exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

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

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. :roll:

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? :)

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.

Made some progress since the last post...

:goodpost:

You really are doing the transputer trailblazing arent you Doug? :)

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

mrbombermillzy wrote: 26 Sep 2026 20:33 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... :)

:bravo: :2k2:

dml wrote: 08 Sep 2026 12:07 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...

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....

dml wrote: 27 Sep 2026 13:51 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!

rubber_jonnie wrote: 27 Sep 2026 14:00 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.