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Hardware Heritage

Oldschool plasma is perhaps the most iconic effect of the PC VGA era. By summing multiple periodic waves (typically sines) and using the result to cycle through a pre-computed color palette, coders created fluid, organic-looking interference patterns that showcased the machine's computational speed.

PC Mastery

Plasma is the defining effect of the PC VGA era. It leveraged the fast 386 CPU to calculate sine tables and the VGA's linear framebuffer to display complex patterns at 320x200.

Amiga Copper

On the Amiga, "Copper Plasma" was a specific variation where the Copper chip changed the palette per-line, creating smooth vertical patterns without using the CPU for pixel math.

Modern Sine

The modern approach sums four or more periodic waves per-pixel in the fragment shader, creating perfectly smooth interference patterns at Retina resolutions.

Oldschool Plasma

The fluid motion of summed sine waves.

Legacy C (VGA)

for (y=0; y < 200; y++) {
  for (x=0; x < 320; x++) {
    // Sum precomputed sine tables
    index = (sinTab[x+t1] +
             sinTab[y+t2]) >> 1;
    VGA_MEM[y*320+x] = index;
  }
}

Modern GLSL

float v = sin(uv.x * 10.0 + iTime);
v += sin(uv.y * 10.0 + iTime * 0.5);
vec3 col = 0.5 + 0.5 * cos(6.28 * (v + vec3(0,0.3,0.6)));