This document provides information about some of the software associated with the Tarpeeksi Hyvae Soft banner – in other words, software made by a dude in his own time, some of it professional-like and some just for fun.
A capable capture tool for Datapath's VisionRGB range of capture cards, intended for both recreational and professional use.
VCS's features include:
Further info is available from these links:
Developer documentation for VCS with fully custom Doxygen theming.
VCS's developer documentation is written in-code in the Doxygen format, which is first converted using Doxygen into XML and then into HTML output using a custom Python XML-to-HTML converter.
Compared to Doxygen's standard HTML output, the custom format includes a light and dark mode, a mobile-friendlier layout, more semantic markup, and a subjectively better look. Future features will include search functionality.
Further info is available from these links:
A well-featured, retro-oriented 3D software renderer for the HTML <canvas>, with support also for async off-screen rendering.
The renderer's features include:
Further info is available from these links:
<canvas id='canvas' style='width: 200px; height: 200px;'></canvas>
<script src='rngon.cat.js'></script>
<script>
const triangle = Rngon.ngon([
Rngon.vertex(-1, -1, 3),
Rngon.vertex( 1, -1, 3),
Rngon.vertex( 1, 1, 3)], {
color: Rngon.color_rgba(0, 150, 255)
});
const mesh = Rngon.mesh([triangle]);
Rngon.render('canvas', [mesh]);
</script>
// The renderer will call this function once the current frame has been rasterized.
// The 'fragmentBuffer' property contains metadata about each pixel, like world-
// space coordinates and n-gon material properties.
function wavy_pixel_shader({renderWidth, renderHeight, fragmentBuffer, ngonCache, pixelBuffer})
{
const timer = (performance.now() / 300);
for (let y = 0; y < renderHeight; y++)
{
const horMagnitude = 7;
const verMagnitude = ((y / renderWidth) * 10);
const cos = (horMagnitude * Math.cos(timer + verMagnitude));
for (let x = 0; x < renderWidth; x++)
{
const dstIdx = (4 * (x + y * renderWidth));
const srcIdx = (4 * (Math.min((renderWidth - 1), (x + horMagnitude + ~~cos)) + y * renderWidth));
const fragment = fragmentBuffer[srcIdx / 4];
if (!ngonCache[fragment.ngonIdx].material.isWavy)
{
continue;
}
pixelBuffer[dstIdx + 0] = pixelBuffer[srcIdx + 0];
pixelBuffer[dstIdx + 1] = pixelBuffer[srcIdx + 1];
pixelBuffer[dstIdx + 2] = pixelBuffer[srcIdx + 2];
pixelBuffer[srcIdx + 0] = 255;
pixelBuffer[srcIdx + 1] = 255;
pixelBuffer[srcIdx + 2] = 255;
}
}
}
A little app for playing and corrupting the 1996 DOS game Rally-Sport in your browser.
The app provides a UI for selecting from a list of more than 60 pre-defined corruptions, and uses the API of DOSBox viewer to run the game in the browser with the selected corruptions applied to the game files.
Can be a lot of fun to mess around with, especially if you have nostalgia for the game. The GitHub repo also has instructions for submitting your own corruptions.
Related to the RallySportED project.
Further info is available from these links:
A modding toolset for the classic racing game Rally-Sport. Apparently the only such toolset available for this game.
The toolset has included a variety of asset editors over the years: tracks, cars, textures, etc. The toolset has also supported a number of operating systems, from 16-bit DOS to modern browsers.
For the moment, I've condensed the toolset into two parts: a browser-based track editor, and a DOS-based loader program for playing custom tracks.
The browser-based track editor's features include:
The track editor's custom software 3D renderer closely reproduces Rally-Sport's unique 3D rendering style, with n-sided polygons, screen-space texture-mapping, and one-point perspective. You can read more about it in this blog post.
I learned x86 assembly and reverse-engineered good chunks of the game to enable modding support for it. I put together a bunch of what I learned into documentation about the game's file and data formats.
Further info is available from these links:
A platform for users of RallySportED to share and download custom-made content for the game.
Rally-Sport Content's features include:
Further info is available from these links:
A vanilla multi-threaded path tracer written originally in JavaScript and later converted into TypeScript.
Wray's features include:
Further info is available from these links:
{
"camera":{
"position":{"x":0,"y":0,"z":1.745841},
"axisAngle":{"x":0,"y":1,"z":0,"w":0}
},
"sky":{
"model":"cie-overcast",
"zenithDirection":{"x":0,"y":1,"z":0}
},
"materials":{
"default":{
"type":"lambertian",
"color":{"r":0.1,"g":1,"b":0.1}
}
},
"triangles":[
{
"material":"default",
"vertices":[
{"position":{"x":-2.653676,"y":-2.627338,"z":-8.797296},"normal":null},
{"position":{"x":2.666877,"y":-2.627337,"z":-8.797296},"normal":null},
{"position":{"x":2.666877,"y":-2.627338,"z":-14.179447},"normal":null}
]
}
]
}
A 3D front-end for the PC emulator PCem, and in general a retro PC simulator. Replaces PCem's text-based user interface with a 3D scene in which you can assemble and run the emulated PCs.
PCbi's features include:
PCbi is implemented as a separate process from PCem. The two programs communicate via a shared memory buffer, using signal bytes to direct data flow. This method is fast enough to allow the PCem frame buffer to be transferred to – and rendered by – PCbi in real-time as the emulation runs.
PCbi uses a custom OpenGL-based 3D renderer and a custom-styled GUI implemented with Qt.
Further info is available from these links:
A web app for Finnish hobbyist birdwatchers to keep list of their sightings in a visually engaging way. The app tracks the date of your first sighting of each species, and shows a pleasing visual tally of your sightings so far.
Lintulista's features include:
Lintulista is currently for private use only, but a public sample is provided in the links below.
Further info is available from these links:
Ever wanted a cloud physics simulator and renderer? Maybe not, but this software provides.
The program simulates the rising of moist air and the subsequent condensation of cloud-forming droplets as the air cools; then renders the resulting 3D droplet grid into a realistic image of clouds.
You can configure the simulator's atmospheric properties to your liking, including the environmental lapse rate and relative humidity curves. The GUI provides real-time visualization of the state of the simulation, showing the relative humidity, air temperature, and droplet distribution either as averages across the simulation grid or as horizontal or vertical slices.
The renderer uses volumetric path tracing and photon mapping to model in-cloud light transfer. Spectral Mie scattering is empirically approximated (by eyeballing MiePlot graphs), while the Hosek–Wilkie 2012 sky model is used to approximate Rayleigh scattering. Optionally, a HDR environment map can be used in place of the parametric sky model.
OpenCL is used to accelerate calculations of condensation (a square root and a multiplication or two per simulation grid cell, each cell being processable parallel to the others), while the renderer works on tiles distributed across the system's cores.
This program required a beefy computer. With a mid-to-low-range home PC of the time, running the simulation on a high-resolution grid (e.g. 300 × 300 × 300) could take hours, and the rendering would take several days to converge to a relatively noise-free outcome even at low render resolutions (e.g. 512 × 512).
Further info is available from these links:
A hybrid voxel/polygon 3D software renderer that draws its inspiration from retro voxel/polygon games like Delta Force and Outcast.
The voxel renderer makes 2D heightmaps into 3D landscapes. It's effectively a ray tracer, tracing a ray through each pixel on the screen and sampling height values from the heightmap along the ray's path. The renderer has full six degrees of freedom, multi-threading, and bilinear interpolation.
The polygon renderer supports single-threaded scanline and barycentric rasterization. It uses the depth map generated by the voxel renderer to discard pixels occluded by the terrain, and draws the rest over the voxel renderer's pixel buffer.
Further info is available from these links:
// This function will be called by the voxel renderer for each sky pixel, with
// a direction vector from the viewer to the pixel's sky patch as an argument.
const auto hosekWilkieSkySampler = [&](const vond::vector3<double> &direction)->vond::color<uint8_t, 4>
{
const double thetaSky = std::acos(skyZenith.dot(direction));
const double phiSky = std::acos(sunPos.dot(direction));
vond::color<double, 3> result;
for (unsigned int i = 0; i < 3; i++)
{
result.channel_at(i) = (5 * arhosek_tristim_skymodel_radiance(skyModelState[i], thetaSky, phiSky, i));
}
return {
uint8_t(std::min(255.0, std::max(0.0, result.channel_at(0)))),
uint8_t(std::min(255.0, std::max(0.0, result.channel_at(1)))),
uint8_t(std::min(255.0, std::max(0.0, result.channel_at(2)))),
255u
};
};
A Node.js app for monitoring retail prices at Kesko's grocery stores.
The app logs prices on products of your choosing into either JSON files or a PostgreSQL database, and provides a web interface for viewing their trends over time in your browser.
Further info is available from these links:
A framework for constructing single-page documentation using Markdown syntax. Work in progress.
Dokki's feature's include:
Dokki extends HTML with a set of new tags designed for marking up documentation and the like, backed by a Vue.js front-end for rendering the tags as standard HTML elements. The front-end also provides an automatically-generated table of contents, responsive styling, keyword search, and both a light and dark color theme, among other things.
Further info is available from these links:
A unifying C89 interface for various 3D rasterizer APIs on the Win32 platform.
Kelpo's features include:
The 1990s saw the proliferation of consumer 3D hardware along with non-standard rendering APIs and diverging hardware feature-sets (see e.g. vintage3d.org for more info). If you wanted your 3D application to capture the home market, you had to write several variations of your rendering code – for example, the renderer for Tomb Raider came in at least six versions: one for software rendering and the rest for the various 3D hardware offerings from ATi, Matrox, S3, and others.
The goal for Kelpo is to create an easy-to-use generic render API that exposes a minimal feature-set shared across the various 3D implementations of this time period (Glide, S3D, Direct3D, and others), such that the client application only needs to write its rendering code once and can be fairly certain that the output will be the same regardless of the end-user's hardware, while in the background the application still takes advantage of that hardware via its native API.
Kelpo is work in progress, and there's no hurry to complete it – it's a casual project being done for the sake of doing it. It currently supports Glide 3, Direct3D 5, Direct3D 7, OpenGL 1.1, and OpenGL 3.0; planned support includes the proprietary rendering APIs of Matrox, S3, and ATi, among others.
Further info is available from these links:
/* Initialize Kelpo for OpenGL 1.1. */
const struct kelpo_interface_s *kelpo = NULL;
kelpo_create_interface(&kelpo, "opengl_1_1");
/* Open a 640 x 480 (16-bit) render window on video device #0. */
kelpo->window.open(0, 640, 480, 16);
/* Run the render loop. */
while (kelpo->window.process_messages(),
!kelpo->window.is_closing())
{
kelpo->rasterizer.clear_frame();
kelpo->rasterizer.draw_triangles(&triangle, 1);
kelpo->window.flip_surface();
}
A retro-oriented binary file format for storing 3D models and their textures. Designed as a companion format for the Kelpo renderer.
KAC's features include:
Further info is available from these links:
A minimalist wireframe renderer of n-sided polygons into an <svg> HTML element.
Luujanko's features include:
In normal rasterization, you first clear the frame buffer and then plot in the new frame's pixels. Luujanko works kind of like that, except rather than clearing the frame buffer, it empties the target <svg> element of its <polygon> child elements; and rather than plotting pixels, it re-populates the <svg> element with <polygon> children from a pre-generated <polygon> element cache, inserting into them the new frame's screen-space vertex coordinates.
The render performance is adequate for single frames, but continuous rendering can suffer from stuttering. I think WebGL would be a better solution for the latter kind, but using an <svg> for it was an interesting experiment in any case.
Luujanko is an offshoot of the retro n-gon renderer, sharing much of its end-user API style.
Further info is available from these links:
<svg id='rendering' width='200' height='200'></svg>
<script type='module'>
import {Luu} from 'luujanko.js';
const targetSVG = document.getElementById('rendering');
const triangle = Luu.ngon([
Luu.vertex(-1, -1, 0),
Luu.vertex( 1, -1, 0),
Luu.vertex( 1, 1, 0)
]);
Luu.render([Luu.mesh([triangle])], targetSVG, {
viewRotation: Luu.rotation(0, 0, 0),
viewPosition: Luu.translation(0, 0, -3)
});
</script>
Looks like an old browser, acts like an old browser. Serlain is a cute little frontend for Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, displaying archived pages inside period-correct-looking mock browsers.
A browser in Serlain is a plain HTML element with its background image a screenshot of a blank browser window (empty title bar, nothing in the address bar, etc.), and the blank portions then populated with interactive React components. Imperfections in component placement in the original browsers have been reproduced.
Unfortunately, this app is fundamentally quite picky about displaying properly. Having font antialising enabled on your system will make the React components look out of place, because the background browser screenshots were taken without antialiasing. Also, depending on your monitor, the Windows 9x-style thin, un-antialiased lines of the background screenshots can look unpleasantly sharp. At the moment, while the app is in alpha, it also simply expects that your browser is using a font size of 16 pixels – otherwise, text scaling between the dynamic React components and the static browser backgrounds will look wrong.
I wrote Serlain originally as just a quick little thing to play around with, and it's been stuck in early alpha since then. It's got more potential, but I'm not sure how much effort I'll be putting into it.
Further info is available from these links:
const nn4 = {
desktopIcon: {
title: "Netscape Navigator 4",
imageUrl: "./img/icons/netscape-navigator-4.png",
},
browserClassName: "netscape-navigator-4 resolution-800x600",
// The year from which this browser will show Wayback Machine captures.
browsingYear: 1997,
// The desktop styling to be shown when this browser is open.
operatingSystem: "Windows 95",
// The standard interactible buttons available in this browser.
buttons: ["reload", "home", "back", "forward", "close"],
// Strings shown in the browser's message bar in response to events,
// replicating the original, period-correct wording.
messageBarStrings: {
fetching_page_url: (url)=>`Connect: Looking up host: ${url}...`,
loading_page: (url)=>`Transferring data from ${url}`,
page_load_failed: (url)=>`Unable to connect to site ${url}`,
page_load_finished: ()=>"Document: Done",
},
};
Patches a bug in Ultima 7 that forces the CPU cache on at game launch.
Like many games of its time, Ultima 7 lacks hardware-agnostic game cycle timing, meaning that its gameplay will run too fast on hardware that's much newer than the early Pentium-class machines the game was originally developed for.
The usual workaround for this problem is to disable the CPU's cache, making it run much slower and so more in line with what the game was written for. Unfortunately, this workaround doesn't work for Ultima 7, as the game will always force the CPU cache back on at launch.
This patch modifies the game executables so that they no longer touch the CPU cache flag (which controls whether the cache is disabled), and so the cache can remain disabled during gameplay. With the patched executable, I've seen a cache-disabled Athlon 64 CPU run the game absolutely fine.
It seems that the (unpatched) game resets the CPU cache flag as part of its logic to enter unreal mode. However, this process shouldn't require the cache flag to be modified, so it seems like a programming oversight (i.e. bug). The patch simply prevents the game code from modifying the cache flag bit, while retaining the relevant functionality to enter unreal mode.
Further info is available from these links:
; The game wants to enable protected mode as the first step in entering ; unreal mode. Normally, it assigns 1 to EBX, which sets the relevant ; first bit but also resets all the other bits (importantly, bit #30, ; for cache disable). Instead, we want to set only the first bit and ; leave the others untouched. mov ebx, cr0 or bl, 1 mov cr0, ebx ; ... ; The game has entered unreal mode and is ready to disable protected ; mode. Again, we want to manipulate only the relevant first bit. and bl, 0feh mov cr0, ebx
A set of command-line tools for converting data from the DAT files of Grand Prix Legends into more standard formats. The tools can extract files from DATs (container files), convert MIPs and SRBs (images) into PNG, and turn 3DOs (3D meshes) into OBJs.
The game's assets are stored in DAT container files, which are collections of straightforward binary blobs represented as a data header and a stream of bytes. Of the types of assets, the most notable is the 3DO mesh: its data are stored in a tree format, with nodes defining properties of the mesh (visibility, texture, color, polygons, etc.) and branches joining multiple nodes together (resulting in e.g. visibility culling based on which branch path is taken). This seems to be a pre-compiled format for consumption by the game's renderer rather than a format for storing meshes in general.
I used PHP to write the DAT and MIP/SRB converters, but chose C++ for the 3DO-to-OBJ converter for better binary-parsing performance (I recall the speed-up was about an order of magnitude going from a PHP implementation to C++).
I wrote this toolset to help generate scenes for testing the retro n-gon renderer. There didn't appear to be existing tools that ran natively on Linux.
Further info is available from these links:
A HTML5 video player whose seek bar shows a spectrogram of the video's audio.
To generate the spectrogram, the app samples the output of a <video> element using an AnalyserNode to get a time-variant spectrum, then paints the spectral values into a <canvas> element overlaid on the video's seek bar.
This app was originally made for a friend who had a need for it, but it turned out their iPad was overly paranoid about letting the browser access videos on the system, and so they couldn't use this. Further info is available from these links:
A program to measure aspects of your typing, NPTO provides statistics like percentage of per-key mis-presses, breakdown of typing time per key, and others things of that nature.
Comes with a fully custom styled GUI made using Qt.
Check out some of the videos demonstrating the program in action.
A 3D visualizer that lets you embed n-gonal meshes into a HTML5 document via extended HTML syntax, with a simple UI for controlling the visualization.
Possible use cases include debug rendering in the workflow of writing a mesh file importer, and for demonstrating the contents of a mesh file.
Uses Luujanko for the wireframe rendering.
Further info is available from these links:
<mesh-preview>
<wireframe-mesh id='triangle' name='Triangle'
src-array='[
[{x:-1, y:-1, z:0},
{x: 0, y: 1, z:0},
{x: 1, y:-1, z:0}]
]'>
</wireframe-mesh>
<wireframe-mesh id='two-squares' name='Two squares'
src-array='[
[{x:-2, y:-1, z: 0},
{x:-2, y: 1, z: 0},
{x:-1, y: 1, z: 0},
{x:-1, y:-1, z: 0}],
[{x: 1, y:-1, z: 0},
{x: 1, y: 1, z: 0},
{x: 2, y: 1, z: 0},
{x: 2, y:-1, z: 0}]
]'>
</wireframe-mesh>
</mesh-preview>
A utility to parse hard drive SMART data dumps from smartctl into customizable graphs.
The app provides the ability define individual graphs (e.g. temperature per time) and to compose these graphs into an image. The graphs' data can be either directly from the SMART dumps or transformed using simple mathematical expressions.
The app uses Qt to draw the graphs and for exporting them into a PNG image.
Smarse is a more recent version of this program.
A web-based version of Smartti parseri.
The app parses SMART attribute data from smartctl log dumps via a Node.js back-end, then converts the data using client-side JavaScript into SVG plots for display.
The fundamental output of the app is a single plot of a SMART attribute's values over a period of time. The user is then free to style and compose these plots onto a HTML page as they see fit.
Test your old processor's floating-point performance with this DOS path tracer that renders a scene of spheres and counts the number of seconds it took.
The program runs in VGA mode 13h (320 × 200, 256 colors) and renders its test image in 120 × 80 resolution (upscaled to 240 × 160 for display). The scene to be rendered is made of eight spheres (five diffuse Lambertian and three reflective) and a large triangle for the ground plane; the background is a light source approximating the CIE Standard Overcast Sky.
Requires a math co-processor.
A simple 16-bit real-mode 3D rasterizer benchmark for recreational perf-testing of DOS-capable C compilers, compatible with a number of legacy C and C++ toolchains.
The benchmark renders a spinning 3D model in VGA mode 13h, then provides basic characteristics of its runtime performance.
Supported compilers:
Further info is available from these links:
A simple user interface for js-dos, intended primarily as a means to embed and demonstrate Tarpeeksi Hyvae Soft's DOS apps in this document.
The app provides a JavaScript API for defining a set of containerized DOS programs; a URL hash interface for running one of the containerized programs in js-dos (e.g. //localhost:80/dosbox/#quake); and a styled HTML container for the js-dos canvas with dynamic resizing that maintains the pixel aspect ratio.
The app was built for embedding and showcasing DOS apps on web pages – namely, DOS apps I've made and in this document (see e.g. DOS path tracing benchmark.
Further info is available from these links:
A tool to make impulse response recordings into waterfall graphs.
The app reads WAV files representing impulse responses, uses the Kiss FFT library to extract the audio's frequencies in the time-domain, and renders the resulting spectrogram.
The method of rendering varied from ray-tracing a 3D mesh of the spectrogram to drawing slices of the spectrogram as polygons using Qt's QPainter.
No-frills data storage and graphing for minimalist logging and monitoring of sequential data (e.g. temperature).
The database is a program providing IO for a headerless binary storage format consisting of 12-byte time/value pairs: a 4-byte float that stores a value logged on an occasion, and an 8-byte int that records the corresponding timestamp. The data are stored in files on disk, for which the program provides a simple command-line interface to enter and fetch data.
Complementing the database is a grapher that produces visual readouts of data from the database files.
The program conforms to feature minimalism: it has a small set of base features, just enough to do the intended job, and no more are to be added.
Further info is available from these links:
This was the first path tracer I made, serving as a personal testbed for messing around in offline rendering.
The renderer featured BVH-accelerated ray–triangle path tracing on the CPU and GPU, photon mapping, spectral and volumetric rendering, HDR environment mapping, and various other similar things. Its render performance wasn't stellar, but as with path tracing in general, it was able to generate fairly realistic images.
The renderer was later used in my cloud simulator to produce its cloud images, in which rays were traced through moisture volumes representing cloud bodies.
My first ray caster, from 2003. Its initial incarnation was based heavily on Permadi's historic ray-casting tutorial, but evolved from that original Wolfenstein-style 90-degree-walled caster into a heightmap-based 2.5D voxel renderer as I kept experimentally tinkering with it.
This project is included here for the sake of history. Vond is a more recent heightmapped voxel renderer of mine, and I continued my ray-tracing experiments with YQR.