SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO

You're very welcome. Computer graphics has a very interesting history, and like many things, there's a lot to learn from studying it. Surprisingly, many techniques and principles are still relevant to this day. Thankfully, the Internet is full of documentation, post-mortem accounts and reference implementations to learn more about all this. Here's a bunch of random noteworthy things and references I forgot to link (sorry for potentially digging rabbit holes): The best information tends to come from official documentation detailing almost everything you want to know about the inner workings of systems. Additionally, unofficial community documentation can also be of great quality and complement official sources. The architecture overview posts from Rodrigo Copetti (link) pack a lot of accurate information at a glance, and are a great starting point if a specific topic piques your interest. The Resident Evil 2 microcode post-mortem: link Improved lighting, reverberation, Dolby surround and MP3 microcodes from Rare: link H.264 decoding microcode: link The Reality Signal Processor's programming guide: link Emulators' progress reports can reveal a lot about the details and intricacies required for accurately replicating these systems' features: link is one such amazing source of information, but all other major emulation efforts have equally interesting content. Transparency sorting of surfaces (link) is a hard problem to solve for traditional scanline renderers (most PC/console GPUs), to the point that even today's releases can ship with somewhat obvious rendering errors. On the other hand, tiled renderers (used in the Dreamcast, mobile hardware, and Apple silicon) are able to solve this problem due to their very nature, albeit trading another set of drawbacks, though the completely different hardware approach is a nice read (link). Someone once shared a video demonstrating a 3D package from ancient Lisp machines (▶ this video), and it was almost shocking to see how many things were familiar and done right from a modern perspective. Reimplementing new techniques on old hardware. For example, someone implemented real-time shadows and toon shading on N64 (link). For fun, you can grab RenderDoc (link) and copies of your favourite games to analyse their frames (even via emulation): see how developers implement or fake visual effects and generally how these games render their world. For instance, Dolphin emulates the GameCube's semi-programmable texture environment unit (TEV) via a pixel shader, and its shader source code is directly visible and editable, with the resulting output shown in the texture viewer. With the aid of textures, you can implement refraction, reflection and heat haze, among other effects. Retro Game Mechanics Explained talks about both hardware and software concepts: link

On Oberon, Mesa/Cedar and Lisp Machines, the experience extends to the whole OS and any application, or REPL, not just a plain text editor. Althought I haven't mentioned, Smalltalk also provides a similar experience. Here are some videos that try to convey it, from my playlists, "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" link "Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0" link "SymbolicsTalk28June2012" "SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO" ▶ this video "Symbolics Lisp Machine demo Jan 2013" link The Native Oberon demos available at link

Be prepared to be amazed with what Xerox PARC and others were doing, while Bell Labs was busy pushing for UNIX. "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" link "Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0" link "Documents as User Interfaces Video Demo" link "SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO" ▶ this video "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" link "Action!, the worlds first dynamic interface builder - 1988" (Interface Builder percursor, written in Lisp) link "The Interlisp programming environment" link And the cherry, how Lucid used Lisp ideas for their Energize C++ IDE, including an image based format for AST storage link link

SBCL REPL cannot do this on xterm, it needs a proper hosting REPL environment like SLIME, which is no wonder, given how Emacs came to be and the interaction with genera. Inline graphics from 1981, link Or using S-PACKAGE used to develop Nintendo 64. ▶ this video You are missing integration with live debugging, calling anything on the OS during a REPL session, e.g. OS APIs, calling into automation points of the OS, Can try out directly on the browser, courtesy of WebAssembly and recovery of Xerox PARC software, link Or get either Squeak or Pharo, and see how using the Transcript integrates with the whole platform Windows, with either PowerShell ISE, or its new VSCode integration, are the closest to these kind of experiences. To finalise with Xerox PARC view on UNIX, from 1989 "UNIX Needs A True Integrated Environment: CASE Closed" link

Wings3D's UI workflow is really nice for 3D mesh modeling (it was actually inspired by the Symbolics 3D animation system [1]). Blender feels very cumbersome when you learned 3D modeling with Wings. It's really unfortunate that they chose to implement it in a language (ERLANG) that severely limits the number of people that can contribute to the software, and as a result, the development of Wings sort of stagnates. [1] ▶ this video