I wrote a Raytracer for DOS, 16 VGA colors
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN fans praise Bisqwit as a favorite programming YouTuber and this video as an excellent look at dithering.
What it is
Bisqwit writes a raytracer from scratch in C++ for DOS, rendering in the 16-color VGA palette at 640x480. The video also covers color quantization and ordered dithering.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2019 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec petercooper · 2019-01 · on “Let’s Create a Speech Synthesizer in C++17 [video]”
Agreed. My favourite programming YouTuber by a long stretch. If anyone is unfamiliar with him and wants to watch some of the "classics" I'd recommend these: His "cracking videogame passwords" series: [LINK] Creating a Doom-style 3D engine in C: [LINK] Creating a Rogue-like game in C++11: [LINK] Creating a PIC16 emulator and NES music player: [LINK] Creating a NES emulator: [LINK] Creating a DOS VGA raytracer: [this video]
Strong rec pdkl95 · 2021-01 · on “Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering”
Bisqwit's discussion of dithering is outstanding . He presents a very impressive algorithm for arbitrary-palette dithering that is animation safe . > This paper introduces a patent-free positional (ordered) dithering algorithm that is applicable for arbitrary palettes. Such dithering algorithm can be used to change truecolor animations into paletted ones, while maximally avoiding unintended jitter arising from dithering. He demonstrates it "live coding" style in this[1] video where he writes a demo in 256 colors of a "starfield" animation with color blending and Gaussian blur style bloom. The first animation at 6:33 using traditional ordered dithering has the usual annoying artifacts. The an
Cites themodelplumber · 2019-02 · on “Show HN: E3Dos – A 3D engine I wrote when I was a teen”
Wow that's really cool. I liked the structure you added to the Martian landscape. It was funny to wake up and see this on HN, as I was watching something DOS and 3D-related on Bisqwit's channel last night. [this video]