Stumbling Into the Cold Expanse of Real Programming

prog21.dadgum.com

70 pointstl4 comments

Imagine if we applied such creative hardware-level acceleration as let the Atari run animated games - to the modern goal of creating zero-latency augmented reality.

Cameras and displays can both be interfaced with by FPGAs running synchronous computation on each pixel as it comes down the bus, to achieve refresh speeds as fast as the pixel clock.

It's just a matter of inventing new programming hacks and strategies to build compelling AR experiences in Verilog. We can do it, right?

Unfortunately, it's harder than it sounds: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/latency-the-sine-qua-n...

Heresy! Graphics programmers have gotten used to all kinds of cushy abstractions such as the OpenGL pipeline and high-level shading languages, and you're proposing to throw it all overboard and compute the color value per pixel on the fly using low-level logic. Interesting times.

The Commodore 64 had some nice hardware also. I liked tinkering with the sound generators.

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