Recovering Eric Graham's 1987 Amiga Juggler raytracer source code | Hacker News Reader

Recovering Eric Graham's 1987 Amiga Juggler raytracer source code

alphapixeldev.com

40 pointsmariuz15 comments

"Recovering"...from an ADF file that was already on IA, which many tools already exist to work with, both native Amiga tools and other-platform tools.

This blog post should be titled "Extracting files from an Amiga disk image with generative AI Python"

Didn't expect a stealth ad at the end there.

i may be hallucinating this memory, but I'd swear the source was published in a magazine back in the day and i had this one

Yes, this isn't the original source code that produced the animation. It is verbatim the source code that was printed in the May 1987 Amiga World article, which was available as a floppy disk through post at the time. An ADF of the floppy first became available on the internet in 2014 through dottyflowers on English Amiga Board. It contains none of the animation code, none of the poses, none of the HAM, none of the blending, quanitzation, etc.

As an aside, I've spent the last 6 months recreating the original on classic hardware. Blogpost and binary in the works.

edit: no idea why this comment was flagged to deadness. 1 karma I suppose.

Stopped reading when this turned into a 'look I got AI to do this thing' article.

It wasn't really, though. Creating a Python extractor was a side-quest that supported the end goal of making the original source code available and easily accessible.

(You're going to cut yourself off from interesting content more and more with this sort of kneejerk response to anything AI related.)

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By the by, creating a Python port of something originally in C is exactly the sort of routine work that current AI models are ideally suited to. Let them do the boring work with clear goals, while humans focus on the stuff the models aren't suited to.

My mum still likes to wash her dishes by hand, but I'm happy to delegate that task to a dishwashing machine, etc.

Interesting analogy since there is lots of stuff you can't use a dishwasher for without harming or destroying it.

Indeed; keep Claude away from your butcher's block cutting board!

Creating the python extractor at all was sort of bizarre. The argument given was that it is too difficult for a developer to spin up a whole dev environment just to compile a tool, but the C extractor is a single C file that only depends on the C standard library and zlib.

This feels more like your mom likes to wash dishes by hand and you have a known good dishwasher that needs to be plugged in, but instead of plugging it in you build a new one that you tested a couple times and it seems to work but who knows? At least you saved yourself all the work of plugging in that other dishwasher?

Still a cool project to publish the source code, but the python port side quest seems pointless.

> Creating the python extractor at all was sort of bizarre. The argument given was that it is too difficult for a developer to spin up a whole dev environment just to compile a tool, but the C extractor is a single C file that only depends on the C standard library and zlib.

He just wanted the extraction utility to be easily available to other people without them needing to spin up a whole development environment. That's quite community-spirited. And honestly, having tried and failed to get a number of things to successfully compile (after spending god knows how long installing different and specific Visual Studio or cmake packages) in the past, I get it.

"For this archive I wanted a Python version that could be kept with the recovered files and run without compiling the original C program. Most developers have easy access to Python, and it's quicker to run a one-off Python script than it is to spin up a dev environment, configure and compile and run a compiled native executable."

> This feels more like your mom likes to wash dishes by hand and you have a known good dishwasher that needs to be plugged in, but instead of plugging it in you build a new one that you tested a couple times and it seems to work but who knows? At least you saved yourself all the work of plugging in that other dishwasher?

If we really want to flog this analogy :) then it's more like: I rent out a holiday property. It has a dishwasher, but it takes 20 minutes of messing around for each new tenant to learn how to turn it on, and there's a non-zero failure rate. So I replace it with a different model without this difficulty.

I just wonder why he didn't boot up an Amiga emulator and copy the files out that way. Could even run DiskSalv on the disk image to look for data in the slack space. Or he could have used a tool like what comes with ADFlib (https://github.com/adflib/ADFlib) to do it. This seems like a thinly-veiled ad for AI and for this person's company, at the end.

Edit: I loaded the ADF into WinUAE and ram it through DiskSalv to check for deleted files. There were none.

> This seems like a thinly-veiled ad for AI and for this person's company, at the end.

There was a very clear (what's the opposite of thinly-veiled?) advertisment for the person's company at the end! But I didn't read is as an advert for AI - that was just a tool that was used along the way.

There are tons of tools the blog author could have used before resorting to using AI to convert an existing library to Python.

AI isn't "just a tool", the whole reason it exists is to offload thinking. I wish I'd noticed this needed "recovery" before this person did, I'd have extracted the files and been done with it. AI was not necessary for this at all

The ad was well past the lede

This kind of comment is extremely detrimental to my enjoyment of HN. They show up in every post now. I wish the mods would start punishing these destructive jerks and not let this toxic behavior become the norm. It's starting to become insufferable.

But notice how the people saying that are always the veteran/old HN users

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