I upgraded my PC slightly over the last couple of weeks - more memory (finally got 1 Gb of RAM under the hood) and a new DVD burner.
The RAM is pleasant, and makes using
photoshop and
Poser at the same time a useful thing as opposed to a painful wait-fest.
But it's the new burner that has given me an unexpected boost.
My old, faithful Pioneer burner burnt discs reliably, if a little slow. But it had a flaw - it couldn't read most of the DVD-R discs that it wrote! The discs were fine, and could be read by any other DVD-ROM drive in the house, just not by the burner that created them. A small inconvenience when I can just read discs over the network using my sister's laptop. (Just think of it as a really juiced-up external drive!)
Once I got my new DVD Burner, I checked them all out, and they were all readable. Then I decided to catalog them by the date they were created. All my current back-ups were catalogued from mid-2006. But I hadn't bothered going through a lot of my older discs, the ones I burnt while preparing to move back to NZ from Oz.
(A not-so-little background history:
At the time, I had just under a thousand discs - Magazine cover-discs, clip-art CD-ROMs and my CD-R backups mostly - and didn't relish the idea of hauling the whole lot back over via air - too expensive. So I made ISO images of them all, copied the images to DVD-Rs. By editing the ISO images to prune out any stuff I didn't need (cover-discs are notorious for excess fluff and demos of software you'll never use) I managed to squeeze my entire collection of discs down to 80 DVD-R discs. I could take the whole lot onto the flight home as carry-on luggage - which I did!
Of course nowadays I could just lob everything onto an pocket-sized external HDD drive... but I digress.)
So.. the reason for this thread. While cataloging this data, I stumbled across a whole bunch of my old.. really old... (down-right decrepit, actually) object files for my first real software love: Imagine, by Impulse Software.
Imagine was one of the first fully-functional,
usable consumer 3D programs out there. It was written for the Amiga, and was a re-write of an early program called Turbo Silver.
It was ported over to PC DOS for a couple of versions, and even ported to Windows NT and Windows 2000.
Now... Imagine 4.0 for DOS was released as a freebie a while back by Impulse when their Windows version came out. Quite powerful considering it's age, if a somewhat quirky interface. (They ported over the software EXACTLY as it was on the Amiga, including a couple of interface bugs... sheesh.)
Then Impulse moved to Nevada, started writing slot-machine software and abandoned the PC versions - DOS and Windows - completely. It is still (theoretically) under development for the Amiga OS, and is now up to version 6, I understand.
I, after wandering through some of my old data on CD-R, decided to see what had become of Imagine... so fired up Google, found a few sites and went poking around. Turns out, one of the main programmers of the software has given permission for the Imagine for Windows binaries to be distributed as-is, with a view to eventually putting the source code out as an open source project for others to continue with.
The practical upshot of which is this: I've just downloaded it! Wheee!
Why would I do that, when I've got newer, more modern software?
Imagine is a ray-tracer, and quite powerful at that... and I'm just curious how fast it'll do renders on my PC now... considering I originally used an Amiga 500 that chugged along at 7.14Mhz and my PC zips along now at a quite respectable 2.48Ghz...
(I just loaded the biggest .IOB (Imagine OBject) file I could find - a highly detailed version of Voyager (go, Janeway!) and my PC didn't even stop to swallow the thing... Quick Render done before my finger even left the Render key... Bloody Hell!)
The other reason I'm taking a look at the Windows version is that Imagine has a very powerful object editor... there are still times I'll load the DOS version in DOSBox to build something that would be fiddly to do in MAX. I've been able to import
Posette and Vicky and use them, and that was with the older DOS version. If I can find a WaveFront OBJ plug-in, I would be very happy using this for creation/altering meshs for
Poser. (It does deal with 3DS, DXF and LWO directly).
Any comments about my sanity...?
A Stumble Down Memory Lane
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I won the Loebner prize 
! 
Thanks a lot, I think i'll have a look at it. I like ancient software, it's more easy to get an overview in most cases, cos they're limited to the functions you realy need, without all bells and whistles (I'm still missing my old Poser3. Only took the step to P6, cos P3 didn't like 1G memory...)
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