Albedo is a winamp visualisation plugin that's supposed to be pretty to look at. It is my first attempt at using DirectX, and in addition it has involved learning quite a few things about x86 and MMX assembly. It was inspired by a great plugin called "Geiss", which can be downloaded at http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~geiss/geiss.html. My goal was to duplicate its features and its speed, just to see if I could do it. In this attempt, I tried several algorithms which never quite matched the speed of the Geiss plugin, but I eventually settled on one that suited my purpose. I decided to concentrate my efforts on creating interesting visual effects. Unfortunately, the code relies exclusively on the MMX instruction set to execute, so people with anything less that a Pentium MMX won't be able to use Albedo. In fact, I've only tested it on Pentium II machines, and I suspect it will run poorly on a plain vanilla MMX Pentium machine because I didn't try to optimize for that CPU. I'm not sure about AMD or Cyrix. Albedo as written and mainly tested on my trusty IBM Thinkpad 600 with a P2-233. On that machine, I get about 27 fps at a 320x240x16bit resolution. I also tried it on the mighty Celeron 300A overclocked to 450 Mhz with a Matrox G200. It ran great at 512x384x32. As mentioned earlier, try to choose the display mode to achieve 25-30 fps.
This thing rules! The only one that's better is Geiss!!! And I dont know about it being choppy, maybe that guy just has a sucky AMD... I've got a P3 600 w/ a Voodoo 3000 and it rocks! it even runs on my other PC, a P2 233 with NO 3d card.
I almost didn't want to give this a low number, because it sure is pretty, but optimized for MMX is a real understatement. This display is horribly slow and choppy on an AMD, even a 500 Mhz one. I tested it on several systems that had no trouble with Geiss or half a dozen other display modules, and nothing not intel could handle it.
cool. I like the background option..only problem is most of the time I'm doing something else while listening to mp3s..so it covers it up..cool when I'm not really doing anything though.
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