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Comment by lproven | Hacker News Reader

Oh yes, Starglider was stunning at the time.

But wireframe only, I think?

I think Starglider 2 was inspired in part by Zarch on the Archimedes, and the free Lander demo that came with every Archie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFwpsb75omg

It is hard to put into words how amazing it was to see this running, live and playable, on a home computer in 1987.

Jez San also co-designed the SuperFX 3D accelerator chip in the SNES game Starfox. That evolved into the ARC RISC CPU family.

An ARC core was the Intel Management Engine chip in Intel CPUs before they switched to an x86 ME controller running Minix 3.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Hardwa...

And that ARC core ran ThreadX, which is the same OS that runs on the GPU of every Raspberry Pi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX

San offered me a job once, nearly 30Y ago. I should have accepted it. :-D

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interesting anecdotes about argonaut design methodology... pt 2

we used the opposite approach to design the Super FX chip (we called it the Mario chip - likely the first ever gpu)

Carl & Pete would write code to do 3d math and render polygons... and write and re-write the code hundreds of times, using an imaginary assembler language. they would invent new instructions on the fly to let their code get tighter. they would keep coming up with new instructions, new registers, new ways of forming instructions and referencing registers etc... until the code was the tightest... and THEN, we designed a microprocessor from scratch to execute those instructions.

Also, likely the opposite way that microprocessors were designed... because (in the past) the designers had no idea what their cpus were going to be used for, whereas we knew what we wanted to achieve, so got to use software to drive the hardware design.

this was the first time that a cpu was able to be designed using programmable gate arrays. literally Ben & Rob could make a change to the hardware design - the netlist, and email it off to the usa, and actel would Fedex back the next day a working chip for us to try out. this was before you could program your own fpga's yourself (and Xilinx at the time wasn't large enough to fit a whole microprocessor). this iterative approach allowed us to design the optimum 'gpu' for the task.

That is amazing. What was the design process like in terms of tooling? Schematic capture or was one of the proto HDLs in use?

I don't remember which tools the Super FX chip was designed with but maybe some other ex-Argonauts can chime in on that. I know it was pretty basic gate level stuff and wasn't designed with a high level language (Ben Cheese was an old skool chip designer)... we started using VHDL later on, when we designed the ARC etc.

@Dang, really strange to see the dead comments (sibling to this, and elsewhere) as they are 100% relevant and straight from the source.

If I missed something then apologies.

Yeah, I have no idea why all of JezSan's comments are gray.

Looks like it's been fixed! Kudos.

Question: where did you learn 3D rendering in the 1980’s? How was this knowledge disseminated? How much was “solved” at the time?

I learned 3d math and rendering from the textbooks of the time like Newman Sproul and Bruce Artwick books. and a lot of trial and error.

wrote my first 3d games on the bbc computer (1982-1983) and then got a Mac in 1984.. and did more 3d on the Mac. I started StarGlider on the Mac, written in 68000 code.. and then ported it to the Amiga and Atari ST when they came out. I had the first Amiga outside the USA.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Principles-Interactive-Computer-Gra...

https://www.amazon.com/Applied-Concepts-Microcomputer-Graphi...

Why did Argonaut have the ability to design early GPU hardware when it doesn't seem like anyone else had the interest, background knowledge or tools?

(And how did Nintendo find a company in the UK to work with considering the language barriers?)

From what has been said of the latter. Argonaut showed up to Nintendo's booth (E3, CES etc. I forget which one specifically)

They pulled out a Nintendo Gameboy and proceeded to put an unlicensed prototype game cartridge in it, which booted successfully even without Nintendo's approval

Nintendo was so impressed with the engineering talent they agreed to work with them thereafter

Argonaut had several team members including Rick Clucas (CTO) who had hardware design experience as well as software. Rick's first hardware at Argonaut was a development cartridge for the SNES that allowed you to remote control it and download games from the pc development kit. This allowed us to be self sufficient and develop games earlier on SNES (and less expensively than others)

And Fuzzz (aka James Hakewill, now at Tesla AI) was designing silicon including The ARC.

its a pretty well known story as to how we got involved with Nintendo.

I went up to a senior Nintendo guy at a CES show and showed him some stuff that blew him away. I was on a flight to meet Mr Yamauchi in Japan a few days later.

We had Argonaut team members stationed inside Nintendo working directly for Mr Miyamoto, et al

our team back in UK did the tech stuff, and the team inside Nintendo built the games.

It was only the second time that Nintendo had worked with a company outside Japan (the first was Rare ltd)

am sure you did fine without that job ;-)

btw, the arc core got used in lots of things that you never hear about... like in Sandisk memory cards (no relation), and various set top box chips (mpeg etc), and wifi chips (at the time, most intel wifi chips used arc)

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