Repository of
CG Hacks
by J. Aaron Holmes, N7OE

Welcome, visitor Counter.
 

When I'm hopelessly bored, overcome with nostalgia for my Amiga days, or have a sudden revelation about how to make something cool looking, I often conjure little CG hacks.  Most of the time they're not worth sharing.  Other times, when I do share them, I'm horrified to discover that they only perform well on my computer ;-)  I've often daydreamed about making bona fide screen savers out of these kinds of things, but usually get bored before I make it that far.  Below are a few that are mildly amusing (IMO).  Click the pictures to download them.

Someday, when I'm supremely bored, I'll make a modern Windows port of SRGP so that I can resurrect all my old Linux hacks from college.  Their numbers are truly staggering, and correlate curiously with those semesters in which I had primarily English, history, and other non-major subjects on my class schedule.  Huh...that's weird...

 


Above:  BoxSpringGL -- BoxSpring in three dimensions!
NOTE: BUGS!!  This was to see if the spring model I'd developed
for BoxSpring would extend easily to three dimensions.  It did, however
the oscillations make the culling hard to get working, so sometimes the
back faces show through to the front.  I may have to give up on that
and go to z-buffering.

 


Above:  BoxSpring -- Shimmering cross sections of Jello bounce around the
window.  This is one of my most recent experiments with simulating springs
that have a non-zero rest length.  I love things that look complicated but have
almost no code in them.  This is one.

 


Above:  SpringNetwork 2.0 -- Strands of iridescent silk stretch and snap
creating a scene of total chaos!  This was one of several programs I made
to play with simulated springs.  The model used here is very simplistic, but
sheer numbers make it look very complicated.

 


Above:  Stereo SinSphere -- A modern adaptation of my old "sinsphere" SRGP
hack on Linux.  Two identical spheres laced with sine waves rotate slowly.  They're
slightly out of phase, however, so the viewer can cross his/her eyes for a cool 3D
effect.  Try it on the above picture and see!

 


Above:  WinWar! -- Friends and former coworkers do battle in outer space
in this Windows port of an old screensaver I wrote for the Macintosh while
working at the student advising center at Washington State University in the
mid 1990's.  Got a lot of laughs from all the featured folks.  Unfortunately,
it features music and many sound effects borrowed from various old Mac
games, so I won't be posting it until I've gotten permission to redistribute
those elements.  They're half the fun.

 


Above:  Funky Spirals -- A screen saver for Mac OS X 10.4 (PowerPC and
Intel).  My first OS X program!  This is a port of a port of a port ... (etc.) of a
program I long ago wrote in QuickBASIC for System 6.x in the late 1980's.  It
was originally derived from a QuickBASIC sample that showed how to use trig
functions to draw circles and spirals.  It has since been colorized and made cooler
in other ways I've long since forgotten.  This simple screen saver module will
draw a new random Spirograph(tm)-esque pattern every five seconds or so.
Expand the .zip file, then double-click the .saver file to install it.

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Maverakahn IV

This one seemed worthy of its own little section.  Maverakahn IV is the fourth installment in the inexcusably lame series of side-scrolling shooter games written by me during my college and pre-college years.  The name "Maverakahn" is an inside joke I won't go into here.  The first three installments were written in QuickBASIC and Pascal on the Macintosh, and sometimes the sprites were just circles, lines, and filled rectangles!  This one is for MS-DOS, but runs ok on Windows XP, too :-)

Maverakahn IV was written in C using the free DJGPP compiler, and employed the also-free Allegro graphics library.  All of the artwork in the game was drawn by me using Photoshop, and game layout was done using a nifty little game editor that I wrote in Visual Basic.  The project got underway in the fall of 1998 only a few months before I graduated, and was abandoned only a few weeks after that.  It remains a sort of time capsule of my collegiate goofiness, and one I remember fondly.
 


Above:  Maverakahn IV (assorted screenshots)

HOW TO PLAY:  The game was written with a gamepad in mind, but responds to the keyboard as well (albeit sluggishly): Esc=Quit, P=Start, Space=Fire, and movement is accomplished via the arrow keys.  There is a cheat code, too, and based on another inside joke.  Trouble is, it's hard to pull off under XP due to differences in keyboard scanning.  If you want to try it, here's how I usually get it to work:  During gameplay, press P to pause.  Now, press the keys F, O, W, and L simultaneously.  If it worked, the words "Game Paused" will become "Ryan Power!", as seen in the lower right-hand corner of the screenshots above.  If not, try pressing the keys simultaneously (or near simultaneously) over and over.  Once you've gotten "Ryan Power!", unpause the game (press P again), and your peashooter will have been replaced by a missile launcher.  You can now fire missiles endlessly.  They penetrate every obstacle and kill every enemy with only a single hit.  Convenient, eh?

Maverakahn IV is only the first part of the first level, and even that much isn't really complete.  When you get to the end, the screen will simply fade to black and you'll be returned to the title screen.  Sorry!  I'm thinking it'll probably be that way forever, unless I get an unexpected urge to finish it (and if I do, it won't be done in DOS!!).

NOTE:  Mav4.exe may fail to run if launched from a network share or from a pre-existing command prompt in Windows NT.  For best results, copy it to a local hard disk and double-click it.  Mav4.exe may not run on Windows Vista unless VDM compatibility mode is set to "Windows XP" or lower (right-click EXE, choose Properties, then click the Compatibility tab).

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Questions, comments, etc....?  Feel free to mail me.

73,
J. Aaron Holmes, N7OE

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