Free ebook “Graphics Programming Black Book” by Michael Abrash is a collection of the author’s previous books on assembly language and graphics programming, as well as past columns for Dr. Dobb’s magazine.
Book Description
Though much of the book (such as 8088/286/386 assembly language optimization and VGA graphics programming) is out-of-date by now, the reader can see some of the larger tendencies in the author’s work over the years–a reliance on profiling in order to test code, and creative thinking to improve performance wherever possible.This text features assembler optimization for a variety of problems including searching algorithms, and records the author’s approaches to optimizing code for the evolving line of Intel CPUs, from the 8088 on to the early Pentium lines. The last few chapters of this book are more relevant, and include a series of explorations of some of the technology behind the popular Doom and Quake 3-D games by id Corporation (where the author worked). Optimized solutions to 3-D graphics problems from texture mapping, hidden surface removal, and Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) trees are explained. Current gaming and 3-D technology, such as Direct3D and VRML is left out, but it’s clear that game programmers like the author will continue to push the limits of current hardware technology in inventive ways. This book is clearly targeted at game developers and serious assembly language programmers, not for the general reader.
Table of Contents
- The Best Optimizer is between Your Ears
- A World Apart
- Assume Nothing
- In the Lair of the Cycle-Eaters
- Crossing the Border
- Looking Past Face Value
- Local Optimization
- Speeding Up C with Assembly Language
- Hints My Readers Gave Me
- Patient Coding, Faster Code
- Pushing the 286 and 386
- Pushing the 486
- Aiming the 486
- Boyer-Moore String Searching
- Linked Lists and Unintended Challenges
- There Ain’t No Such Thing as the Fastest Code
- The Game of Life
- It’s a Wonderful Life
- PentiumNot the Same Old Song
- Pentium Rules
- Unleashing the Pentium’s V-pipe
- Zenning and the Flexible Mind
- Bones and Sinew
- Parallel Processing with the VGA
- VGA Data Machinery
- VGA Write Mode 3
- Yet Another VGA Write Mode
- Reading VGA Memory
- Saving Screens and Other VGA Mysteries
- Video Est Omnis Divisa
- Higher 256-Color Resolution on the VGA
- Be It Resolved360x480
- Yogi Bear and Eurythmics Confront VGA Colors
- Changing Colors without Writing Pixels
- Bresenham Is Fast, and Fast Is Good
- The Good, theBad, and the Run-Sliced
- Dead Cats and Lightning Lines
- The Polygon Primeval
- Fast Convex Polygons
- Of Songs, Taxes, and the Simplicity of Complex Polygons
- Those Way-Down Polygon Nomenclature Blues
- Wu’ed in Haste; Fried, Stewed at Leisure
- Bit-Plane Animation
- Split Screens Save the Page-Flipped Day
- Dog Hair and Dirty Rectangles
- Who Was that Masked Image?
- Mode X256-Color VGA Magic
- Mode X Marks the Latch
- Mode X 256-Color Animation
- Adding a Dimension
- Sneakers in Space
- Fast 3-D AnimationMeet X-Sharp
- Raw Speed and More
- 3-D Shading
- Color Modeling in 256-Color Mode
- Pooh and the Space Station
- 10,000 Freshly Sheared Sheep on the Screen
- Heinlein’s Crystal Ball, Spock’s Brain, and the 9-Cycle Dare
- The Idea of BSP Trees
- Compiling BSP Trees
- Frames of Reference
- One Story, Two Rules, and a BSP Renderer
- Floating-Point for Real-Time 3-D
- Quake’s Visible-Surface Determination
- 3-D Clipping and Other Thoughts
- Quake’s Hidden-Surface Removal
- Sorted Spans in Action
- Quake’s Lighting Model
- Surface Caching and Quake’s Triangle Models
- QuakeA Post-Mortem and a Glimpse into the Future
Download Free PDF / Read Online
Publisher: Coriolis Group Books
Format(s): HTML(Online)
File size: –
Number of pages: –
Link: Read online.