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Modern Vector Art on the Tektronix 4050 microcomputers

nikola-wan

nikola-wan

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Location
Texas, USA
I am intrigued with the Modern Vector Art on the Plotterfiles.com website that had the Jack O'Lantern Face.

Thanks to @stepleton's post of a Jack O'Lantern Face that he had ported to run on his Tektronix 4006 Terminal - I checked out that site and was impressed by the number and variety of vector art images posted.

Plotterfiles caters to artists uploading their art - typically with CC BY 4.0 free with attribution licenses. That site targets plotting those images on modern plotters, laser and mechanical engravers, and vinyl cutters- such as the AxiDraw plotter available on their site.

I just finished a new SVG creator and SVG viewer program that converts the SVG art into R12/Fast Graphics format.

Here are three modern art images created from my edited SVG files on my Tektronix 4054A vector graphic microcomputer.
  • One Line Fish (entire drawing is one continuous line)
  • Impossible Cube
  • Jack O'Lantern Face

I plan to create a Modern Art Gallery of these images that can be viewed on any 4051/4052/4054 computer with the R12 or Fast Graphics ROM Pack and my 4050 GPIB Flash Drive.

I also plan to publish some of my vector art on that site - like my SVG Star Wars Droids.

Here is a table of how long it took to run my BASIC SVG-R12 viewer on my 4054A, 4052, and @WaveyDipole 's latest 405x Emulator with Flash Drive and option ROM support including the R12 Enhanced Graphics ROM Pack:

SVG ImageTektronix 4054ATektronix 4052405x Emulator
One Line Fish5.5 seconds20 seconds8 seconds
Impossible Cube5 seconds16 seconds10 seconds
Jack O-Lantern Face23 seconds1 minute 26 seconds39 seconds

Here are my photos of my 4054A displaying these three images:

One Line Fish - 4054.jpeg

Impossible Cube - 4054.jpeg


Jack O'Lantern Face - 4054.jpeg
 
Vector images from this site and others are proving to be a real attractor at my Tektronix display at the Retro Computing Festival here in Cambridge (continuing into Sunday this weekend). The little 4006-1 terminal drawing these images gets all the attention, gathering people around like folks watching a campfire, and the 4051 machines with their more advanced capabilities and the fancy game I wrote or various other capabilities are less eye-grabbing. I think @jdreesen experienced something similar with a 4014 terminal. Regardless, it is all a success I think, with lots of people learning about this unusual storage tube display technology.

Kudos for displaying the credit line at the top of the screen! Hopefully some of these artists will learn of this unusual "medium" and be enthused by it.

I am surprised to find that the 4054A is so much faster than the 4052. Why should this be? I thought they both had the custom Tek bit-slice CPU, and I wasn't aware of any clocking differences.
 
Yes, the 4052 and 4054 share the same bit-slice CPU, but the 4054 and 4054A have completely different vector generators than the 4051 and 4052.

The 4051 and 4052 10-bit vector D/A is constant time per vector - regardless of length.

The 4054/4054A 12-bit vector D/A is constant speed per vector and averages 10x faster drawing speed than the 4051/4052. The 4054/4054A vector generator uses two stacked rate multipliers instead of a D/A ladder and has a vector drawing time of 15kcm/sec according to the 4054 Brochure in March 1979 posted on vcfed.org.

The 4054 Option 30 manual appendix A has a chart showing the vector drawing speed versus vector length. Short vectors on the 4054 are much more than 10x faster than the 4051/4052 drawing speed!
 
stepleton said:
Vector images from this site and others are proving to be a real attractor at my Tektronix display at the Retro Computing Festival here in Cambridge (continuing into Sunday this weekend). The little 4006-1 terminal drawing these images gets all the attention, gathering people around like folks watching a campfire, and the 4051 machines with their more advanced capabilities and the fancy game I wrote or various other capabilities are less eye-grabbing. I think @jdreesen experienced something similar with a 4014 terminal. Regardless, it is all a success I think, with lots of people learning about this unusual storage tube display technology.

Kudos for displaying the credit line at the top of the screen! Hopefully some of these artists will learn of this unusual "medium" and be enthused by it.

I am surprised to find that the 4054A is so much faster than the 4052. Why should this be? I thought they both had the custom Tek bit-slice CPU, and I wasn't aware of any clocking differences.
Click to expand...
How was the Retro Computing Festival? Are you going to post some photos? Maybe a new thread?
 
Yes, I was wondering the same thing. I never managed to get there this year - too much on I am afraid. It would have been nice to have met up in person.

Dave
 
nikola-wan said:
How was the Retro Computing Festival? Are you going to post some photos? Maybe a new thread?
Click to expand...
Thanks for asking, it went quite well! The systems had no trouble. The only problem is that there was a whole lot of day-job work dammed up behind the time leading up to the show, and once the event was behind me, I've had to attend to that backlog. I'll try to say more once the dust settles, but again, a smooth, uneventful exhibit and lots of people enjoying the introduction to these machines.
 
Great news.

I went away for a week with work - and still had a week of work to catch up on when I got back... A double whammy!

Dave
 
Beautiful artwork. Those machines are amazing. Too bad they are so rare.

I saw your displays at the VCF Southwest, but alas, I only had a couple of hours there and I didn't have a chance to dwell there. Where are you in Texas? It would be awesome if you made it to one of our quarterly meetups (3rd Saturday in Jan, April, and October with a break in the summer for VCF SW).
 
dfnr2 said:
Beautiful artwork. Those machines are amazing. Too bad they are so rare.

I saw your displays at the VCF Southwest, but alas, I only had a couple of hours there and I didn't have a chance to dwell there. Where are you in Texas? It would be awesome if you made it to one of our quarterly meetups (3rd Saturday in Jan, April, and October with a break in the summer for VCF SW).
Click to expand...
I'm near Houston.

Are your meetings in Dallas?

I do intend to exhibit my 4054A at next year's VCF Southwest. Maybe I should sign up as a speaker.
 
Here is a photo I took of my Tektronix 4054A running the Option 30 Demo at VCF Southwest 2023.

The "Tektronix 4054 Dynamic Graphics" text in the center is being displayed by the Option 30 coprocessor in dynamic or refresh mode and moving across the screen right to left in "orange".

The menu and surrounding vectors were drawn with BASIC move/draw commands and stored persistently on the Option 31 Color Dynamics Display and show up in green.

The burgundy color on the Option 31 CRT is due to a 50/50 mix of red and green phosphors. The red phosphor are very short persistence (fraction of a second) and if the electron beam energy is too low to cause storage - the red and green phosphors both glow briefly creating the "orange" vector color.

If the electron beam energy is high enough for storage - the vector briefly flashes orange and then only the green phosphor stays illuminated by the voltage applied to the phosphor coating.

Monty and his 4054A exhibit with Option 30 & 31 at VCF West 2022-pic2-sharp-small.png
 
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I just uploaded my latest 4054A youtube video - with 16 new SVG images - including the DeLorean Time Machine from Back to the Future (see image below).

TEK Vectors: MORE SVG with my Tek 4054A

DeLorean Time Machine.png

I also just uploaded the latest FlashDrive-27Nov2023.zip file. The SVG2FG folder contains my latest SVG to R12 CREATOR BASIC program and the latest Viewer for these files.
I also added SVG PICs to the MAIN MENU program. These files will run on 4051/4052/4054 and A-Series computers with the Fast Graphics ROM in the MAXIROM or the 4052R12 Enhanced Graphics ROM Pack in @jdreesen 4052/4054 Multifunction ROM Pack for the 4052/4054 computers. The files also run in the 405x Emulator:

Tektronix 4051-4052-4054 Program Files
 
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