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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.
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.
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.
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!
On weed?
I have two opposable thumbs. It's pretty cool.
[javac] 100 errors
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.
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.
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.