Recovering Eric Graham's 1987 Amiga Juggler raytracer source code

Recovering Eric Graham's 1987 Juggler raytracer source code

AlphaPixel often gets involved with modernizing and updating old performance and graphics code. Sometimes that means client work under NDA. But sometimes it means a fun side quest in the mystical realms of curiosity, preservation, and the practical problem of getting old data into a form that can be read and used on a current machine.

Today let's talk about Amiga Juggler ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sculpt_3D ).

The Juggler animation was ground-breaking and Earth-shattering. Even the Amiga's creaators (Commodore) didn't believe it had been made on an Amiga. They thought the actual computation work had been done on a mainframe, and the result simply converted to and displayed on an Amiga.

Juggler made a strong impression on me. It is one part of why I bought an Amiga, and the Amiga is part of why I ended up in computer graphics. I recently realized that the source of Juggler is not redily available to most people on the web, due to it being inside an Amiga ADF file which most archivers don't parse. Additionally, some of the canonical references (dottyflowers.com) have already decayed into inaccessibility. So I wanted a first-class permanent code archive for posterity.

Finding the files

There were known references to the Juggler raytracer source. Ernie Wright's pages at:

http://www.etwright.org/cghist/juggler.html

and:

http://www.etwright.org/cghist/juggler_rt.html

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