Monthly Archives: September 1998

Finally I’m using Linux at work! I can do some kick-ass work on perl scripting, database connectivity, and do some cool automation to update the site everyday! 🙂
The Beginners Linux Guide has moved home to www.linux.ie, so go over there and check out some of the new docs Owen has written!
Mesa has reached version 3.0 which is old news by now but worth mentioning anyway!
I got an email yesterday from someone asking about coding in assembly. I used to code demos using ASM, but that was quite a while ago. In this day and age I would recommend using C/C++ with _maybe_ inline assembly in low level classes/functions to get things going fast. With new processors coming out and different operating systems running on them/on old processors coding an application/demo restricts your potential audience greatly! Still, asm has it’s advocates and benefits but the disadvantages outweigh these IMO.
Oh yes. My site is a few hits short of 10,000 hits! If someone sends me the gif of that hit I’ll give them a mention on the page!
Another big announcement recently was the release of Scitech Display Doctor. This may very well encourage demo coders to move to Linux but it’s proof of the awful architecture of the PC, especially when it comes to the video sub-system. The screenshot on the above page looks very familiar..

Two little tips for Netscape:
Middle-mouse button clicking on a link brings the link up in a new window.
Copy a URL to the clipboard and click the middle-mouse button in Netscape (on a clear part of the page) to load the URL in the browser.
Second tip was courtesy of the ILUG mailing list
Download squid to improve your browsers’ perceived responsiveness. It works great and you don’t get any of the Netscape stalls when you pressed ESC when it was “Looking for host:…” because it doesn’t look! Squid does!
This essay makes quite good reading, especially if you think that everyone should use Linux and Linux is perfect for everything. Again, I got this link from the ILUG mailing list.
I think I’ll buy a Microsoft wheel mouse for home. I got the one in work to function in X and it rocks in Netscape. The wheel even acts as a middle mouse button when pressed down!
A friend pointed out this article by Cringely. Interesting reading on the freedom of utilities and consumer goods, and the goings-on of Microsoft.. Thanks Mark.

All you mp3 fans should get over to the Blade enc. homepage. It’s something like 25-30% faster than the 8hz encoder and while source isn’t available, there are glibc2 and libc5 version for i386 Linux. Other platforms are supported too and well worth downloading.
The Mesa openGL library has finally reached version 3 although I guess you all knew about this thanks to slashdot and freshmeat. 😉
Check out Linux Games for a link to screenshots to a version of Xmame using openGL. Looks cool!

I found a few things of interest on freshmeat today.
First off is FxEngine which is a graphics lib for the 3dfx using 3dfx glide. It originally appeared on Win32 but a slightly earlier version was ported to Linux. So, if you want to do a 3dfx demo in win32 and Linux then this may be the answer.
The screenshots are impressive on the homepage although if the fps in them is true I wonder if it’s slow..
A new release of Prometheus Truecolour is out too. Supposedly it has a ton of new changes so get it if you’re interested in this!
On a final note, I installed Quake2 on a friends’ Linux box tonight. The 3dfx mini-port was ported from Windows95 and the game now flies. I was amazed at how fast it was on a P133. I remember it had been impressive before, but now.. *phew*

According to Linux Games there’s a new game using openGL called BFRIS. It’ll apparently be released on Linux too and the screenshots look pretty tasty!
You may have seen links to NewsNow popping up around the place. It’s a very good site for grabbing the latest headlines. You can even grab the latest Linux headlines! Unfortunetly their database hasn’t been updated at this time since Sep. 11th so news is actually old, but when they have it running properly again you can expect up to the hour news! Check out NewsNow if you want to be the first to post an article on Slashdot 🙂

A bit late with this update. The Babylon Project was featured on Slashdot a while back. It has an ambitious aim, it “aims to become a standard development platform for Computer Games (and possibly other software in the future) allowing the developer to make one executable that can run on any x86 based microprocessor, regardless of operating system (thus freeing the developer to concentrate on developing the GAME, and not having to worry about platform specific problems).”

They’re going to use Linux as a base OS, one reason being is the availability of the OS on many different architectures. It seems they hope to use the idea of booting Linux to play games using some Linux loader (loadlin?). This would have worked in the days of DOS but nowadays people expect things to work by just clicking..
Several new versions of PTC came out in the last while. Check them out at the link below somewhere.
My machine isn’t so out of date anymore! I now have a P200MMX chip, 64 megs of ram, 13 gigs of space (heh.. gotta try out Suse and BeOS again!) and I invested in a tv tuner which unfortunetly doesn’t work very well with my S3 chip in X 🙁
‘Course, some friends have PII 400s and masses of ram and lots of other stuff, but then, they’re running an MS OS 😉
A note to all you Irish guys! There may be a Quake meet in Dublin on the 19th of the month (next week!) I want to be there, will you? email me about it!
It appears that a large minority of you would like some help in demo coding.. Anyone interested in a series on coding in X? My aim will be portability, and I might veer off to weird stuff like networked demos and the like.. I’ll be thinking about it. It might require a whole new site though!
I was just checking through The Linux Scenezone when I stumbled across the Optimum homepage. Unfortunetly it’s in French but it has a nice bit of Javascript that makes some circling balls follow the mouse around the browser.. *cool* IMO 🙂 Besides that the page has tiny fonts 🙁 One more thing to note is they host the Linux DemoScene Ring. I joined. If you have a Linux demoscene related site why not join too?

**Late News**
It seems like the Babylon project had to rename itself because the name was being used already. It’ll now be called the Babel project and can be found at http://celsius-software.hypermart.net/babel