pouët.net

Not directly demoscene related, but still inspiring.
DemoV615

I've stopped watching when he said it's hard to do 640x480 32bits graphics at 60fps.

go write an OS about it.

(http://www.losethos.com/doc/LoseThosGraphics.html#l1)

It's a bit puzzling cause this guy says he's worked 7 years on this, written an assembler and compiler and OS so he should have a clue, but these kinds of claims about graphics really question his coding skills.

Maybe he's not pushing data on the bus the right way. Simple central RAM surface + blit to vesa2.0 LFB should allow for quite some more.

But it might be true that even the blit will be bottlenecked without mainboard/graphic drivers nowadays (but not to that extent) and that you wont have much more than vesa2 modes, aka 640, 800, 1024, maybe 1280 and 1600.
I remember something called directFB also.

Still, interesting, he says he's got his own language and theres no protection/paging/segmentation, could be some cool experimentation/hacking platform.

There are just things here and there that give the feeling that he's a lunatic who cant code and thinks he's a genious, but I havent investigated enough to tell.

For those interested they might look into solar OS which I think is a really outstanding piece of asm work (though not 64) ; theres also some seemingly new thing called pure64. And the old menuetOS which I never really managed to love but which is quite an amount of work.
Dunno wether people here are into this or not.

from the guy:

I read a bit more.
Seems to be quite some work, seems to work, has a "bare to the metal, no useless junk" philosophy.
Interesting. The guy apparently is a hardware guy.
Probably mostly a hobby thing, and wont attain more.

Maybe he never got the CPU caches working....

damn, that thing is ugly

From the same guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i0pMO697Zk

Maybe he never figured out that an i7 can easily write 70 MB/s across a PCIe x16 bus, with or without caches. ;)

Is it just me or does his voice has the same tension as that you'd expect from someone on a toilet? :D

Is he narrating that clip at gunpoint?

god, please help me.
god, please help me.
god, please help me.
god, please help me.
god, please help me.
god, please help me.
god, please help me.

♥:
70 MB /s, I hope you're kidding. This seems orders of magnitude slower than it should.

@HeLLoWorld: he can't use VESA since his kernel leaves the real-mode. But VGA registers still work on today GPUs.

640x480 32bit 60hz is about 70MB/s. Graphics adapter bus speeds have exceeded that number since 1995 or something...

ponce: now that's just BS, he can either switch back to real mode or run the bios in a separate task in virtual x86 mode.

Someone fix his code :)

SONGS BY GOD !

god, please help me.
god, please help me.
god, please help me.
god, please help me.
god, please help me.
god, please help me.
god, please help me.

Damn, this thing is not inspiring at all...

Instead this one, is sth else:

ponce:

If theres only one mode used and no switch after boot, all you have to do is to call bios int 13h for vesa2.0 init before entering protected mode and then you use the lfb physical address to access vram, even if not in real mode.

If you need to switch modes, i guess you can do as suggested above, lock everything and go back to realmode to call the int, or take a deep breath and learn the quirks of virtual 8086.

For the 70MB/s thing, I thought it was mentioned as a maximum.
Obviously we should be well above this even without cache/SIMD/nontemporalwrites/chipsetdrivers/mtrr/graphicboarddrivers.