Martins collection of milkdrop presets

[Nitorami]

Hi there !

Long time no visit here. I am pleased to see that my old login still works, and that there is now a visualisation section. Great !

I'll take this opportunity to post my collection of milkdrop presets I made over the years. They were originally published on the winamp forum starting in 2008, but the future of that forum is uncertain, the owner does not seem to be interested and it was close to being shut down a couple of times already.

So... this pack includes not only new works but (most of) my early attempts... oh my  !
I went through all of them and made minor corrections where necessary to cope with the much faster modern GPUs, or to fix odd bugs. So if you happen to use my presets already, I recommend to replace them. They should all run ok with milkdrop v2.25c, although there's a few caveats:

- Do not use milkdrop v2.25d (comes with winamp 5.9x). It has no benefit, but it is buggy and cannot handle float to integer conversion.
- Shader model PSVERSION 4 (see at the top of the .milk files) does not work with ATI video cards, due to an old bug in the milkdrop dll I am unable to fix. Therefore I avoided model 4 where possible but there is one exception:

My latest work "emergency power supply only" is based on Nivush's ray marching code and needs PSVERSION_COMP=4, so won't run on ATI. Sorry for that. And it will take a few seconds to compile, so I recommed not to store it in your standard presets folder, as it will interrupt the smooth transition between presets. Other than that, it needs its "skin" martin_skin_emergency_power_supply.jpg, and loads three random textures found in its own folder or under the milkdrop textures folder.

If you find a problem or a missing image, please report here.

Enjoy!
Martin

[dro]

- Shader model PSVERSION 4 (see at the top of the .milk files) does not work with ATI video cards, due to an old bug in the milkdrop dll I am unable to fix.

Shader Model 3 should work with AMD cards as it's what DX9.0c implies though I vaguely remember having to tweak something with the SM compilation steps to get it behaving for the WACUP build of milkdrop when I had an AMD card to test against so I might be misremembering something here. No idea about anything from "winamp" as I'm not touching their versions though most problems likely stem from trying to update the nseel implementation & how that might be different depending on the version of it that's being used in the dll.

[Nitorami]

Hi DrO
The common notion of shader models is not congruent with milkdrop's numbering, i.e. PSVERSION 4 may refer to something different that commonly understood as "shader model 4"... I don't remember the details but the ATI problem definitely occurs with the shader model that allows 1024 instructions rather than 512. I think that is model 3.

Back 2010, Eo.S posted an idea why this does not work, and proposed an easy fix. Sounds quite plausible but I am not an expert. Citation:

"Having run milkdrop through Microsoft's directx debugging tool PIX, I noticed that for presets that are running in pixel shader 3.0 mode, the vertex shader's are all compiled as shader model 1.1, while the pixel shaders are compiled as model 3.0.
ATI cards will not run ver 3.0 pixel shaders with non 3.0 vertex shaders. Any version of pixel shader below 3.0 can be combined with lesser versions of vertex shader, which is why 2.0 and 2.x presets still work in Milkdrop 2.

DirectX will actually issue a warning in regards to this, but not an actual error so it can be missed during development if using NVidia GPUs. I'm familiar with the error because Rendermonkey issues the warning. When I use Rendermonkey on our ATI GPU computers I have to set the vertex shader to compile for vs3.0 whenever I set the pixel shader to use PS3.0 or it doesn't render. On our Nvidia GPU computers it still issues the warning, but the GPU allows it and still renders.

This is a very easy fix codewise, as the fxc compiler just needs to be given the flag to compile VS as 3.0 for PS3 presets, so hopefully a winamp developer with access to the MD2 source can implement this fix.

It's possible this may not be the only issue, but having spent the last 6 years programming on both ATI/Nvidia GPUs I'm pretty positive this should be the whole of it.

Eo.S. "

[dro]

I know that the PSVERSION vs SM used isn't aligned due to it needing to account for either nothing, SM1, SM2, SM2.1 & SM3. There's also a pre-emptive SM4 define in the code but it was never hooked up to be used. As for the quoted part from Eo.S. I don't think I've come across milkdrop not trying to use the SM version but I also can't remember what exactly I did to my build of the plug-in without trying to find some of my old notes when I had more interest to work on vis plug-ins. All I know is presets that didn't work with AMD worked ok after whatever I did (maybe it was something about the flags passed to compiler) but it likely doesn't matter if most people now seem to be on nvidia cards.

[Nitorami]

Interesting. Alright, once I can get hold of an ATI card, I'll try.

[Aminifu]

Hi Nitorami,

I really enjoy using your Milkdrop presets. Thank you for this package of updates. They do run better with the Nvidia graphics card I'm using. I'm using version 2.39 of Milkdrop that comes with the current x86 beta build #21066 of WACUP.

[hatecubed]

Thanks Martin, appreciated as always. Somehow you still manage to take presets to new heights!