My Secret CGA 3D Graphics Project (2 Year Progression) 

It's amazing how fast things moved in that era isn't it.

Oh that's very interesting. Of course it wasn't originally written for PC. I actually forget which machine it was written for, but I vaguely recall it was a vector machine. It's definitely a favourite game of mine.

I hear you, especially with regard to summer holidays. I had access to a genuine copy of MASM at the time and a handful of books. But it was really hard to get decent info back then. I couldn't afford a modem so didn't get access to BBSs. By the time the internet came along it was pretty much too late as I had not so much spare time.

@@PCRetroTech Obstacles were put in my way. To give an example. The public library had a few useful computer books in the adult section, but as a child I couldn't get access to them. Access was forbidden for children. In the children's section I found very few children's books with simple basic programs. I then bought a book for GW-Basic. I didn't get access to the adult section until much later.

I should get more familiar with the early Amiga demos. So many of those guys probably came to PC from Amiga. It must have been a weird time. It seems as soon as VGA got cheap demos popped up for it.

@@PCRetroTech Yea, it's the same for me. I grew up with a C64, which had a rich cracktro scene, and there were some early demos on it in the late 80s. My dad did get a PC in 1988 or so (a Commodore PC10-III Turbo XT), so we did have a PC in the house, but it never interested me much, as gaming with Hercules and PC speaker was nowhere near as good as on the C64 for most games. Friend of mine had an Amiga, so I saw the first 16-bit games and demos on that, and was really amazed. So I saved up to get an Amiga of my own, and we tried our hand at coding some games and demo stuff. But my dad did upgrade the PC from time to time, and I even got a Sound Blaster Pro for it. And I saw those early demos like that UltraForce one at an early stage. Spage Pigs and Sorcerers were also early PC demo groups that I remember from those days. Then Crystal Dream 2 and Second Reality pretty much put the PC on the map as a demo platform. So eventually I moved from coding on Amiga to PC myself. As you may know from the Crystal Dream end scroller, some of the Physical Crew/Triton guys came from Amiga as well. Wouldn't be surprised if the Space Pigs did as well (they had early MOD player routines). I think the Future Crew guys actually skipped the Amiga, and came straight from C64 to PC. But they have talked about how the Amiga demo Desert Dream by Kefrens was a huge influence on them. In fact, if you look at the source code, some of the effects actually reference Desert Dream. What was somewhat unique about Desert Dream at the time, was that it was very 'cinematic'. Most demos either had a single piece of music that just looped in the background, as they showed various effects, objects etc... or they would have different 'screens', where each screen would have its own music and show a particular combination of effects, and then you'd go back to a loader screen, and then the next screen would show (Space Pigs mEGAdemo copied this particular style). But Desert Dream had a soundtrack that matched the different scenes, and there was synchronization and direction between what you saw on the screen and what you were hearing. It was like watching a movie. It would flow from one effect to the other seamlessly, both visually and musically. Second Reality does that exact same thing.

Yeah I have heard that the flow of Second Reality was one of the things that really made that demo so famous. I would agree that there is a very different quality to PC demos from some point on. I actually prefer SpacePigs later demo (the one I showed in this video) than their earlier Megademo. I know it is different for other people, but I'm more graphically inclined than musical so that's probably why.

@@PCRetroTech Yea, is that from the Vicky demo? I know the Triton guys referenced the Space Pigs somewhere in their scroll text I believe. As you may know from my older blogs on polygon rasterization, you can do really fast polygon filling with EGA's bitmapped mode if you set everything up the right way. I took those ideas from studying the Triton stuff and the F29 Retaliator game, which have the fastest 3D routines I had ever seen. From the reference in the scroll text (or perhaps an nfo file?), I discovered that Vicky demo, which also uses that really fast EGA polygon filling, and it predates the Triton and Physical Crew stuff. So perhaps the Space Pigs figured it out first, and the Triton guys got it from them.

@@PCRetroTech there are lot's of excellent amiga demos that blew 386/486 with vga out of the water ;)

Yep, that's it exactly.

They certainly were.

Thanks!

Yeah that is a very nice game, that's for sure.

Thanks!

Ookokño

That is not a game I've heard of. Was that on the Mac or the PC though? My knowledge of Macs could be written on a postage stamp. If it was PC, there are definitely people here who could identify the game if they were given a good enough description of it.

@@PCRetroTech it was for the iMac g3, and as far as I know, was distributed to primary schools around my area in Australia around that time (2000-2010) along with Kid Pix and a couple other educational programs

@@PCRetroTech although my memory could be faulty about the platform. The school had a couple student PC'S, but they were mostly all iMac g3's

@@PCRetroTech another thing I can say for certain is that it definitely was not 3d Movie Maker. The ui was very different, and it was much more simplistic texture-wise. However, the models were all still riggable

@@damianh760 Was it Stunt Island (1992)? This was a DOS game and had simple 3d graphics with gouraud shading. A much later game than this and 3d Movie Maker was the game "The Movies" (2006). The latter was also released for Mac.

Please do!

Definitely!

In the end, Commodore started making PC's. By then the damage was already done. The PC had already won.

Well, I think Commodore simply had no chance with their Amiga against the very cheap PC compatible ones. Not even IBM managed to assert itself in this sector and the larger Amiga models, which had more CPU power than the Amiga 500, were too expensive to counter this competition. The rest was decided by the number of units sold and Intel's ability to make the CPUs faster and faster while prices dropped rapidly at the same time. Motorola later tried with IBM and Apple to place the PowerPC architecture against the x86 architecture and failed miserably because they simply could no longer win the megahertz race against Intel and AMD.

That would be interesting for sure. I wonder if someone will release one some time. I did see something like that on the VCFED forum about a year or so ago. I can't recall the name though.

@@PCRetroTech FastDoom supports rendering in multiple CGA modes. For me the best one is the 160x100 16 color mode, it's very fast. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_6Jft32G3ls.html

It's hard to say. Some things are definitely harder, which would narrow the range of interest in writing demos.

That one is a little late for us. 1996, but nice game.

Yes, I saw that. These demoscene methods are usually not pixel perfect, but have other advantages, depending on the application.

Thanks. That is certainly possible, but I've no specific plans for it at present.

@@PCRetroTech You could write a nice graphic DEMO.

Yes I noticed that. I have no idea why it wanted to do that. Very weird for a graphical game.

It was written in C for multiple platforms and also very early in the system's life when people were coming from trying to do things generically (ie. write code once, compile for multiple environments). While it's rare to see a game doing that, it's not unheard of. (Hack requires ANSI, for example.)

Ah, that explains it.

@@JimLeonard It's of course reasonable for a text game, and I think a number of text adventures also required ANSI. For a graphics program which needs to implement its own non-portable graphic routines anyway, it's just weird.

@@darak2 I've seen a few programs that expect ANSI to work in graphics mode. ANSI actually does work in graphics mode depending on which one you load.

I've put a binary up on my GitHub and I've put a link in the description. I can't release the source code just yet, but will do so one day. This version should work on a normal CGA card. You don't require the special card I used for the "improper" mode. It needs a lot of memory. Let me know if it works on your machine.

@@PCRetroTech I downloaded it and works great on the internal LCD which is a half-height mono screen so a little ghosty there with the low screen refresh. Then I attached the external CGA adapter which includes a composite color output, ran great on a color CRT via composite as well. Super smooth, impressive work! I'll have to run it as a batch file loop at the next retro meetup I take the 5140 to. For reference, my machine is upgraded to 640kb.

@@antialias21 Great, I'm glad it worked for you and that it will get some exposure at a meetup.

@@PCRetroTech I tried it in DOSBox. It still runs very fast at 192 cycles. As a suggestion for improvement, I would suggest adding the option to quit it early with the ESC key. That would certainly make testing on a real computer easier. In the DOSBox you can of course also simply close the DOSBox window.

The list isn't public at the moment. But it might become public eventually.

@@PCRetroTech Would be very intersting for me to share what you have so far on a website. I am really interested in this topic

@@GeorgesChannel I'll do a writeup eventually, but unfortunately won't have time this year.

Yes I can change the rotation. I haven't tried playing with the shading. That might be especially interesting in the improper mode.

I think whether you like monochrome or not depends a lot on whether you had black and white TV and whether you used a monochrome monitor as a kid. I had a 16 colour monitor fairly early in my teens and colour TV, so I just don't find single colour images appealing to look at. But obviously it is just a personal preference.

@@PCRetroTech Thanks for the reply! No I definitely meant monochrome and not black and white. I never had a monochrome monitor or even a black and white TV. I did use a zx spectrum (named after its colours) which did 16 colours in a strange but efficient way but even cga 640x200 mode could do a variety of colours but only 2 at a time and i don't think they made the most of that and I would have even preferred the 16 colour low res cga mode over the awful cga colour palette in 4 colour mode. I think it was because by that point I was used to more colours and better graphics than anything anyone on the PC was actually doing. It was kind of disappointing,

@@SolarLantern424 Yes, I can understand that. Your experience probably still shaped your opinion on it of course. Although my Amstrad could do 16 colours in a special CGA mode it wasn't widely used, so I still played a lot of games in the 4 colour CGA modes. So in some sense that is what I was used to and therefore enjoyed it. Perhaps if there had been more games in monochrome (or one colour plus a background colour) then I would be more inclined toward it.

Yes, certainly. I've even made videos about it.

Do you want to know about just demos that became games (for the PC), or also about recent Indie games that have nothing to do with demos per se?

@@PCRetroTech Yeah Impressive "demos" that became games

There are no demos that I know of that directly became games... but that doesn't mean they led nowhere. The european games industry is full of companies that started life as demogroups: Dice (Silents), Remedy (some Future Crew members), Starbreeze (Triton), etc. So while no specific demo was turned into a game, the skills they honed making demos did later go into game development.

I've looked at a video so far. It's definitely on our list.

@@PCRetroTech It was a game I played lots of as a teen

It's a Multitech CGA-PC. Not all Multitech cards support it though. I have found other Japanese cards that support it, but they have snow in that mode.

@@PCRetroTech Shouldn't you be in bed right now ;-)

Yes I'm originally from Australia.

I don't understand what you mean by "bring it to stock" or why that would be an interesting thing. I certainly don't wish to modify it.

@@PCRetroTech Stock CGA.

I still don't know what you mean. This is a CGA card and as far as I'm aware it is stock. Do you mean turn it into an IBM CGA card? I really don't wish to do that. This has static RAM chips to avoid snow for one thing.

@@PCRetroTech By stock CGA I mean IBM CGA. I mean make something very close to this kind of "improper" mode and effect actually work on an original IBM CGA.

@@ropersonline Oh, by "bring that to stock" I thought you meant make the card at 13:59 a stock card. I definitely don't want to modify any IBM graphics cards. They are as rare as hen's teeth and very valuable. It doesn't make sense to modify an original card when cards exist which just do that mode (admittedly 2 of the 3 I have found so far have snow).