The last version of GRASS was RT/1, a port of GRASS to other platforms that divorced the language from the display model and allowed it to be ported to other platforms. The work would never be released by Midway, but the Circle would produce machines based on it as the Datamax UV-1. This included an extensive set of bit block transfer commands in order to simulate sprites, something the hardware didn't include. The Z-Box was a raster graphics machine, unlike the original GRASS systems, so while most of the GRASS3 style was maintained in Zgrass, it added a number of commands dedicated to raster images. A number of people at the Habitat, as well as some from Nutting, worked on the project, which they referred to as the Z Box. Midway was quite interested in seeing the GRASS language running on their system, and contracted DeFanti to port it to the platform. They intended to use it in most of their future arcade games, as well as a video game console they were working on which would later turn into the Astrocade. Nutting had been contracted by Midway, the videogame division of Bally, to create a standardized graphics driver chip. In 1977, DeFanti was introduced to Jeff Frederiksen, a chip designer working at Dave Nutting Associates. This can be seen in the sequence, as the initial sections of the film show the Death Star being rotated and scaled very rapidly, while the later sections simulating flight down the trench requires new scenery to be paged in from GRASS "trees". ![]() It is only during the times when new scenery is being presented that the much slower communications with the GRASS language takes place. in realtime without interacting with the computer. The VG3D had internal hardware that performed basic transformations - scaling, rotation, etc. Larry Cuba's Star Wars work is based on semi-automated filming of a GRASS system running on a Vector General 3D terminal. In 1977 another member of the Habitat, Nola Donato, re-designed many of GRASS's control structures into more general forms, resulting in the considerably cleaner GRASS3. In order to make the system more useful, DeFanti and Sandin added all sorts of "one-off" commands to the existing GRASS system, but these changes also made the language considerably more idiosyncratic. ĭeFanti added the existing GRASS system as the input to the IP, creating the GRASS/Image Processor, which was used throughout the mid-1970s. He described it as the video version of a Moog synthesizer. The IP was an analog computer which took two video inputs, mixed them, colored the results, and then re-created TV output. Sandin had joined the university in 1971 and built the Sandin Image Processor, or IP. There he joined up with Dan Sandin and together they formed the Circle Graphics Habitat (today known as the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, or EVL). Īfter graduation, DeFanti moved to the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle. GRASS included a number of vector-drawing commands, and could organize collections of them into a hierarchy, applying the various animation effects to whole "trees" of the image at once (stored in arrays). As the name implies, this was a purely vector graphics machine. It was developed on a PDP-11/45 driving a Vector General 3DR display.
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