Microsoft reanimates 1995's 3D Movie Maker via GitHub

Microsoft has continued its record of open-sourcing curiosities from the past and released the code behind kids' favorite 3D Movie Maker. You can take a look here. For anyone too young to remember the tool, it came out of Microsoft's Kids educational subsidiary in 1995 and permitted the creation of movies using props, actors …

[Chewi]

I was once a lousy bum, just like you.

You lousy bum.

(Anyone remember that?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Argonaut were shit hot!

Fascinating story about Argonaut and their 3D work with Nintendo kit. The dev at Argonaut who came up with 3D code was from a training scheme, he signed up to learn coding and found he was absolutely shit-hot at it. He developed the 3D code and Nintendo were so supicious that anyone could possibly do what they said, that they flew him and a fellow dev out to Nintendo HQ in Japan, locked them in a room with the top Nintendo dev team and engineers and these two nobodies from the UK just blew the Nintendo devs and engineers away with what they'd been able to do on bog Nintendo standard hardware. Nintendo then got them to stay on in Japan on the work that later led to Starfox.

[BRYN]

not 100% accurate

Lets put some flesh onto the bones of that story.

Whilst true your rendition isnt accurate:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argonaut_Games

"In 1990, Argonaut collaborated with Nintendo during the early years of the NES and SNES, a notable incident being when Argonaut submitted a proof-of-concept method of defeating the Game Boy's copyright protection mechanism to Nintendo.[5] The combined efforts from both Nintendo and Argonaut yielded a prototype of the game Star Fox, initially codenamed "SnesGlider" and inspired by their earlier Atari ST and Amiga game Starglider, that they had running on the NES and then some weeks later on a prototype SNES. Jez San told Nintendo that his team could only improve performance or functionality of the demonstration if Nintendo allowed Argonaut to design custom hardware to extend the SNES to have true 3D capability. Nintendo agreed, so San hired chip designers and made the Super FX chip. They originally codenamed it the Mathematical Argonaut Rotation I/O, or "MARIO", as is printed on the chip's surface.[1][6] So powerful was the Super FX chip used to create the graphics and gameplay, that they joked that the Super NES was just a box to hold the chip.[7]"

[Blackjack]

I remember playing around with the demo of 3D Movie Maker. Should make a VM and play around with this Open Source version.

I wonder if one day Windows 3.0 will be open sourced? I have fond memories of some of the games for it.

[Anonymous Coward]

BRender

"First, he wrote the manual – the full documentation that served as the spec. Then the coding started."

If only we could get back to documenting before coding the world would be a better, and far less patch filled, place.

[karlkarl]

Re: BRender

Heh, I specifically noticed that on the GitHub README too.

These days I would be happy with people just attempting to finish the implementation before release ;)

"DRM mechanism first, half the code second, ratty patches from then on"

[Sanguma]

inch-by-inch

Microsoft's stopping holding on to everything in the past. Little-by-little it's liberating itself from its "all that's mine is mine and all that's yours is mine" attitude.

I still think Microsoft (and IBM and whoever's got the carcass of VMS) should open that part of computer history (VAX VMS, IBM/Microsoft OS/2 and earlier versions of MS WinNT) up to hobbyists.

[Ross 12]

Re: inch-by-inch

Don't HP own VMS these days? And there's still big customers using it

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: inch-by-inch

HP don't own VMS anymore, its developed by a company called VMS Software, Inc which was setup when HP said they were going to kill it off. They are busy porting it to run on Intel x86 processors.

[Kane]

...shuffled off into the Redmond cupboard where the Band, Media Center and Groove were locked away.

...Zune cries quietly in the corner of the room...