v0.7.8: The Stanford Dragon Has Arrived!

v0.7.8: The Stanford Dragon Has Arrived!

The Stanford Dragon lands on the Commodore 64 in five HORS-V3 demo cartridges: wireframe, metallic (grey), red, green and blue. The official Stanford res4 mesh retains all 5,205 vertices, 15,796 edges and 11,102 triangles, with 128 viewing orientations per cart.

New in HORS-V3: red, green and blue shading ramps for generated surface textures, alongside the original metallic (grey). Choose the look from the CLI with --surface-palette grey|red|green|blue. --surface-fill grey is an alias for --surface-fill metallic.

Watch the showcase GIF: one complete turn each of wireframe, metallic, red, green and blue, in that order. Individual GIFs, prebuilt carts, source geometry, rebuild commands and performance results are in the Stanford Dragon example. Playback follows measured PAL VICE display timing.

CLI

python c643d.py build --renderer hors-renderer-v3 \
  --obj examples/stanford_dragon/stanford_dragon.obj \
  --name "STANFORD DRAGON" --obj-up y --spin-axis y --frames 128 \
  --surface-fill metallic --surface-palette red

Use green or blue for the other colour ramps. The default is grey; metallic and gray also alias the grey palette. Coloured shading uses native C64 colours and respects the two-colours-per-8×8-cell hires limit. The original black/white dither mode requires the grey palette. Imported image textures and MTL face colours retain their previous behaviour.

HORS-V3 performs projection, visibility and lighting on the host and streams bitmap/colour drawing data to the C64. HORS-V2 remains the toolkit default; older explicit renderers remain available.

Measured Dragon performance

PAL VICE 3.10, stock C64 timing, 128 orientations per cart. Average FPS counts actual display-buffer flips over 1,504 PAL refreshes after warmup.

Look	Average displayed FPS	Frame stream	CRT file
Wireframe	20.00	233,306 bytes	303,760 bytes
Metallic (grey)	15.13	279,935 bytes	361,216 bytes
Red	15.10	277,791 bytes	353,008 bytes
Green	15.13	279,215 bytes	361,216 bytes
Blue	15.13	280,945 bytes	361,216 bytes

The combined GIF shows all five complete rotations in 40.34 seconds. All 1,295 completed-picture checks passed; every orientation was also verified in the actual display buffers. Detailed timings, RAM use and evidence.

The release unit suite passed: 239 tests, 3 skipped. Existing release validation passed 25 cartridges and 10,751 picture checks. The full historical renderer comparison and all 11 existing HORS-V3 workloads were rerun. Existing HORS-V3 cartridge binaries remained byte-for-byte identical to v0.7.7.

Release integration

• Lead the main README with the Dragon showcase, retain the previous Pretzel release with its metallic GIF, and move older announcements to release history.
• Integrate all five Dragon builds, independent picture checks, display measurements, GIF captures and a combined showcase into the release workflow.
• Add Dragon performance to the generated main comparison and its source/evidence checks.
• Rebuild current release cartridges and refresh the existing renderer comparison for 0.7.8.
• Give incremental packages a distinct filename, preserving the full ZIP when a baseline is supplied.
• Save required HORS-V3 test transcripts as tracked .txt files and derive the evidence path from VERSION.
• Add Stanford University Computer Graphics Laboratory and Thomas "skoe" Giesel / EasyFlash / EasyAPI to the main README credits.

Model provenance and Stanford's usage terms are included with the example. PAL VICE validation is recorded in release evidence; physical C64 hardware and NTSC are not measured.

Install and check

Extract the incremental ZIP from the parent of the existing checkout. It contains a c64-3d-toolkit/ top-level directory. Then run from the checkout:

python examples/stanford_dragon/verify.py --check
python tools/run_hors_v3_perfs.py --check
python tools/compare_renderers.py --check