On 21/01/2016 07:55 AM, scott wrote:
> I think I had a P166 with 16MB RAM ... and then I bought a 3Dfx card for
> it.

Ah, the days when 3D cards cost *money*. I think my step brother paid 


Mind you, remember when a graphics card with better than 256 colours 
cost money? (There's an expansion card for the Amiga called Picasso, 
which gives you true 24-bit video, as opposed to the 256 colour graphics 


>> (Remember Glide?)
>
> It's where I learned 3D graphics programming :-)

Heh. I never learned 3D programming. Well, I did read the OpenGL book 
almost from cover to cover. But that's an older version; the current one 
costs money.

I've never looked at DirectX though. (Or should that be Direct3D?)

The only time I "learned 3D programming" was when I wrote cost in 
Borland Turbo Pascal to draw a spinning fireframe cube. And then added 
surface illumination, which dropped the framerate to a crawl. And then a 
rotating torus, which required me to implement the painter's algorithm 
for correct surface occlusion. (Back-face cull is sufficient for a cube, 
or any other convex solid I suppose...)

Oh, and that time I built a ray-tracer and thought I was the only person 
in human history to have ever achieved such a feat...

> The separate cards for
> 2D/3D was actually really useful, as it allowed me to have a TWO SCREEN
> setup!

Interesting...

>> Quake II is also the only game I've ever made a map for.
>
> I was a Duke Nukem guy rather than Quake II, I used to waste my summer
> holidays with my sister over serial link on that. When we got bored we
> made maps - mine were usually full of hidden tunnels and secret ambush
> points :-) The editor was very buggy though, and would periodically get
> completely corrupted and you'd end up with several walls going through
> the middle of all your rooms and extending 32km into the distance. That
> was a sure sign it was about to crash and you better reload the last
> backup (or the one before that...).

I didn't have any problems with crashes, just that I suck at level design!

I do recall though that my dad ordered a computer from a local computer 
company, and when I tried to play Quake II, the graphics were slightly 
messed up. In certain areas of the map, it looked like a paintball fight 
went wrong; weird splotches of highly-saturated random colours all over 
the walls, like they're glowing. When me dad took it back to the shop, 
they told him they "accidentally fitted the graphics card back to 
front". Which is so obviously nonsense, you have to wonder... But 
anyway, when the PC came back, the graphics worked fine.

One of my graphics cards developed an interesting fault where after a 
while, it would start rendering polygons that extent to infinity along 
one of the coordinate axies. Makes it very hard to play CS:S when you 
can't actually see where you're going!

Post a reply to this message