Supercomputing adventures with a MegaST/4

[Darklord]

Yep, I'd imagine the whole "pitchfork and torches" crowd would be out for your blood.

Way back in the day, an Amiga acquaintance used to go on and on about B5 and the Amiga's
role with the Video Toaster. A revelation like that might break him.

After you port LightWave over though, don't stop there - try it on a CT'd Falcon, V4 or the
PiSTorm (which is rapidly advancing these days). If we're gonna dream, dream big, right?

[dml]

I had moderate success converting some of the models to a custom BVH (bounding volume hierarchy) format used by my renderer (the one that can run on the Transputers) but I will need to skip the textures and spoof them with procedural textures as I did with some of the shader scenes in XPtr because there isn't enough T-RAM for that and my stuff does not yet support texture uploads anyway.

This is probably another, completely separate sidequest-rabbithole but it will keep me busy

If anyone has managed to locate more of the original LW models I can have a play with those sometime.

sf40.png (72.01 KiB) Viewed 165 times

[dml]

Made some progress since the last post...

[mrbombermillzy]

You really are doing the transputer trailblazing arent you Doug?

Absolutely first class work and good progress to boot. Well done!

[dml]

Absolutely first class work and good progress to boot. Well done!

Thanks!

When I realised the changes I would have to make for the software to talk to the board I was thinking "what did I get myself into?" again...

[exxos]

[rubber_jonnie]

I had moderate success converting some of the models to a custom BVH (bounding volume hierarchy) format used by my renderer (the one that can run on the Transputers) but I will need to skip the textures and spoof them with procedural textures as I did with some of the shader scenes in XPtr because there isn't enough T-RAM for that and my stuff does not yet support texture uploads anyway.

This is probably another, completely separate sidequest-rabbithole but it will keep me busy

If anyone has managed to locate more of the original LW models I can have a play with those sometime.


sf40.png

Love that render, the Star Fury was one of my favourite ships from B5 and I was building one in Caligari Truespace 3d many moons ago on my PC. Sadly life got in the way and I ended up parking it indefinitely.

Time for a B5 re-watch, it's been too long and I have all seasons on DVD plus the films.

I personally wouldn't want to see a reboot of it with modern CGI such as used in shows like 'The Mandalorian' etc as I think part of the charm was the look of the CGI sequences, plus I think finding actors to replace those who have gone would leave it feeling like it's 'Not the one' to quote Zathras...

[dml]

I think we completed bullet 1 on plan list 2:

next part should be:

- make code run on it <----- we are here
- escalate things in all directions
- render some Babylon 5 on it

That means we unlock the escalate-things step! Now there's two of them.

I need to figure out from my notes which tie points will get them talking. Time for some wire-wrapping....

twoofthem.jpg (674.15 KiB) Viewed 56 times

[rubber_jonnie]

I think we completed bullet 1 on plan list 2:

next part should be:

- make code run on it <----- we are here
- escalate things in all directions
- render some Babylon 5 on it

That means we unlock the escalate-things step! Now there's two of them.

I need to figure out from my notes which tie points will get them talking. Time for some wire-wrapping....




twoofthem.jpg

Wow!!!

You'll be running your own AI on it soon enough!

[dml]

You'll be running your own AI on it soon enough!

It seems like we're not in short supply right now

A contributor on the ATW800 channel has actually done this (running a very very tiny model, on the root Transputer) as an experiment.