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
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.
In part 4 of our raytracer porting blog, we fix the SDL event pump, add a PNG saver with libspng, remove the preset resolution limits and add a unit test using CTest.
How AlphaPixel created a 3D interactive visualization of Mars using CesiumJS, covering the technical aspects of rendering a virtual Mars globe in a WebGL-capable browser, including configuring ellipsoids, applying real-world data layers, and adding interactivity for dynamic Mars data exploration.
The article explores adding a modern SDL-based UI to a legacy Amiga raytracer. It covers integrating SDL with CMake, updating UI code from Amiga OS, and resolving rendering performance issues. By using SDL’s cross-platform libraries, the article demonstrates how to modernize graphical functionality while preserving the original program logic.
This article details the process of compiling and running legacy Amiga-based raytracer code in Visual Studio Code. It covers updating old C code, handling missing libraries, and adapting the original environment using modern tools like CMake. The step-by-step guide ensures the code works on current systems with minimal changes.
The article explores how AlphaPixel tackles the challenges of forward porting legacy media and code, including recovering data from 1980s and 1990s hardware. Through a real-life example involving an Amiga-based raytracer project, it highlights the complexities of resurrecting old code, using modern tools to extract and convert outdated formats for modern use.
