribbon was fresh). You could make some pretty cool pictures (within the restrictions of 80 cols of overprinted chars). The biggest problem was that it tended to irritate the computer center gnomes when you sent your job to the printer.

    Ahhh....nostalgia.....

    --
    Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
    1. Re:Ahhh......Line Printer Art by MarcoAtWork · · Score: 1

      going a bit OT...

      there were also those booths that took a digital pic of you and printed it with the same 'technology' on big (in order to have a recognizeable face) posters (the 'wanted, dead or alive' ones were very popular) for a sizeable amount of $$$, I think they were popular in 1980 or so.

      Around 1985-86 I found a cool program for my MSX that did something similar, you used a worn ribbon (so it was sort of medium/light grey) and it printed several times on the same row (graphically), after a loooong time (and lots of noise) you had a pseudo-greyscale image that looked actually pretty nice (for a 9pin low-dpi printer obv)

      --
      -- the cake is a lie
    2. Re:Ahhh......Line Printer Art by WuphonsReach · · Score: 1

      /shudder

      I'll never forget the screech of a 9pin dot-matrix printer being forced to print graphics (especially where it made 3 interleaved passes over the same line).

      --
      Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
    3. Re:Ahhh......Line Printer Art by bhtooefr · · Score: 1

      They aren't that bad if they were actually designed to do graphics - ImageWriters were QUIET for dot matrices!

  34. Open source anyone ? by stud9920 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One thing that has always bothered me about the demo scene, is their lack of openness. It's very hard to come across the source code of a demo, or even just a description of how it was done.

    It's frustrating for multiple reasons. First, because it's harder for newbies to learn the art, and second because after some time, demos that were real pieces of art, Second Reality for instance, are pretty much unrunnable on a modern computer. And this is truly sad.

    1. Re:Open source anyone ? by lahna · · Score: 1

      TMDC 5 invitation was released as open-source. The sources are available for download at the TMDC site.

      Phaser / DHFC^grin

    2. Re:Open source anyone ? by jjl · · Score: 1
      Demoscene has always been quite closed about sources and how to make the best tricks. This is now changing slowly as even regular 3D HW api tutorials tend to have enough information available for creating some kind of demo, and some groups have also released source to old productions as well.

      About demos being unrunnable on a modern computer, have to say that it really sucks. However, there's still projects like DemoDVD and Amidemos which try to archive demos as videos.

      Also, to my and many others delight, open source project called DOSBox has managed to get its project up to the state being able to run quite a few older demos as well. Even some of the trick effects using VGA hw registers work fine, although there's still some room for improvement with that. :) Note that you'll need more or less top of the line computer to get enough emulating power.

      PS. The Second Reality you mentioned still doesn't work...

      --
      --
    3. Re:Open source anyone ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It seems that the current source of dosbox is very capable of playing Second Reality (Even With Gus emulation!!!!!!!!!)

  35. text mode demos for nt console... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is possibly the single most pointless task in existance. Masturbation is more productive.

    'Yet Another Stupid human Trick'

  36. Would you use dxvt? by yerricde · · Score: 1

    I *really* like the shell on a framebuffer console.

    Then perhaps it's time for somebody to write "dxvt", or "DirectX Video Terminal", a terminal emulator that runs in a fullscreen DirectDraw session.

    --
    Will I retire or break 10K?
    1. Re:Would you use dxvt? by fishbowl · · Score: 1

      "Then perhaps it's time for somebody to write "dxvt", or "DirectX Video Terminal", a terminal emulator that runs in a fullscreen DirectDraw session. "

      I guess that would be as good as it gets.

      Wonder if I can get started just with visual studio...

      --
      -fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
    2. Re:Would you use dxvt? by yerricde · · Score: 1

      You can in theory get started developing DXVT even without Microsoft Visual $1000. The free MinGW port of GCC is enough to get DirectDraw running, and there exist some nice DirectDraw wrappers such as the Allegro library.

      --
      Will I retire or break 10K?
  37. Calls are unmetered too by yerricde · · Score: 1

    At $0.05 a call

    This may be true outside North America, but in the United States, both local calls and local minutes are unmetered. Some U.S. phone companies even provide unmetered domestic local, regional, and long distance calls and minutes for a flat fee.

    --
    Will I retire or break 10K?
  38. silly by mr.Spike+(edd+sonic) · · Score: 1

    Well this contest is silly in it's basic concept. This all have reduced to about doing good decimate+dither+map&fit routine, which converts graphics to ascii. Moreover why the hell Windows (especially lame 2000!) are so much of a defacto? Very lame, veeery lame. And asking Windows Default Palette is even more lame. I, myself, have dome pretty lot of ascii mode arts and demos back then, when i had a lovely Tandy CGA. It was about art. And tweaking. About Weaking ART. And Art of Tweaking. I think, in some soon times i am gona try to organize, for first, extremely small contest, BUT using REAL CGA (With 8x8 letters REAL ascii font, and not "stripeful" 9x14/9x16) and RGBI REAL colors, and of course REAL blurry screen. And for DOS/LINUX - a pleace where REAL ascii-art lives! Maybe some size limitation might take place, like, for example 512kbytes. However i am most likely to do some site on this topic and see what people will ask. The most problems might arrise with plugging CGA into pentiums-class stuff. I think i might do some budgetary small chipset CGA+ cards with PCI connectors, or something. Second point is in using some pretty CGA HW emulation introducing all the image qualities to 19" FD Trinitrons and 19" LCD we use nowdays. Additional words: I love ascii gfx I love tweaking fonts (why i made a reprogrammable-font card back then) I love tweaking collors (why i made reprogrammable rgbi palette no cga gfx modes - few $ addon between monitor and card and connected to centronix port) :)

    1. Re:silly by bhtooefr · · Score: 1

      You could be rendering your 3d on the fly if you don't have enough space for your demo...

    2. Re:silly by mr.Spike+(edd+sonic) · · Score: 1

      For sure! That's why i want that size limit in fact. If there is no limit - You can render all and just bring a player along with 30mb file with all the demo.
      512k is sort of enough to put all textures, objects and samples for music with some simple compression.

      And yes - main limit - demo must be only one file! [die windows!] annd no usage of exteral liraries and dll's allowed.

      Otherwise i don't understand what's a demo - demo of direct X? silly&sick!

    3. Re:silly by bhtooefr · · Score: 1

      Where does it say it must only be one file? Hell, the winner of TMDC5 used external files! The invitations all use external files!

    4. Re:silly by mr.Spike+(edd+sonic) · · Score: 1

      :]

      well i am talking about a good compo, not this one. external files is a baad thing for a demo. just like causing a bluescreen with problem in opengl or directx and than fucking up all stoopid windows.

      boo on windows. shouldn't compo use anything more clear and clean?

  39. Damn it by njord · · Score: 1

    Don't follow that link in the parent, people. It might as well be goatse.

    I know I'm being offtopic, but to hell with karma, I want to spare the rest of you from what my poor eyes have just witnessed.

    Poor, poor old Njord

    1. Re:Damn it by eatdave13 · · Score: 1

      Oooh, you fell for a tubgirl link. My condolences.

      --
      "Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
  40. This reminds me of old Assembly 9X entries by Viol8 · · Score: 1

    Having looked at some of the demos they remind me of lots of entries of the Assembly competitions
    from the early 90s before they descended into 3D hell.

  41. No linux entries? Thats a bit lame. by Viol8 · · Score: 1

    In their FAQ:

    "Since we're doing the jurying on several sites, and most of these do not have the possibility of using linux,"

    Jesus , I mean come on , how hard would it be for these guys to have a couple of linux judges who
    have linux installed on their PCs?? Its not like people are asking them to judge AS/400 console demos! Or they could even get some

    old cast off 486s or something and use those since you'd only need a bare minimal linux setup.

  42. Funny... by Haeleth · · Score: 1

    ...this comment looks strangely familiar. And the story wasn't even a dupe...