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Software Graphics Programming IT Technology

1.6 Megahertz per Pixel: TMDC6 136

Posted by jamie from the get-your-demo-on dept.
TMDC Organizing writes "The sixth pseudoannual text mode demo competition is on. The goal is to make cool audiovisual demos that run in an NT console. Deadline for submissions is 12.12.2003 (Slashdot has covered TMDC before). An invitation demo and all the entries from two last contests are available." The FAQ has some static screenshots.
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1.6 Megahertz per Pixel: TMDC6 More

1.6 Megahertz per Pixel: TMDC6

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  • Cool Logo (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by bacon-kidney-pie ( 717079 )
    I wonder what it would be like to have two opposable thumbs.

  • Mirror to invitation (Score:4, Informative)

    by SeanTobin ( 138474 ) * <<byrdhuntr> <at> <hotmail.com>> on Friday November 14, 2003 @05:04PM (#7476724)
    This is quite possibly the only site that could be completely mirrored in text mode... and here I am posting a link... Anyway.. here is a mirror of the invitation:

    http://slashdot.isthatdamngood.com/tmdc6inv.zip [isthatdamngood.com]

    Be nice. Its dsl.
  • Is that geek-speak for "whenever the organizers decided to drop the bong and get things started again"?

  • Cygwin Legal ??? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Cygwin is just bash in the "console", right?

    Is cygin legal ?
    • Cygwin is much more than just "bash in the console", which you would discover if you bothered to check. It's actually getting to the point where it is often hard to make the argument for a unix-like system in terms of userland apps, because lots of stuff runs under Cygwin. There's even a fairly decent XFree86 server. You can compile and run GTK apps, for instance. It makes the filesystem transparent. All kinds of good things.

      I still can't get anything close enough to linux Virtual Consoles (160x60 Fra
      • I'm assuming that by "legal" he meant that he wanted to know whether it was legal for use in the competition.
        • Which it IS, but only if it fits in 2.8MB zipped and 5MiB (yes, there's a difference - they said 2800000 bytes and 5MB, but I could tell) unzipped. With the app.
      • If you use the native Windows port of rxvt supplied with Cygwin instead of Windows console, you can have your 160x60 consoles without problems. (Same goes for the X11 version, but Cygwin/XFree is a touch slow for console work.)

        I already think of my Cygwin box as GNU/Windows... as with the Linux case, I have Windows providing a kernel, and Cygwin providing all the utilities necessary to turn it into a real operating system.
        • "If you use the native Windows port of rxvt supplied with Cygwin instead of Windows console, you can have your 160x60 consoles without problems."

          No I can't! I can get pretty close I guess, and maybe even close enough to be workable. But can you sit me down at a windows box and tell me it's linux? No. Because there are video modes that apparently cannot be duplicated on the same hardware running windows. And I don't know what you're going to do about switching VC's. Yes, I know to use screen.

          There's
      • He wasn't asking if Cygwin was legal as in according to US law. He was asking if it was legal in TMDC6. AFAIK, you just have to be able to zip into 2.8MB, and unzip into 5MiB. If you can fit your app compiled for Linux AND Cygwin in 5MiB, you're fine. (and DON'T try expanding Cygwin on the fly - you'll just increase your zip size)

  • Here's my text demo (Score:5, Funny)

    by nacturation ( 646836 ) <nacturation AT gmail DOT com> on Friday November 14, 2003 @05:12PM (#7476802) Journal
    I demo this [evang.priv.no] to my coworkers about 10 times a day. It always makes them laugh. I guess that means I have a chance of winning?
    • I have never seen a blue screen that didn't have that on there. Is that the "standard" message, or is it like the bad old days of MacOS when "BUS ERROR" or something came up for lots of variable error conditions.

      What does IRQL... mean, anyway?
      • I forget exactly what it means, something like an irq vector not pointing to the interrupt service routine.

        It's nearly always caused by a memory failure or timing error, though a bad driver could cause it, it's doubtful.

        It's really common these days what with kids overclocking a system made out of second hand shit they bought on eBay.

        They get this error and blame windows.

        I love overclocker forums, reading posts like "Yeah I got my P4 2.4 runnin at 3 ghz, and my compusa ram is runnin at 500mhz now. My R
      • There are a million zillion things which can cause that error. Bluescreens are useless, it would be much better if the system would simply reboot by default. You can find out more about this error by visiting support.microsoft.com and searching on "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL".

      • What is IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (Score:5, Informative)

        by sgasch ( 239701 ) on Friday November 14, 2003 @05:45PM (#7477037) Homepage
        IRQL is "Interrupt Request Level". This is a DWORD in the NT kernel that cooresponds to a system state and determines what can preempt the currently running code. For example, raising the IRQL causes different priority device IRQs (interrupts) from the PICs to be masked off and ignored until the IRQL is lowered again. But the IRQL is not just to mask off interrupts, the NT kernel uses it for synchronization, communication between different CPUs on MP machines, to determine whether DPCs can run, to determine whether its ok to run user mode code, etc...

        Any code running in kernel mode (x86 ring 0) on NT (drivers or the kernel) can change the IRQL by making a call. Code typically raises the IRQL when it needs to do something critical and cannot afford to be preempted. The IRQL has to be at a certain level to acquire certain system locks, etc. So with all this raising of the IRQL people have to remember to put it back before they return.

        Invariably what happens is that someone forgets to lower the IRQL after they have raised it... maybe on an error path or something. They leave it raised, returned to whoever called them etc... and eventually you get to code that requires that the IRQL be below some level. For example, you try to acquire a spinlock, take a page fault, try to allocate memory (pool), try to schedule the next user mode job etc... All of these actions have code that basically asserts that the IRQL is where it should be. When it's not, the machine is bugchecked and you get the bluescreen.

        This kind of bugcheck is not ususally caused by hardware, it's almost always software related. Someone raised the IRQL and forgot to lower it. There are ways to find out who, basically by logging all calls to KeRaiseIrql, KeLowerIrql and some other routines that change the IRQL as a side effect.

      • Another poster did a good job with the technical explination so I won't rehash it. What it comes down to generally is a driver problem. Buggy drivers are great at causing this one, for a couple of different reasons. Usually, Windows should note the DLL that caused it. Find out which driver that is a part of, you have your culprit. As noted that's not the only thing that can cause it, but it is by far the most common.
    • Maybe HAL.DLL is just starting?!

    • Wow, nostalgia! I remember the blue screen of death. I used to see it back when I used the old pre-NT Windows kernels. I haven't seen it a single time in the three years since I upgraded to Windows 2000.
  • "Slashdot has covered TMDC before"... And they still are not able to handle the slashdot-effect...
  • It appears that they're running their webserver on NT.
  • distributed folding [blueprint.org] is, granted not as appealing to the eyes, but makes up for that with productive results. also makes a decent benchmarking util. win32 screenshot. [blueprint.org] i like using it with multi-gnome-terminal [sourceforge.net] w/ transparency turned on ontop of a snazzy desktop background image.

  • Sure you've seen the Paris Hilton video... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mikeophile ( 647318 ) on Friday November 14, 2003 @05:34PM (#7476953)
    but have you seen it in text-mode?

    On weed?

  • Looks like the lumeta system is toast.

    They started a project to map the Internet and probably didn't expect the entire Internet to come to them.

  • I want voxel-based displays! Let's make "32-bit deep" mean something a whole lot more!

  • ASCII Matrix (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 14, 2003 @05:46PM (#7477046)
    Somebody threw together a

    Matrix clip [washington.edu] in ASCII.

  • Bitmapped text mode (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jhan ( 542783 ) on Friday November 14, 2003 @06:03PM (#7477189) Homepage

    The last time this competition came up, I got to wondering what's to stop you from doing "bitmapped" text mode? Standard 80x25 text mode is 30 KHz ie. 30,000 lines per second, each 640 pixels wide. That's about 24 million pixels per second. These day we have multi giga-op processors, and interrupt hardware can't be far behind (?).

    Simply set the screen to 80x25 space characters then trigger interrupts a bit before each pixel and change the background color. Hey presto, 16 color bitmapped mode. Then use temporal anti-aliasing to yield even more colors. Kudos to the first person who makes a X driver for this mode.

    Sure, this will eat a lot of CPU time, but that's what this sort of competition is all about.

    • Hey presto, 16 color bitmapped mode.

      If I remember correctly, standard text-modes offer the ability to change the palette with six available bits per channel, giving you a total of 2**18=262144 possible colors in text-mode. That's the way the "copper bars" effect is made, although it usually just used simple shades of red (for simplicity). (Look up copper bars here [jasondoucette.com])

      • Please snort less cocaine.

        Text mode is 16 colors (8 primaries + half bright). 6 bits per channel is probably some misplaced memories from EGA days. The page you cited is all about VGA.

      • Palette shifting is against the rules.
      • I should mention that the Copper Bars sample on my page [jasondoucette.com] does NOT change the palette in the horizontal retrace of a text or graphics mode. It uses 320x200 256-color mode (mode 13h) and uses a certain optimization to redraw every pixel every frame, allowing the bars to rotate, as well as zoom in and out.

        But, BetterThanCaesar is right, as someone has mentioned. On a VGA card, in text mode, you can set the palette using the same code to modify the palette in 256-color mode (obviously because it uses the sam
    • You can do it, but it would be virtually impossible to keep the whole mess synced up with the monitor's scan rate.

      Much easier to do something like copper bars, where you change the color during the monitors horizontal retrace.

      What I can't figure is, I had a copper bars program that depended on changing colors during horizontal retrace, and it worked perfectly on the LCD panel of a laptop. Are the LCD panels designed to act like a computer monitor complete with a little pause after drawing each line?
      • What I can't figure is, I had a copper bars program that depended on changing colors during horizontal retrace, and it worked perfectly on the LCD panel of a laptop. Are the LCD panels designed to act like a computer monitor complete with a little pause after drawing each line?

        If you have a passive matrix LCD, yes. Active matrix supossedly only flip pixels as needed.

    • You CAN change the palette, but TMDC6 doesn't allow changing the palette OR changing the character map.
  • The music for the invitation demo is in Ogg Vorbis format.

    I for one welcome the repeal of our old MP3 overlords!
  • This contest brings back fond memories of creating line printer art on a CDC6600. Better than ASCII art, it relied on the ability to to use carriage returns (without line feeds) to create especially dark overprinted characters for a much wider pallette of gray values ("8" "X" ":" was pretty dark if the ribbon was fresh). You could make some pretty cool pictures (within the restrictions of 80 cols of overprinted chars). The biggest problem was that it tended to irritate the computer center gnomes when you
    • going a bit OT...

      there were also those booths that took a digital pic of you and printed it with the same 'technology' on big (in order to have a recognizeable face) posters (the 'wanted, dead or alive' ones were very popular) for a sizeable amount of $$$, I think they were popular in 1980 or so.

      Around 1985-86 I found a cool program for my MSX that did something similar, you used a worn ribbon (so it was sort of medium/light grey) and it printed several times on the same row (graphically), after a loooong

  • Open source anyone ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stud9920 ( 236753 ) on Friday November 14, 2003 @08:28PM (#7478292)
    One thing that has always bothered me about the demo scene, is their lack of openness. It's very hard to come across the source code of a demo, or even just a description of how it was done.

    It's frustrating for multiple reasons. First, because it's harder for newbies to learn the art, and second because after some time, demos that were real pieces of art, Second Reality for instance, are pretty much unrunnable on a modern computer. And this is truly sad.
    • TMDC 5 invitation was released as open-source. The sources are available for download at the TMDC site.

      Phaser / DHFC^grin
    • Demoscene has always been quite closed about sources and how to make the best tricks. This is now changing slowly as even regular 3D HW api tutorials tend to have enough information available for creating some kind of demo, and some groups have also released source to old productions as well.

      About demos being unrunnable on a modern computer, have to say that it really sucks. However, there's still projects like DemoDVD [demodvd.org] and Amidemos [planet-d.net] which try to archive demos as videos.

      Also, to my and many others delight

  • Well this contest is silly in it's basic concept. This all have reduced to about doing good decimate+dither+map&fit routine, which converts graphics to ascii. Moreover why the hell Windows (especially lame 2000!) are so much of a defacto? Very lame, veeery lame. And asking Windows Default Palette is even more lame. I, myself, have dome pretty lot of ascii mode arts and demos back then, when i had a lovely Tandy CGA. It was about art. And tweaking. About Weaking ART. And Art of Tweaking. I think, in
    • You could be rendering your 3d on the fly if you don't have enough space for your demo...
      • For sure! That's why i want that size limit in fact. If there is no limit - You can render all and just bring a player along with 30mb file with all the demo.
        512k is sort of enough to put all textures, objects and samples for music with some simple compression.

        And yes - main limit - demo must be only one file! [die windows!] annd no usage of exteral liraries and dll's allowed.

        Otherwise i don't understand what's a demo - demo of direct X? silly&sick!
        • Where does it say it must only be one file? Hell, the winner of TMDC5 used external files! The invitations all use external files!
          • :]

            well i am talking about a good compo, not this one. external files is a baad thing for a demo. just like causing a bluescreen with problem in opengl or directx and than fucking up all stoopid windows.

            boo on windows. shouldn't compo use anything more clear and clean?
  • Having looked at some of the demos they remind me of lots of entries of the Assembly competitions
    from the early 90s before they descended into 3D hell.
  • In their FAQ:

    "Since we're doing the jurying on several sites, and most of these do not have the possibility of using linux,"

    Jesus , I mean come on , how hard would it be for these guys to have a couple of linux judges who
    have linux installed on their PCs?? Its not like people are asking them to judge AS/400 console demos! Or they could even get some

    old cast off 486s or something and use those since you'd only need a bare minimal linux setup.

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