Skip to main content

PC Gaming + Nostalgia

Not long ago i remember buying my 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 and running my old games. I remember the huge difference that the hardware transformation and lighting could provide. I was fanatic of Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit at this period. I had a good friend from the neighbour home and from time to time we were playing together in the PC trying to make the best time. I still remember his expression when we lunched the NFS again and saw the new graphics. My setup was a Cyrix 6x86 350 running at 250MHz with 32MB of ram initially that i upgraded them to 96MB later. My first graphics card had something like 4MB and with the upgrade to Voodoo3 3000 i went to 16MB. Enormous difference. Take a look on the difference of using Software vs Glide of 3dfx:




At that period i was using my PC mostly about playing games and nothing else. So the first thing i did is to install the games included with my 3dfx card. I remember two or three games. The first was the Descent 3 and the other one, what i played the most the Unreal.... When i first saw the graphics, i just said.. wow. This is not possible, my PC can't create these graphics real time and with vast open spaces. It was just a new machine. Just to get an idea of the intro screen:



Recently i stumbled upon a video regarding History of games. I will suggest you to watch if you ever played games and interested in the history.




Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Static linking with gcc and g++

In this tutorial, we will explain what the static linking is, how this affect the size of final binary, and why statically linking with g++ sometimes is pain. By definition, a statically compiled binary is a group of programmer ‘s routines, external functions, and variables which are packed into the final binary executable. The compiler or the linker produces the final object and embeds all the functions and variables and the linking phase.  There are two reasons of using dynamic linking and shared libraries: 1) Avoid creating a huge binary, if all the programs use a standard set of libraries why not having the operating system providing to them 2) Compatibility on operating system and machine dependant characteristics: sometimes the libraries must be implemented based on the architecture or the operating system and using dynamic linking is an easy way to avoid this catch. On the other hand, static linking is the ideal way of distributing one software product, pay...
Read more

Processing Milky Way in RawTherapee

This text is an analysis of a video I did some months ago how to process photos of our Milky Way in RawTherapee. You can find the picture here . The photo was taken by wiegemalt. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Editing: Step 1: Fixing lighting The first thing someone notices when opening the picture is the extreme noise due to high ISO used (1600 - check the picture on the right). The first thought is to de-noise the picture, however, if you do that you are going to loose the details of the night sky. The main reason for the high noise is the additional exposure Rawtherapee adds when the 'Auto' button is pressed. In particular, the RT adds +2.4 EV to equalize the picture. This is Wrong! What we want is to keep the noise down and at the same time bring the stars up. That's why we are going to play with the Tone Curve of the RT. To adjust the light properly we increase the cont...
Read more

Auto - Vectorization with little help from GCC!

This tutorial helps the programmers to benefit the progress of the auto-vectorization algorithms that are implemented in modern compilers, such as gcc. Before you start playing with the vectorization of your code i assume that you don't have any bottleneck in you code (like dynamic memory allocation etc) in the critical path. In this tutorial we will use the gcc 4.4.1, but the same steps can be applied to newer or older versions.  First of all there are two issues with auto vectorization:  1) gcc must know the architecture (eg what SIMD instructions are available)  2) The data structures must by properly aligned in memory The first step is to find the architecture of your processor and point it to gcc using the flags -mtune=... / -march=... you specify the architecture.  For example, my laptop is core2Duo so i put -march=core2. You can find more more information  here .  The next problem we must solve is knowledge of memory alignment. ...
Read more