Hi people,

I am very proud to announce the release of my PS3 demo called retrostation.

I know it is a bit late compared to sony's decision to completely remove the Install Other OS functionality from the new firmware release of latest April 1st. However, I started this project more than two years ago, so I definitely wouldn't stop this until it is done. I also know about people who still haven't updated their system, because they are aware of what they will lose, so this is a way to show them what they can do with a ps3 system, even without hardware 3D acceleration.

The demo is an animation of different kinds of 3D objects. Some of these have been designed by Mic of Dune, who did a really good job. Others are coming from old Atari ST demos. I let you try and find out from which demos they come from ! Objects of the last kind are algorithmically generated: blobs and text in separately-animated pieces.

The music has been composed by Dma-Sc of Sector One, who also did a great job in the final design of the whole animation. I personally also use my own demoscene nickname in the demo, which is Zerkman of Sector One.

The demo runs on any PS3 system with a linux OS installed on it. It runs in framebuffer mode. Ensure you set the screen mode to 720p 1280*720, and disabled the Xorg server before running the demo.

I hope you'll like the demo as much as I liked making it.

Author:
François Galea
Version:
0.1.0
Introduction

Freezer is a 3D engine and animation system for the Cell Broadband Engine processor.

The 3D engine main characteristics are:
Efficient use of SPE's for display acceleration. Used PPE CPU power is reduced to the minimum (almost zero).
Support for triangles, quads, with optional extrusion mechanism for 2D ojects.
Support for import of 3D objects in OFF file format.
Available shading types:
flat shading
gouraud shading
Accurate Z-buffered rendering.
Automatic generation of normal vectors for flat-shaded objects, and for Gouraud-shaded objects.
No support for textures (yet).

The animation system characteristics are:
Available output environments: SDL, PS3 framebuffer, or file export for frames (BMP format).
Double buffering.
Eventual support for motion blur and fading effects.