I don't really understand how or why Bad Apple is becoming the de-facto graphics rendering "hello world" but it's fun to see in real time. I came across this demo which uses Bad Apple for demonstrating high FPS hypermedia:
1. The creator is extremely cool about remixes and fanuse. In many ways touhou is the OG modern internet fandom in a way that previous ones weren't. Your bad apple video will not be taken down even though it has the same audio as all the others.
2. The shadow puppet format is recognizable at seemingly any resolution. I have seen examples in a 3x3 grid even. On top of that, it only has two colors (black/white, 1/0) so its dead simple to convert the video frames into any other format you can imagine with only a 'hello world' understanding of what you're doing.
Maybe read the linked article about that. ;)
Just in case reading TFA is too daunting for those only reading comments
As the article mentions, the source video is grayscale, not monochrome. Grays are used for motion blur, glow, gradients, etc.
Commercial music is really hard to utilize in this way. ZUN and Fox know the music is special to the fans and that they like to see it in different places, so they put the effort in to accommodate it.
built on a fully programmable cpu in redstone
IRIS Computer Specs:
- Custom 16 bit CPU
- 8 kB of RAM
- 64 kB of ROM
- 1 kB texture ROM
- 96x64 pixel screen - 16 colours
- Floating point unit (add sub mult div sqrt)
- 173 redstone tick clock
- No 3D graphics hardware acceleration (entirely done in software)
- Runs programs written in URCL
- Runs at 1 million ticks per second thanks to MCHPRS server - which is 5.8 kHz clock speed
I had to go look into this, because that's shockingly fast. The latest Intel CPUs have a 6.2 GHz clock rate when TVBing, so each Minecraft tick runs in ~1,000 CPU cycles. Each thread handles 65k surface blocks (256x256 plot), so that means each cycle is processing upwards of 10 surface cycles in the most lenient circumstances I can think of.
I went to go look into how on Earth they're doing that with all this Redstone around; there are some docs at [1] if anyone else is curious. It looks like they have some kind of Redstone "compiler" that converts the Redstone blocks into a graph, and execution happens on that graph.
That's crazy impressive. It does make using Minecraft feel a little silly, to me and perhaps only me. They have an input step where they basically parse the map, convert it to a graph that seems to resemble the AST of an LLVM IR, and then execute it. It makes Minecraft feel like a very awkward scripting language to me; why stack 16k Redstone cubes manually just so they can parse it into an IR instead of just scripting generating the IR or something like that?
1. https://github.com/MCHPR/MCHPRS/blob/master/docs/Redpiler.md
I would imagine they used one of many tools for copy/paste in Minecraft, especially with the repetitive nature of the components.
Mojang (and now Microsoft) have taken ideas from the community to make the game better. It would be interesting if they incorporated the Redpiler idea, because redstone can get laggy
I’m not a visual learner, but many people are, and this is probably a good illustration of a basic PC.
Likewise, editing visual 3D blocks may suit some people better than writing text.
It’s also probably the most fun way to build a CPU for most people. I would imagine writing scripts isn’t as much for people. Especially children, who I suspect might tinker with this for fun and would balk at learning to write Python to emulate a CPU.
I wonder if Redpiler is tied to the “thread per plot” model; it might be. Eg there’s some stuff in that doc about optimizing the size of nodes in the graph so they fit into the CPU cache.
I’m not an expert, but my offhand impression from the docs is that this is all meant to create a fairly small, very high performance world. The main server seems to want the opposite: maintaining acceptable but not necessarily amazing performance across a very large world.
Now if they would just do something about inventory...
Another factor is nicovideo.jp / nico-tech community developed from 2ch/futaba culture. Lots of users with way more domain expertise than pay or financial ambitions threw in their skills into remixes for fun(many were STEM students back then). Unidentified FPGA wizards, motor driver experts, video editors, would just come by and drop psychedelic videos. It was absurd. So absurd that Maker Faire Tokyo once put suspected nico-tech dress-shirts into a quarantine zone in a separate venue to save face for ambitious t-shirt webdevs(that was naughty, and lead to creation of nico-tech meetups, and also was never repeated). That absurd content quality-quantity density sure had created inertia for Bad Apple!! PVs.
Undoubtedly one last key element was that the PV was monochromatic(okay, grayscale). That's probably why it wasn't one of other ones from the golden age of nicovideo.jp.
A different video clip with color https://youtu.be/mgfwwqwxdxY
8088 Domination used an awful lot of technical tricks to show Bad Apple, Full frame rate, Full screen on a real 8088 Intel Processor, back in 2014. As far as I know, that was the first, most recognized use of Bad Apple as a "demo benchmark" along side Doom as attempting to display it on as much hardware as possible.