Video playback in cmd.exe² @ProjectPhysX

Uploaded February 2022 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

This is a fun little C++ project, inspired by the legendary 8088 Corruption/Domination programs.

Windows cmd.exe can only display standard ASCII characters in 16 colors. Using a 12x7 pixel font and shading characters 176 ░, 177 ▒ and 178 ▓, I can increase the number of colors to 616 using dithering. Contiguous characters of the same colors are combined into blocks to minimize the number of color change commands.

What's new in version 2?
- lookup table for color conversion instead of doing nearest-neighbor-search algorithm just-in-time
- compare downsampled frame with previous frame and only draw the pixels/characters that have changed; draw changed characters in contiguous segments to minimize std::cout and color change commands
- framerate is now between 40% to 400% higher (best for scenes with stationary background)

Version 1 video: youtu.be/fkgwCvZiqmg

Streaming video through SSH from a remote server in Windows Subsystem for Linux: youtu.be/72VGIiWKMEU

Code Snippets:
- Colors in Console with C++: stackoverflow.com/a/67195569/9178992
- Dithering: stackoverflow.com/a/68460068/9178992
- Screen Recording in C++: stackoverflow.com/a/68483943/9178992

8088 Corruption/Domination
- youtu.be/L6CkYou6hYU
- youtu.be/MWdG413nNkI

Time Stamps:
0:00 Intro
0:10 Tron Legacy (2010), Flynn vs Rinzler scene
0:51 Tron Legacy (2010), Lightbike scene
2:03 The Matrix (1999), "Dodge This" Scene
2:54 Spongebob, "Tea at the Treedome" (1999), "I don't need it" scene
4:09 :D

Video References:
- Tron Legacy (2010), Flynn vs Rinzler scene, youtu.be/YyoKXfBQgXw
- Tron Legacy (2010), Lightbike scene, youtu.be/SqSuRdkglxM
- The Matrix (1999), "Dodge This" scene, youtu.be/ggFKLxAQBbc
- Spongebob, "Tea at the Treedome" (1999), youtu.be/m5uayeTCYJQ
- Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (1987), youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ

$From Boxes to photorealistic Fluid (marching-cubes + raytracing) From Boxes to photorealistic Fluid - how does ot work? The fluid simulation is done with the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) with the Volume-of-Fluid (VoF) extension and piecewise linear interface construction (PLIC) for surface tension. VoF-LBM: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349552856_High_Performance_Free_Surface_LBM_on_GPUs PLIC: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3197/10/2/21 VoF-LBM provides a 3D grid with fluid fill levels, used as isovalues for marching-cubes, which generates a contiguous triangle mesh representing the water surface. Marching-cubes: http://paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/ With raytracing I shoot light rays from the camera through the 3D isogrid. For each grid cell that a ray traverses, I run marching-cubes to generate the triangles on-the-fly, then check for ray-triangle intersections with any of these triangles. If the ray intersects, I dont use the flat-face-surface nromal of the triangle, as this would lead to visual artefacts on the reflected/refracted rays. Instead, I interpolate the surface normal at the intersection point in order to have a smoothly appearing surface. How does surface normal interpolation work with marching-cubes? I get the normals directly at the lattice points with gradient (central derivative) on the isogrid, then linearly interpolate to get the normals at triangle vertices and linearly interpolate again to where the ray intersects the triangle with Barycentric coordinates on the triangle. The 3D lattice that the LBM provides already is one of the ideal acceleration structures for raytracing. Any ray only has to check for possible intersections with iso-surface triangles contained within the traversed grid cells. This makes it - when the lattice is not too large - even run in real time on non-RTX GPUs. New video with surface normal interpolation: https://youtu.be/UUYrWUpPQwY Old video without surface normal interpolation: https://youtu.be/9Rfu9ZqW894 The simulation setup you see here is a physically accurate 4mm diameter terminal velocity raindrop impact in water, although at rather low 256x256x218 resolution for this real time demo. See my published research paper in Microplastics and Nanoplastics, where the simulation is validated to great extent: https://microplastics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43591-021-00018-8 This simulation as well as the raytracing graphics are running in real time on a single Nvidia Titan Xp GPU. The simulation software used is FluidX3D, an OpenCL implementation of the lattice Boltzmann method. FluidX3D runs at peak hardware efficiency on the worlds fastest data-center GPUs (8799/5232 MLUPs/s on the Nvidia A100/V100 @ D3Q19 SRT FP32), on gaming GPUs and CPUs and it even runs my smartphone. For more performance details, see: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.08926.pdf #FluidX3D #OpenCL #Raytracing #GPU #LBM$

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