DKBTrace




This ray tracer was written by David K. Buck and is released as freely
distributable software. The author retains all copyrights but permits
free distribution of the software through any medium. The software may
be used without charge so long as the code is not included in any
commercial product.


The Amiga archive here contains two versions of the raytracer:

traceffp - Fast Floating Point version of the raytracer.
This version will run on any Amiga with sufficient
memory.

trace881 - Math coprocessor version. This version will only
run on 68020 or 68030 based systems that have a
68881 or 68882 math coprocessor.


I usually like having a fairly large stack for this program. If it
crashes on you, try inceasing the stack size.


The IBM version archive also contains two versions of the raytracer:

dkbno87.exe - Emulated Floating Point version of the raytracer.
This version will run on any IBM P.C. or Compatible
machine, as it is compiled for 8088 opcodes.

dkb.exe - Math coprocessor and 80186 or better ('286, '386, etc.)
optimized version of the raytracer. Requires a 80x87 NPE.

The stack size in this version is fixed at 32K which should be sufficient.
If you run into a scene which is too complex to trace with 640K of memory,
QuarterDeck's QRAM or VIDRAM are programs which will extend DOS memory to
704K/740K using either EMM or Video RAM memory, respectively. There are
also Public Domain programs (such as 740K.COM/SYS (?)) that will accomplish
the same thing. The raytracer will use up to all available DOS memory,
but no EMM or XMS support is present at this time.


The program documentation can be found in the file DKB.DOC and the
documentation for some Amiga specific utilities may be found in
AmigaUtils.doc.

This program is being distributed in four separate packages:


DKBTrace.zip: Executables for dkb.exe and dkbno87.exe
documentation files
Sculpt2DKB, Dump2RAW, GlueTGA, HalfTGA executables

DKBData.zip: Many sample data files

DKBSrc.zip: Source code for DKBTrace, Amiga utilities, and
IBM Utilities.

DKBPics.zip: Sample pictures produced by the raytracer.
(You could render these yourself using the
data files in the DKBData.zip archive).


There is a document in the DKBTrace.zip archive which describes the
conversions required to use data files for DKBTrace version 1.2 with
the new 2.0 version. This file is called 12to20.doc

This readme file is in all three archives.