Bonus · A Vortex on a 386

While making a web project about my old MS-DOS graphics days, I happened to see OpenAI's announcement about a solution to the smoothness problem from Navier-Stokes, and various visualizations of it (e.g. this one). So I wondered if I could make a nice anachronistic 386 demo of this visualization, and ended up with two solutions. The palette cycling one draws the screen once and then flips through colors to animate it, while the particle one is actually animating the particles in real time. When I saw their binaries were so small, I went a little further and optimized them both to be sub-1,024 bytes. For each I have a JavaScript version that lets you play with settings and go way beyond what 386 could do, and then real 386 versions running in DOSBox. The JS and ASM source code are available at the bottom. Full disclaimer, this effort was AI assisted. the 256 DAC registers: 2 hues × 4 depths × 32 steps streamlines 120 particles 200 true-color trails instead of palette fades 640×480 uncapped frame rate The defaults here are meant to stay inside what a fast 386 with a VGA card could plausibly do.