D-CSIL · Engine Architecture
Chromaglyph
Simulated in continuous coordinates — rendered through characters.
The engine behind the Chromaglyph Mac app
Watch Chromaglyph in action · 120Hz continuous physics and ECS simulation rendered through a real-time Metal 3 glyph rasterization pipeline
Set the YouTube quality to 1080p
What it is
Core architecture & capabilities
Chromaglyph is a native macOS graphics engine where characters are first-class GPU primitives — not cosmetic overlays. Every system from physics to lighting is built to treat the glyph grid as the canonical output surface.
Native Apple Silicon Graphics Engine
Built ground-up in Metal 3 with no abstraction layers. Leverages unified memory, half-precision compute pipelines, and triple buffering for maximum throughput on Apple Silicon.
Continuous World Simulation
Fixed 120Hz timestep, sparse-set Entity Component System (ECS), and continuous 2D sub-pixel physics with spatial hashing, SAT collision, and CCD.
Per-Cell GPU Compute Graph
Heavy visual processing runs on the glyph grid (320×180 up to 640×360 cells) rather than raw pixel buffers, utilizing deferred lighting and per-cell feature selection.
Temporally Stabilized Rendering
Custom hysteresis feedback loop prevents glyph shimmer while maintaining visual coherence during motion — no flicker, no character thrash.
Live Palette & Font Swapping
Instantly swap between ASCII, Unicode, Braille, box-drawing, emoji, and custom glyph sets at runtime without restarting the physics simulation.
Drives the Chromaglyph App
The same engine powers the Mac app's photo and video conversion — analyzing source media and composing the output entirely from glyphs — and also runs real-time rendered scenes for games (Glyphbound), visualizers, and generative graphics.
Setting expectations
What Chromaglyph is not
Glyph rendering is a frequently misunderstood category. These are the four most common misconceptions — explicitly addressed.
NOT a Post-Processing ASCII Filter
Characters are the fundamental rendering primitives in the GPU raster pipeline — not a retro video effect layered on top of pixels after the fact.
NOT a Grid-Bound or Tile-Map World
Objects and entities move freely in continuous sub-pixel coordinates. The glyph grid is strictly the final visual layer, not the world model.
NOT a Cross-Platform Web Tool
Engineered exclusively as a native macOS application, optimized for Apple Silicon GPUs and Metal 3. Browser or Linux ports are out of scope.
NOT Just a Single Game
While flagship concepts like Glyphbound are built on it, Chromaglyph is a general-purpose, reusable graphics engine and API — not a one-off project.
Technical specification
Engine graph overview
The render pipeline processes each frame through six ordered stages, all executing on the GPU via Metal compute and render command encoders.
Author
Paul O. Derrington, Jr. · Derrington Collaborative Synthetic Intelligence Labs (D-CSIL)
derrington.collaborative.ai@gmail.com