He built a GPS moving map on a 25MHz 486-SX—years before Garmin or Magellan
A software thing I built: GPS on a 25MHz 486-SX
A contractor recalls a 1993 project: a real-time GPS moving map for a 25MHz 486-SX with 32MB RAM, 1024x768 color display, and no math coprocessor. Using the Hipparchus library's Voronoi-cell integer math, he got updates every 2 seconds—twice as fast as first-gen consumer GPS units that appeared five years later. Financial troubles forced him to hand over the IP, and he never learned what happened to it.
It was literally 10 years before anybody had a consumer-grade GPS that had similar performance to what I had built in 1993 that did not require a math co-processor, and it updated a 1024x768 color display every 2 seconds.
- tomaskafka
A bit related - I tried if I can push Fable to write a Garmin map renderer that would be comparably fast (or faster) on Fenix 8 than the one they claim is possible on Fenix 9 only. I think I got very close, rendering detailed topographical vector map at over 15 fps on QEMU simulated single core simple CPU comparable to actual Fenix 8.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Garmin/comments/1vzaz4w/we_live_in_...
- SillyUsername
I built one, tracking fleet vehicles with a custom box, using tiled maps, on behalf of Vodafone, back in 2002.
I still remember I wrote a basic trans-mercator library too!
Of course Mercator projection may go out of fashion soon https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/world-map-eq... :)
Hope I'm called back to update the library ;)
- svag
I believe the library mentioned in the article should be this one https://geodyssey.github.io/overview/overview.html and here https://www.lukatela.com/geodyssey/