When average is all we strive for, perfection of a thing seems like a waste of time and effort when it can be made easier, faster, and cheaper. But when we desire the average, we can't wow ourselves. That this machine can do this is amazing. The man who put it together has great talents as well.

Amen.

Amen

Imagine what we could do with modern hardware and sufficient optimization

this is the reason I doesn't like "frameworks" and libraries... they hide codes that not always are good and optimzed, they "only" work...

It's awesome to see but in 1981 there would have been no market for it. No medium to store the captured video, no reason to play captured video on an IBM PC. Doesn't mean I don't respect demo coders for making hardware do the impossible.

this demo works only w/ sb so it could not be released in 81'

I mean if you show this to big blue in '81 they'd be getting rickrolled 6 years before the song came out.

@@bluebull399 I still think they would have paid some big money just for the bragging rights when showing off their PCs. I mean just look at this and imagine it happening in the early 80s instead on a household PC, I would have wet my pants for sure and they would love this on a showroom.

IBM didn't care about audio visual performance at all. They made a system with no hardware sprites, no sound, no scrolling, and the ugliest colors known to man. They deliberately made the system bad for games so it would be taken "seriously" and bought by business customers for $5000.

I can't. I grew up gaming on an 8088, and this demo would have melted my little brain.

I just watched it on a CRT and it didn't look any better on my LCD, but I was also watching it at 720p. I suspect it looks much more impressive at 200p on a monitor with much slower phosphors. I kinda miss those days, when drawing a circle on my Commodore 128 was impressive.

i dont think the audio is from the ibm tho

@@gereniccc4487 It absolutely is! Creative Soundblaster II

yea me ever

And have 30+ years to unlock all its secrets!

And have considerably more storage capacity. For example, a big reason early NES video games had simplistic graphics was because you only had 48KB for everything on the game cartridge, as the years rolled by that capacity increased to over 500KB and the visuals improved immensely (this was also helped with advanced Memory Mapper chips getting added to cartridges).

Yep, computers are wonderful machines, they do anything that you ask that is within their limits. I just hope big enterprises like Microsoft and Apple don't start messing things up by adding 101 limitations and hardware requirements as they are already starting to do with the new x64, TPM, and some other requirements for Windows 11. Well, at least the Linux kernel will be always there when we eventually need it.

-The IBM 5150, to my knowledge, can only handle up to 256KB of RAM, whereas the 5160 can handle 640KB.- This demo is super-optimized. _EDIT:_ Misinformation from Wikipedia, the 5150 _can_ handle 640KB of RAM.

Probably my favorite comment ;)

640K was an absolute ton of RAM, but if you had an XT and an expansion board or two you could get 640K pretty easily, and if you ordered it with CGA and a 10MB disk, you'd have been golden to run this. The Soundblaster didn't exist until later, though Im willing to bed that the video alone would have won several awards!

@@AiOinc1 but making the file woulda taken years, sadly XD

dont worry, the pc reached the amiga media capabilities ca in 1990 with the 486 + vga + sb. the sound blaster released just in 89.

Get the time machine!

Even better you could copy the Rick Astley song which was yet to be released and make millions

then you know you came to the right place ;)

i ain't even mad

a machine from the 80s delivering a douchebag from the 80s, just perfect :D

This is worst thing of 8088

There is an OS called KolibriOS, that does what you talk about since its been written with FASM assembly language.

jaykay18 made me think 640*200 mode on te Atari ST has been woefully overlooked

Ashley Whiteman That very well may be. I personally never had experience with the Atari machines.

jaykay18 Even with a lets say 120MHz CPu we could be geting all our work done, but nope the damn programmers of today make the software so damn bloated same with webpages.

Sony Trinitron That's right. There's a reason you used to be able to buy a computer years ago and have it last 15 years. Now you buy one and it craps out before the warranty is even up, but it's already obsolete anyway.

Yes not impressive by any means by today's standards. However, if you grew up during that timeframe and were even remotely interested in computers, this is Awesome. These are the OLD SCHOOL PCs that IBM first released when they got into the micro computer field. Think big ugly heavy dinosaur machines with green text only screens.

Good point. So the question becomes what technology was used to digitize it? I've seen a few demos by "MrAtari" that do the same thing on a 1.8 Mhz Atari 8-bit computer. It seems from reading the descriptions that he used an Atari 8-bit to digitize the video and audio, record it, and play it back. That's still impressive considering that the machines were so slow back then that one would think it difficult for a computer to keep up with the signal coming from a live video source while digitizing it. Though it's possible to keep a low sample size and rate and still have it look decent for the time.

Mark Miller Digitization on older, slower computers was single frames only, not moving video. My old ComputerEyes took roughly 10 seconds to produce an image of a still frame provided by a vcr on "pause".

Jim Leonard Thanks for the detail. Was digitizing the audio more straightforward? So, I see the challenge you addressed with this demo was getting a satisfying frame rate for the playback animation with the graphics technology of the time. Having run some applications in text mode on DOS and in unaccelerated VGA graphics (in Windows) that scroll text, I can appreciate the accomplishment. :)

Thanks! Yes, digitizing audio was much more straightforward and there were many devices for many home computers if the time that could do so. Some even had that capability built in, such as the Tandy TL series.

Exactly.

They already do real-time ray tracing at 4K while still having time to compute game physics and (possibly) encode the whole thing to H.264, encrypt it, and beam it wirelessly to a server halfway around the world. What more could they possibly do?

a modern computer could probably render this video in real time several times over

Glad to hear it!

That would be like that boy on the backseat of the car after dentist.

don't worry, I'm working on it. Give me 15 minutes, a 5.25" floppy disk filled with hentai and a bobby pin.

Sound generated by carefully timing the rotation of the main drive spindle...

The Z80 likely can, given that it usually has much less video memory to change than CGA (16KB). Thanks for the kind words :-)

Guilty as charged

8088 has an 8-bit external data bus.

Slighted remixed by me, but yes (the edits are in the middle portion with the text).

It was briefly pursued, actually. Conversion quality was not high enough for me, but it's not off the table. Better methods may exist in the future.

I'm kind of surprised, as I thought the bright, cel-shading artwork would convert nicely. But, I defer to the expert!

Correct, although I mixed together two different remixes of the song for the final soundtrack.

Thanks. Just one more MHz and full updates would have been possible, but the system is hobbled by slow memory bandwidth.

Thanks for the kind words :-) Here's the tech details: trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19/8088-domination-post-mortem-part-1/ Short answer: I wrote an animation compiler.

...weird, those hummingbirds seem familiar, I feel like I've read that first page already sometime recently but it didn't really sink in. But the second one is where the meat of the trick is hidden, and, well, that's a pretty smart solution that I don't think I'd have ever have got round to developing myself. Very neat lateral leap :) And in terms of the way more important changes are prioritised and little ones are left neglected as they hopefully won't be noticed until a larger change sweeps them up, I think what you've essentially done there is something akin to the MP3 CBR encoder/decoder "bit bucket", or an MPEG quantiser matrix. Both also things that are used as a way to determine what to keep and what to ditch in encoders that have to fit a whole bunch of delta changes to rendered data into a very small data budget. Just without the benefit of discrete cosine transformation wavelet encoding of the visual and audible frequency data and having to instead bruteforce raw pixels onto the screen. Or in other words, if the motion picture experts group think that kind of technique is a good approach for their video and audio codecs...

IIgs would be a good idea; there are homebrew hard drive projects for it, and audio hardware is built-in. Even a simple lores conversion would look good if it were at the full 30fps.

Grab the Apple Game Server ]I[ source from sourceforge -- it has the ability to calculate a stream of frame data based on differences per frame (including page flipping) and it can handle all the modes. My plan was to use that code to generate a stream and fill up a slinky ram card (aka ramfactor or apple ram expansion) with the stream since you can read it cheaply by peeking the same byte over and over. The original design was to optimize the stream of graphics data sent over a serial port but it lends itself really well to this kind of application as well. I won't say that Apple Game Server ]I[ has *everything* you need but it has a good 75% of what you need once you hook up a decoder and run the frame data through. Should be very possible with JavaFX 8 but I have too many things going on to do it myself.

Jim Leonard If you did this on the //gs with fill-mode it would be crazy fast.

Jim Leonard The end result should be similar to this example done on the COCO3. watch?v=42jBBrqn70w

Patchuchan I missed this demo at cocofest (it's 30 minutes from my house!) but it looks like he came up with a lot of the stuff I did, but 3 years before me. Cool! I still think my delta sorting and code generation are innovate ;-) but I'm very glad to see this on the coco3.

Had to stay compatible with older Sound Blasters!

Just imagine how much better the games would have been back then if programmers could utilize these graphics and video modes.

It's actually a mix of two different remixes. It switches during the second text part.

@@JimLeonard Oh it does? Interesting I did not notice. Thanks for pointing it out :)

It makes you think that programmers these days are lazy and cannot code for sh*t

That is the case.

I think it's that today's programmers don't optimize for speed, or size, only flexibility -- which is actually what modern systems programming needs these days. Hardware advances take care of the speed and size issues.

There should be a link to a series of articles that describe how it was created in the video's description

Thanks! It will work with VGA and an NEC V20, but you will see only a B&W image on your VGA monitor.

It'll work with any PC, but yeah you'll only get color with CGA in composite

Snow avoidance kills it. The plasma section in 8088 MPH was 60fps until I had to add snow suppression, which killed the framerate IMO. There's another tradeoff to watch out for, and that's changes per frame. The dithering scheme helps reduce the amount of data that needs to get written to screen; the odd memory organization of the multicolor modes nullifies that, so while it would be colorful, it would be slow.

Once I can get a decent conversion to RGB cyan and magenta, would definitely consider it :-)

Almost ready. Need to solve a few quantum equations first.

@@JimLeonard We believe in you! I'm sure it'll be sooner then controlled effective nuclear fusion!

It's goa trance by Space Cat circa 2003. Exact name escapes me at the moment, sorry! This video, it's actually a mix of two different mixes of the same song.

@@JimLeonard Thanks for the reply anyway!

@@JimLeonard Power Up, Oforia Remix