A small cube gave poulsback its first recognisable shape. It was simple enough to inspect, with enough structure for a broken result to be obvious. That experiment also became the basis for the project’s logo.
A small result we could check
One early hardware contract records an offscreen 64 × 64 cube draw on SGX535. Its complete colour image matched the frozen reference: black background, with red, yellow and magenta faces. Mesa prepared the vertices on the CPU; SGX535 performed rasterization and fragment processing.
That established a particular working route through the hardware. It did not yet provide an ordinary OpenGL window or an application-facing Mesa screen. Repeated rendering, presentation and safe resource release still needed their own work.
Even the picture needed careful interpretation. Correct visible faces alone could not prove depth handling: culling could produce the same appearance. Separate near/far ordering tests were needed to investigate depth. A useful cube test leaves questions behind as well as producing a satisfying image.
Turning the geometry into a logo
The logo generator uses the central 32 × 32 crop of the independent CPU cube reference. Its three coloured faces become a compact pixel silhouette, joined by custom lettering and the phrase “the pulse is back”.
The SVG is generated artwork based on the test geometry. It is not a saved GPU frame. Keeping that distinction clear lets the same cube serve two purposes: a test whose pixels can be checked, and an identity people can recognise.
A picture becomes a starting point
The next challenge was to move beyond a bounded scene. An existing OpenGL application would change state, allocate buffers, submit more work and ask X11 to display the result. Each of those connections needed to work together.
The small scene gives that work a reference point: known geometry, known colours and an image that can be checked. The hardware guide follows the programs, tiles and memory handoffs behind a frame. Making an ordinary application use them is the next step beyond this bounded experiment.