Plasma Generator

Diamond-square

Source

Roughness F Seed

Displace centre (textbook)

The actual 64,000-byte PLASMA.IMG shipped in the 1988 archive — output from a real VGA run on 5 August 1988.

Fractal swimming

Smoothness Random-table start

Show 160 × 100 swim window

Two moving regions of one fractal are added together using the original 10,000-frame movement table from TOMSPLAS.DAT.

Plasma Lab

Scene Pattern Finish Frequency Motion Intensity

Scenes populate the editable controls below. Ice Flow is the clean, cool-toned Plasma Lab default. Fractal Swim is a continuous-field GPU homage to Tom's rough plasma. Memory Mandelbrot uses zₙ₊₁ = zₙ² + zₙ₋₁ + c.

Rendering

Render profile Sampling Live preview quality

Show FPS diagnostics

Modern profiles generate Mulvey and Tom at native widescreen resolution. The archived Mulvey image is cleanly upscaled because its source is fixed.

Palette

Cycle speed

Share & export

Perfect loop (Plasma Lab) WebM recording length

Historical ports credit Bret Mulvey (PLASMA, 1988) and Tom Dibble (Tom's Plasma, 1994). Tom credited Jeremy Longley and Thomas Hagen in the lineage of the swimming effect. Modernization experiment by Eric Blue, developed with Claude and Codex.