dyon@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Dyon Anniballi) (03/02/88)
I've successfully managed to port tracer version 2.1 to the IBM-PC, and will be posting it to comp.binaries.ibm.pc shortly, but I have a few questions. 1) Is this the newest version of the program? I don't want to post an old version. 2) I accidentally erased my copy of something I called "new ray tracer" (ye old Sys V zcat bug!). Can anyone send me a new copy? (Or copies of any other net ray-tracers.) 3) Is it worth posting a vanilla 8086 (not 80286) version of the executable? Source code will be included, I compile using Turboc 1.5. 4) Anyone out there want a pre-posting version to write a VGA image displayer (the tracer outputs a file.) My hardware is somewhat unique, and I suspect that most people that will have the hardware to display traced images will have VGA's. You need at least 420x320 X 256 grey shades to display the image produced (without dithering). Technical notes: The program swaps (somewhat intelligently) data back and forth between disk. It helps to have a 1 megabyte ram disk. My 386 machine with such a ram disk takes about 1 hour 15 mins to generate the default 5 ball picture. It would probably be faster if I had a 387 coprocessor rather than the slowed down 287 that I do have. (And even faster if I had a large linear address space :-) -- --Dyon Anniballi dyon@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu | dyon%batcomputer@crnlcs.bitnet rochester!cornell!batcomputer!dyon | "No time for romantic escape...."