Over a decade ago (sigh) I had managed to make a rig for Blender's old Freestyle renderer that generated pixel-art-ish icons like this:

Yes, this is a 3d model with no retrouching. It's not "pixel art" especially with all the antialiasing but it gives a very good impression of it at 100% scale (this is blown up 400%)

I really liked the results here - rendering a keyboard that has a lot of high frequency noise at this size without it turning into pure moire is pretty great.

MartyPC needs a decent setup/launcher interface, and my idea was to dust this off and render isometric views of the various systems MartyPC can emulate.

Unfortunately for the life of me, I cannot get anything like this effect anymore in a recent Blender version, and despite my best efforts I cannot hunt down the exact ancient version of Blender i used - all my attempts to load this project and render it again have all ended in sadness.

Anyone know of a good rig for doing this in Cycles?

#martypc #blender #blender3d

Improving #MartyPC's video emulation with monitor emulation!

Instead of letting the CGA card's hsync and vsync outputs drive the display directly, we simulate a monitor that must lock on to these signals via vertical and horizontal PLLs.

This provides a semi-realistic 'bounce' when you change video-modes (needs a lil tweaking), but also means if you program an invalid video mode the screen will start to roll, like a real monitor.

#retrocomputing #emulation

I thought it might be a good idea to reach to the basics trying to debug that #FreePascal bug which makes even simplest programs fail to run on i8086/msdos (my #TP7 game port still “”works””, until it reaches #DOS API calls). So thought it might be possible to target the #8086 and run #MartyPC by @gloriouscow

While I pretty much know that the code jumps somewhere randomly and then goes along executing emptiness, I still need to find out why…
and how to set breakpoints on INTs :p