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1.6 Megahertz per Pixel: TMDC6
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.
I wonder what it would be like to have two opposable thumbs.
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;
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.
Cygwin is just bash in the "console", right?
Is cygin legal ?
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.
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?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
"Slashdot has covered TMDC before"... And they still are not able to handle the slashdot-effect...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
this is an artistic competition, not a number-crunching competition.
On weed?
i wonder if it has to do with a website taking legal action because they want all the hits.
I'm not sure exactly what kind of math you're trying to do there
:)
He was doing +1 funny math.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Matrix clip in ASCII.
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.
That was a great post. Highly technically informative, but not obfuscationist.
I added you to my friends list.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
Local telephone calls are unmetered in the United States.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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.
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?
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) :)
WiFi peripherals, anyone? Or maybe a dumb VNC terminal, and an ethernet-connected CD-RW/DVD?
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
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
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.
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.
...this comment looks strangely familiar. And the story wasn't even a dupe...