!!Con West 2019 - Tom Verbeure: World’s 1st racing-the-beam ray tracer on discarded FPGA hardware!!!
Channel: !!Con
Date: 2019-03-25

Presented at !!Con West 2019: http://bangbangcon.com/west

Racing the beam is a technology that was used in the 1977 Atari 2600 console to display game images on a computer system that did not have enough memory to store the full image. Ray tracing is the holy grail of computer graphics rendering. And FPGAs are chips with programmable gates that can be used to implement all kinds of hardware accelerators, from telecommunications to real-time image processing.

In this talk, I show how you can bring these three pieces together and create, on hardware that can be purchased on eBay for just a couple of dollars, a demo in the style of the late eighties and nineties, where the main goal was simply to show a neat visual effect on an underpowered machine.

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