[comp.misc] Movie BYU

milo@ndmath.UUCP (Greg Corson) (12/08/86)

I have recently succeeded in porting an old (1978) version of the Movie BYU
(hidden line/surface rendering/animation engineering applications)
program to an Apple Macintosh and will soon be moving it to an Amiga and 
possibly an Atari ST.  This was a quick port (I didn't want to waste a lot
of time on an obsolete version) but it does prove it is possible and useful
to move the program to such a machine.

The program runs with respectable speed...a 112 plane picture took about
1.5 minutes to render as a hidden line image on a standard Mac.  I will soon
have a program that takes pictures output from Movie BYU and displays them
rapidly (in sequence) on the Mac screen so you can watch animations generated
by Movie in real time.

I had considered buying a copy of the latest version of Movie BYU, porting it
to the three machines and then selling it as a product but I soon 
discovered that, if I wanted to sell my ported version of the program I would
have to pay $400-500 per copy sold to BYU as a royalty.  This would make the
end user price something like $1000-$2000.  A good price for mainframe software
but a little high for PC stuff.  I had hoped the royalties to BYU would be 
low enough that I could sell the Mac/Atari/Amiga version of the program at
a price engineering students could afford.

My question is...would anybody out there actually be interested in a 
Mac/Amiga/AtariST port of Movie BYU for those prices?  I might be able to sell
ported code much cheaper to someone who already has a Movie BYU source license
but I would have to check out that with the legal folks.

I would also like very much to talk to anyone who is currently using the 
Movie BYU package out there in netland...mainly to get some details on how
the new features work.  I could also use copies of any interesting Movie BYU
geometry files you might have created...I haven't got any complex GEOM files
to test my port of movie with...all my old files are stuck on a magtape which
I currently have no easy way to read and convert to Mac disks.

Greg Corson
...seismo!iuvax!kangaro

ksbooth@watcgl.UUCP (Kelly Booth) (12/09/86)

MOVIE.ARIZONA used to be the version of MOVIE.BYU for 16-bit machines,
including the 68000 (I think).  Potential users may want to check it
out before making a decision.

jim@otto.UUCP (Jim Thompson) (12/19/86)

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In article <262@watcgl.UUCP> ksbooth@watcgl.UUCP (Kelly Booth) writes:
>MOVIE.ARIZONA used to be the version of MOVIE.BYU for 16-bit machines,
>including the 68000 (I think).  Potential users may want to check it
>out before making a decision.


Wrong.	MOVIE.ARIZONA is the pre-distribution of MINI-MOVIE.BYU.

MINI-MOVIE.BYU is now available for 16-bit machines.

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