Friday, July 31, 2009

Grabs From The Gallery

Here are some grabs from HayWire. Clicking on an image will enlarge it for you to the full 640x480.

While Haywire has a lot of options for how to project memory contents onto the screen, they typically involve things like pixel format, columns per page, column width, starting address. The only post-production I do is to run them through JPEG compression so they are smaller and don't get me in trouble for software piracy or leak my darkest secrets.

This image comes from the WinLogon part of Windows, which is the program that asks for you name and password. I also found this image there. (I usually run a pretty bare system and don't use background screens, screen savers, etc. It keeps the debugging tractable).





The program has an option that dumps arbitrary files on the hard drive as well as memory resident stuff. You can use that feature to view crashdumps, program and data files, and in the above case, a huge AVI file that was stored months earlier, uncompressed.




One of the most useful features is perspective rendering. It lets me quadruple the amount of info on the screen. I just call a warp subroutine and don't use DirectX-3D, which makes the program slower but less configuration-dependent.

This image came from Firefox. I think the graphic was on the FrameWave web page describing a high-performance multimedia processing library. The graphic didn't look anything like it does here when I saw it on the web at some earlier time.




What happens when you fly over the memory that the system uses to generate the video display? It makes video feedback! The system dumps video memory to the video memory, creating an infinite mirror effect. (This slows everything down by a factor of 4). The way-cool animated effects are worth it.




The perspective display mode lets you adjust the vanishing points and orientation much the way an elaborate view camera does. Here is the flyover screen turned into a video wall effect. Heck - it may even turn into a flight simulator program with video game enemys made out of the resident icons.



Another "stairway to heaven" type effect. There are many ways to work with video feedback, most of them really deserve to be presented as animations. I already have the code in there for that, I just need to fix a few things and voila! my hard disk is full again!





This last one comes from the Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer, but the program that MacHeads call the Finder) which draws windows, icons, trash cans, etc. It has this rocket blastoff image in there too, and I have no idea why.

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