A short video about my Commodore Plus/4

Again i competed at Forndata (Summer 2022) (www.forndata.org) in the Amiga and other graphics competition with the commodore plus4. The entry made the second place (of two entries) with 106 points.

Aphrodite of Milos is an ancient greek sculpture created between 150 and 125 BC. Milos is a greek island where the sculpure was found in the year 1820.

The demo is done in High-Res mode and needs the screen to be 90° rotated to the left.

To keep this BASIC demo short, the 3d model is not renderd in real time on the commodore plus/4 (totaly possible but would last hours), but only the visible lines are drawn line by line per converted SVG-export from Blender. The endresult of both methods is the same.

To get filled faces with the SVG-export method, i start with a green canvas, draw the facelines with black and then flood-fill (Paint command) the background also with black.

The whole idea is to watch the picture unfold during the 3 minute presentation and be hopefully suprised by the endresult.

I had a great time yesterday at Forndata Demoparty. Great entries and really fun to watch.
And a great Thank You to Forndata for having me there.

PRG: afrodite.d64

Deep field test-image of JWST on the Commodore Plus/4
The star is called: 2MASS j17554042+6551277
Done in standard multicolor mode.
Credit: NASA/STSCI

PRG: jwststar.prg

I wrote a small converter-program for the plus/4 in .Net4.8 which converts Blender Freestyle SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) into sequential files (Seq-file). The Seq-file is loaded and interpretated by this small BASIC program:

0 GRAPHIC1,1:COLOR4,1:COLOR0,1:COLOR1,6,4:SCNCLR
1 OPEN8,8,12,“FILENAME,SEQ,READ“
2 INPUT#8,C,X,Y
3 IFC=1THENDRAW1TOX,Y: GOTO2: ELSE IF C = 0THEN LOCATEX,Y: GOTO2: ELSE GOTO4
4 CLOSE 8
RUN

This BASIC code can be easily converted to any other microcomputer (Atari, Apple, Sinclair, MSX, …) of that era. Please send me the code, if you tried this for your system. I want to include it into the converter too.

PRG: GeorgeSVG2SEQ.zip (v 1.230408, you need DotNet 4.8)

Examples:
teapot_example.zip (SVG and SEQ-File for testing)
SEQ_Examples.zip (Seq-files of Hubble, Voyager, Couriosity)
SEQ_porsche911.zip (Seq-file Porsche 911 Turbo)

Atari 800 XL
n1.zip (N1 Fighter) (n1.txt, Atari 800XL only)

Hint: If you use MacOs or Linux and you have trouble reading the files, change the EOL (End-Of-Line) in the file that works with Notepad++.

Video Tutorial Blender 3.5

Some examples:

On its way to Lagrange Point 2. All systems nominal so far.
Conversion to the Commodore 16.
Image-Source: esa.int, images, Webb-poster

PRG: webb16.prg

The James Webb Space Telescope is going to be launched tomorrow Dec 25th.

The memory limitation of 64kb RAM makes its very challenging to render a 3D object like the JWST with over 40k of verts on the commodore plus/4 (or any 8 bit homecomputer of that era). But in Blender you are able to export the finished render in a SVG format file (vector graphics), which you can translate in drawing commands for the plus/4. Model is taken from the NASA 3d Ressource site.

PRG: jwst.zip

This year i competed at Forndata Summer 2021 (https://www.forndata.org) in the graphics competition with a three step 3D-render for the commodore plus4.

Some background infos:

• The scene is separated into 3 renders with following order: boosters, shuttle and space station.
• After each render the screen-memory was saved in a file, and then loaded for the next render as „background“ image.
• The renders are done on an emulator in warp mode. Doing this on a real machine would take probably 1-2 hours or more per render, but its totally possible.

Model-specs (retopologized):
ISS: 1105 vertices, 1195 faces
Shuttle: 2504 vertices, 1733 faces
Boosters\Tank: 2699 vertices, 2165 faces

The base models were provided by the NASA 3D Resources site. I adapted them for this 30-40 year old computer. Thank you for inspiring me!

PRG: spacesh.prg

My newest project included the rebuild of an old IBM AT (512 kB RAM) for the port of the 3d Engine, which is originally written for the commodore plus/4 (64 kb RAM). Download the demo below.

Dowload-Link (Qbasic, DOS 5.0 only): 3dEngine26QBasic.zip

With portability in mind I ported the 3d Engine for the commodore plus/4 on many BASIC System of that era (even to modern PC). The next major step is to bring colours to the renders. In Blender i (mis-)use Materials to define the colours of the faces, which are exported to the Obj-File. Here the promising first result on a Atari ST, which is my experimenting plattform for further developments and ideas. A plus/4 MultiColor version is in experimental phase (see screens) .

Dowload-Link (Atari ST only): Parrot3dDemo.zip

Preview Plus/4 MC Version:

Merry Christmas, Frohe Weihnachten, Kala Christougenna!

PRG: felizsid.prg