7 Apr
2024
7 Apr
'24
5:51 p.m.
On Apr 6, 2024, at 11:40 AM, Phil Budne via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Paul Koning wrote:
Well said, indeed!
Yes, and some emulations have done this, such as
Phil Budne's famous work in SIMH.
Famous?? I'm famous???!!!
To be fair, I started with Douglas W. Jones' PDP8 Emulator.
Which reminds me of:
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of
giants. -- Isaac Newton
In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side with the giants on
whose shoulders we stand. -- Gerald Holton
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my
shoulders. -- Hal Abelson
In computer science, we stand on each other's feet. -- Brian K. Reid It was certainly an awakening to the inherent
parallelism of "analog"
natural processes... I wrote and tuned the code twenty years ago, but
haven't looked at whether better results might be possible by wasting
the capabilities of current systems (SIMD libaries and/or multiple
cores). I felt like I only was able to give a slim impression, and
not an immersive experience. I've also wondered what could be done
with 4K HDR displays: making points round(!) and simulating the
"bloom" and intensity of repeatedly or highly intensified spots.
I did these things, in an emulation of the CDC 6600 console (DD60). It paints the
"dot" on the screen using a 2D Gaussian distribution around the nominal center,
with its parameters adjusted by the "focus" and "intensity" controls
just like on the original. And each visit of the spot is summed into the current screen
data using saturated arithmetic. So you get intensification at no extra charge, and if a
spot is drawn many times it also gets a bit blurrier due to the skirts of the Gaussian
distribution becoming more visible. At one point I had the spot as an RGB value with a
touch of blue in it, so the "bloom" would be bluer than normal lines. I took
that out because I don't remember what the real screen actually does. But clearly a
color shift like that could be simulated.
paul