Turbo Pascal

Some gfx effects made in turbo pascal, programmed just for fun, when I had free time in my first years at UIA (now known as U.A.) which was around 1997!

The most interesting are the 3dengine (engineb.exe and 3dengineb.exe both ran smoothly on a pentium 133Mhz and these are less than 50k in size). It was a real challange to draw triangles efficiently in those days. Also I had to write out the rotation matrix by hand and use simplification rules (simpson etc) by hand (yeah there was no mathematica or maple yet!) to get the multiplies per edge point down to 9 to do both x,y and z rotation. I also implemented my own fixed point arithmetic hacks because at that time integer divide and multiply worked faster than floating point.

Here is a screenshot of a yummie donut spinning (a wine glass and other objects are shown in it, most objects are generated using rotation):


A bit later we learned how to do texture mapping and I quickly wrote the marlcube.exe which showed my pack of sigarettes rotating in 3D :

Now everyone uses opengl or Direct X. I like those frameworks too but it takes away a bit of the magic unfortunately. You work with their data reps and it just renders nicely using a certain shading model and your object appears on screen. Thats just not the same feeling you get when we did it back in the old days. We started with : I can draw a pixel, hmm I can draw a line, hmm now I can draw triangles, hmm now I can render a cube, and finally do a donut in 3d ;).

Still remember explaining Dries Buytaert how to get that damn wireframe cube to show in Oberon. Unfortunately a few weeks later during the computer graphics 1 exams all my nice code was useless because I was in the group that had to rewrite their engines (because of a different data structure with arrays instead of linked lists). Meanwhile Dries was able to show his engine to Arickx and got an awesome grade. I passed but really didn't get the grade I deserved back then. 3D was a real passion for me in those days (thanks to Benjamin Schrauwen who got me started because I too had the same problem Dries had in understanding the transition from 3D to 2D). Luckily I got a better grade in the computer graphics 2 course, also taught by Arickx a few years later, so nobody really cares anymore :).

And finally ArkaPong, our own custom full game written together with 2 friends in one day:

I did some intros for some pc groups as well, they are burried in one of these exe's. Dries Buytaert probably remembers this 3d starfield effect for project x:

It's not code you would want to write nowadays (verry unmaintainable). But hey, it did the job and performed great on old hardware. For me its pure nostalgia just looking at those files briefly and thinking to myself, yep I'm much better at writing software now but man oh man what fun did I have writing that back then :D. Too bad I lost them intros I did for the Purple Turtle group back in the AMIGA days (that was before I got any programming courses so its probably the ugliest goto spaghetti if I read that now. ). Time sure does fly! If you have Mac OS X you can download and install this bundle to look at all the stuff yourself:
DOSBOX_projects.zip (all executables and dosbox emulator included! ~ only about 5Mb).
Just unpack the zip file, run the dosbox application and type an executable name to launch it!