Ron Parker's SuperPatch* for POV-Ray 3.1g, patched for MS-DOS.

(Latest build - July 11, 1999)

Please Note:

The latest (currently 'beta') version of POV-Ray is 3.5. It can do essentially everything this 'SuperPatch' does, and much more. Available here (Highly recommended!)

This page will probably, eventually, be replaced by one for a MegaPOV for MSDOS based on POV-Ray 3.5 (when that becomes possible), or maybe just link to somebody else's MegaPOV for MSDOS.

spovdjg.zip contains spovray.exe, an MS-DOS version of POV-Ray 3.1g with SuperPatches applied, and some source patches.

This DJGPP build has some minor differences from the 'official' SuperPatch (3.1g). In particular, the isosurface patch (by Ryoichi Suzuki) in SuperPatch includes a number of interesting isosurface functions accessible via DLL's. DLL's don't work in MS-DOS, so I made all those extra isosurface functions internal to spovray.exe. This makes their use a little simpler in this version of the SuperPatch than in the Windows SuperPatch, but a new keyword, 'idata', is introduced in order to get the i_dat3d.dll functions internalized.

The SuperPatch source files which were modified are included, along with a makefile for DJGPP, and some little examples. In order to build spovray.exe from the source code yourself, you also need the official MS-DOS POV-Ray 3.1e (or g) source code, available through www.povray.org and Ron Parker's SuperPatch source code. The included source files are a patch to a (super) patch. Please consider this as experimental. I am not an expert in POV-Ray and got this to work mainly by tracking down bugs one by one until it stopped crashing. (see Latest Build date above)
Please send feedback!

spovdjg.zip
Ron Parker's SuperPatch page
The Official POV-Ray page
Isosurface patch page (Ryoichi Suzuki) has numerous helpful examples of using the isosurface functions.

Some fun with SuperPatch: 


function{"Neovius" <1,1>}


function{"data_3d_3", <1.0>, 
   idata "mydata.dat", <10,10,10,0>
}
 

function{"data_3d_3", <1.0>, 
   idata "mydata2.dat", <10,10,10,0>
}
 
#declare HEIGHT_Fn= function{
   pigment {
      image_map {
         gif "myfractal"
         map_type 1
      }
   }
}
#declare SPHERE_Fn
         =function{"sphere",<1>}

isosurface {
   function{SPHERE_Fn(x,y,z)
            -.5*(HEIGHT_Fn(x,y,z))}
}

send feedback
UP to Edna Dornblazer Institute of Theoretical Cosmetology and Mad Secretarial Sciences (geocities annex)

* The POV-Ray SuperPatch is a number of the most popular or valuable patches to the official POV-Ray. SuperPatch is an unofficial version of POV-Ray made of contributions from many authors. The main extensions to POV-Ray are
parametric surfaces, isosurfaces, splines, sphere sweeps, new pigment mappings, rational bezier surfaces, new mesh type, slope dependent textures, variable reflections. light groups, spherical/toroidal/(etc)/ warps, and unicode text.
Authors include (in addition to the authors of the official POV-Ray distribution)
Daniel Skarda, Thomas Bily, Ryoichi Suzuki, Kochin Chang, Nathan Kopp, Jochen Lippert, Wolfgang Ortmann, Hans-Detlev Fink, Michael C. Andrews, Mike Paul, Matthew Corey Brown, Jon A. Cruz, and of course, Ron Parker.