Eric Graham’s 1987 Amiga Juggler raytracer (Part 2): Porting to SDL In Part 1 of this blog series, we recovered the disk image, extracted the source files, and received permission to publish Eric Graham’s 1987 Juggler raytracer source. At that point, we have a snapshot of history that can be viewed from afar, like a[…]
Recovering Eric Graham’s 1987 Juggler raytracer source code AlphaPixel often gets involved with modernizing and updating old performance and graphics code. Sometimes that means client work under NDA. But sometimes it means a fun side quest in the mystical realms of curiosity, preservation, and the practical problem of getting old data into a form that can be read and used on a current machine. Today let’s talk about Amiga Juggler ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sculpt_3D ). The Juggler animation was ground-breaking and Earth-shattering. Even the Amiga’s creators (Commodore) didn’t believe it had been made on an Amiga. They thought the actual computation work[…]
How Have AI/LLM Coding Tools Impacted Software Development? The emergence of AI systems (as we will also refer to as Large Language Model/LLM tools) in the 2020s is one of the biggest, unanticipated, game changers in software development (and virtually every field). For decades AI research plodded along, making incremental progress with occasional practical breakthroughs,
LAN-LOK: The Antarctic DOS Sabotage Game Lost for 34 Years (Part 1) An exercise in reconstructing (and maybe modernizing) history. AlphaPixel often gets called upon to work on legacy codebases, sometimes VERY legacy. We have contact with code from the 80s and 90s on a regular basis, in a variety of dialects and languages, and
Mercenary Programming: the AlphaPixel way Most software shops call themselves consultants. We call ourselves Mercenary Programmers. We are a rapid-response, air-dropped strike team. We show up when things are on fire, fix what’s broken, and leave without creating a dependency on us. No politics, ramp-up theater or six-week discovery phase. We are senior developers who
Top 10 Technical Papers From SIGGRAPH 2025 Vancouver (with paper links) We keep a close eye on the cutting edge of graphics research so we can bring the freshest ideas into our projects and keep our clients informed. The annual Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) 2025 conference took place in
clang-format Style Guide Matrix and Summaries Have you ever tried to make sense of clang-format’s dozens of style options? Or tried to remember which one actually controls that one spacing quirk? Most guides out there just show examples without summarizing why one choice differs from another. We created a table that lines up the formatting
Shader Basics: Go from a Color Gradient to an Animated Mandelbrot in a GPU Shader in One Lesson To play with shaders, go to https://www.shadertoy.com/ and click “New” in the upper right (you can also create an account if you want to save your work as you play). It creates a new basic shader. void
The definitive word on how to force selection of a discrete GPU in C/C++ code.
In part 5 of our raytracing port, we clean up the code a bit and then add camera/viewport animation and a checkerboard ground texture.
