Game:

Millennium Soldier: Expendable (1998)

Duration: 8:05

137 views

5

REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO. Commentary subtitles are available!
This video demonstrates the various Environmental Bump Mapping (EMBM) tech demos for the Matrox G400 that were available in 1999 for download from Matrox's website or from the G400 driver CD-ROM.

Included among the demos is a couple of Microsoft-made demos; Earth New (can't find the original Earth but should be mostly similar), Water and Water New. A few Matrox-made demos are also included; the "Powered by Matrox" logo demo, monochrome Matrox light map demo and the Bump Mapping Inspection Tool (as seen in 3DMark 2000, interestingly). Lastly, there is also the famous G400 Tech Demo by Digital Illusions (yes, the Battlefield developers), albeit in free flying mode to better showcase the EMBM aspects of the demo.

EMBM is a DirectX 6.0 multi-texturing effect (invented by the now-defunct Finnish company Bitboys Oy) that perturbs/distorts an environment map using encoded per-pixel height data contained in a height-field (bump map). EMBM is not to be confused with classic (as defined by Blinn) Bump Mapping and Normal Mapping as it doesn't perform all the 3-dimensional vector-based diffuse surface lighting calculations that make up a true Bump Mapping function. EMBM is a strictly 2-dimensional effect that uses the environment map as its "light source", as opposed to actually calculating view-independent lighting for each per-pixel surface normal and interpolating it across an entire 3D model or surface. The illusion of lighting is thus achieved by simply panning the environment map (or light map used as an environment map) across an EMBM surface. It works the best for conveying a glossy/glassy look on reflective surfaces.

This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
- Compaq Deskpro EP 6400 case and motherboard (manufactured July 1998)
- Intel 440BX motherboard
- Intel Pentium III 500 Mhz processor (S-Spec SL365, manufactured week 10 1999)
- Matrox G400 (DualHead, 32MB) video card (Rev A/105, manufactured around week 25 1999) [Editor’s note: I do have an older Rev A/104 card made around week 22 but sadly it was dead when I bought it.]
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! Value (CT4670) sound card
- 128 MBs of PC100 SDR SDRAM
- Windows 98 (FE) operating system

The capturing was done in VirtualDub2 using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card plugged into an ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core i7-2600K using 8 GBs of DDR3 SDRAM and an nVidia GTX 580 video card installed. A VGA cable is connected between the vintage computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable into the line in on the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard from the sound card of the vintage computer. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x480 capture to 2560x1920 was done using VirtualDub2.

#matrox #g400 #embm #environmentmappedbumpmapping #bumpmapping #datapath #upscaling #windows98 #directx6 #pentium3 #techdemo #25thanniversary #vga

Other Statistics