[Info-vax] I'm looking for samples of ReGIS and Sixel graphics.

[Bee Nine]

On Friday, March 16, 2018 at 3:12:25 PM UTC-7, rco... at gmail.com wrote:
> Sorry for the late reply, but I've been looking for this too. 

It's called the "Long Tail" of the Internet and it's a good thing.

> The old DECUS library has a few ReGIS applications written in Fortran. I ported the sorting visualization, font editor, and paint program to g77 on Linux. That wasn't easy given they were in old Fortran with a lot of DEC extensions and used VMS libraries (I haven't had access to any VMS systems in almost 20 years). I don't know if I'm allowed to redistribute modified stuff from DECUS, otherwise I'd share them. 

Please do share them. Or at least share the techniques you used. I also haven't touched Fortran on a VMS system in decades and I'm having a devil of a time trying to compile an interactive ReGIS drawing program: https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/decus/lt89a/mdraw .

>  Gnuplot supports both ReGIS and Sixel (I have a patch to drastically improve the ReGIS driver, but have been sitting on it because I want to test it on a real VT340 before I send it out). 

I have a real VT340. Shoot me some code at https://github.com/hackerb9/vt340test/ and I'll let you know the results.

> Some other things like the GNU font utilities support ReGIS, but not in any kind of interesting way. I think Ghostscript supports Sixel, probably because some printers used it also. 

You can try Phylip, the Phylogeny Inference Package, which has ReGIS output and uses it with the Hershey vector font to draw text. (apt install phylip, on Debian GNU/Linux).

I believe there was supposed to be a Sixel enhanced version of WordPerfect for VMS. I presume that simply means that when you do a Print Preview it'd take a couple minutes to slowly dump an image to your screen. 

> I've seen passing mentions of games using ReGIS or Sixel, but I've never found any software, screendumps, or details really.

I don't think ReGIS and sixel were fast enough until recently to be used interactively. Just sending the data at 9600bps takes a long time. I could imagine someone drawing static parts of the screen using ReGIS or sixel, but I don't think they'd be useful in actual game play. I think the best you could hope for would be to define a soft character set using sixels and then use the 96 characters you can define as tiles to make your ncurses based video game look better.

--hackerb9