ZX Spectrum Raytracer

[Sandman]

"I love raytracers; in fact I’ve written half a book about them. Probably less known is my love for the ZX Spectrum, the 1982 home computer I grew up with, and which started my interest in graphics and programming. This machine is so ridiculously underpowered for today’s standards (and even for 1980s standards), the inevitable question is, to what extent could I port the Computer Graphics from Scratch raytracer to a ZX Spectrum?"

ZX Spectrum Raytracer - Gabriel Gambetta

gabrielgambetta.com

 

[rabbitBUSH]

Quite a CV Mr Gambetta has - but more interesting is that that ZX Spectrum fired up and ran after all those years in the cupboard (RIP Clive Sinclair)_ (apparently - though admittedly there are no dates on his blog).

 

[BlueVision]

My Sinclair Spectrum worked for 6 months until it broke (damaged by a terrible accident, a friend of mine standing behind, watched my doing and opened simultanously a bottle of lemonade, it's content exploded and the lemonade shower killed my Spectrum immediately ) .

As terrible as it was, the Spectrum was a cheap used machine for me and already slightly outdated. I switched then to an ATARI 130XE with a complete different architecture and processor. Honestly, it was the better machine.
It was a mixture of hate and love with the Spectrum. The keyboard was terrible and the built-in speaker was simply to weak. I loved the rainbow on the housing and the fact, that a complete BASIC-command could be entered by simply pressing a button. I think the keyboard had in minimum 4 or 5 different function-overlays for each key on it. Graphics was fine (for that time and class of computer), sound awful, speed impressive. But unfortunally not really good software for the machine on the market compared with Commodore and Atari.

 

[peacemaker]

"Elite" game, space simulator did 3D raytracing long ago, as i can understand. But not by BASIC.

 

[Sandman]

Elite was wireframe 3d, not raytracing. Still extremely impressive for the time and platform!

 

[Magma]

useful code... waiting @Johan Schoeman version... will be faster

 

[BlueVision]

Elite was wireframe 3d, not raytracing. Still extremely impressive for the time and platform!

Don't know about the details, but some more games came to mind, probably not using raytracing per definition, but with similiar effects. RESCUE ON FRACTALUS by LUCASFILM or MERCENARY could be candidates.
But given the performance of the used processors Zilog Z80 and MOS Technology's 65XX-line, probably unlikely they did real raytracing. But impressive vector graphics. And moving in realtime.