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Geek Culture / Video on a 4.77MHz 8088 with CGA

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Torrey
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2006 06:57
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I saw this posted on hack a day a few days ago and thought it was really neat. My first experiences programming as a kid were with a CGA monitor. The guy in this article managed to hack up some great code to get video running on a 4.77MHz 8808 processing with a CGA monitor!

Click here to check out the site.

The website even has video and the program itself to prove that it ran video incase there are a few skeptics out there.

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Jeku
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2006 10:04
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Wow


Automaton Games website has been revamped! Check it out!
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Eric T
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2006 10:42
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Alright...

I am officially impressed!

http://blog.myspace.com/erict
*Boom HEADSHOT!*
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Lukas W
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2006 11:53
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holy crap!

makes you realize what todays pc's really can do that we would think is impossible today

The Cowboy Game progress 17% (paused)
HorizShootiz progress 20% - optimising code
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SirFire
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2006 13:38
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They should hire those guys to be micro$oft's lead programmers. Can you imagine how fast windows would be?

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Kangaroo2 BETA2
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2006 14:56
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Wow! That is toally amazing, but does it exactly how I would have done, using text mode for teh colours and producing ascii "blocks" for the resolution. I did exactly the same thing with graphics for the old commodres, starting on the CBM/PET. Of course it wasn't as good as this, and back then "video" on pcs didn't exist, but I created some very cool cartoons using exactly the same technique


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Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2006 15:16
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Thats fantastic and I completely agree, it puts modern PC's to shame.

you can get that out of a 4.7Mhz processor and yet on a modern chip that runs at 2800Mhz, what more can it do? More colours and higher res...


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dab
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2006 15:53
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Quote: "more can it do? More colours and higher res...
"


Yah, and that's only the graphics card, and monitor....

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Dazzag
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2006 19:03
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Sheesh, I remember a certain full screen video we used to run fine in BTEC (about 1989) on 4Ghz monochrome efforts (green mainly with the odd "posh" orange one). One bloke left it to run on all the next first year boot disks (that they stupidely left on the desk) after he was kicked off the course at the end of our first year. One lecturer totally blew a fuse over that one, and they closed the main PC room down for a few days because of it (had to use Amstrads then, which were no good for Falcon and Test Drive, or whatever the hell we were playing rather than working...). Good times....

Cheers

Ps. Oh yeah, pretty impressive. Slightly dampened by videos of the type mentioned above, which wern't so good, true, but did exist around 17 years ago....

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
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Kangaroo2 BETA2
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2006 19:16
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"Slightly dampened by videos of the type mentioned above, which wern't so good, true, but did exist around 17 years ago"
do you mean my post? Cos if so thats the method this guy is using in essence if you read the site, just converting each frame into 16 colours and whatever res the ascii handling was, and then playing out coloured ascii blocks. thats the only way to do it on cga as ot would only do more than 3 colours in ascii text mode, all the "graphical" modes were 3 colour.


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Dazzag
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2006 19:43 Edited at: 2nd Feb 2006 19:44
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I thought CGA was 4 colours? Anyways definitely saw some video at the time, just tended to be 2 second efforts in seriously grainy mode. Esp on the monochrome monitors (using seriously slow simcga on Hurcules graphics if I remember rightly). Sorry didn't read your post (skim a lot), but it didn't look like ASCII blocks. Proper pixel stuff. It's like we used to play test drive (simcga again) and other games, and they looked okish (naff on monochrome, but slow so easier). Remember getting Falcon running on a 4 colour CGA machine. Wasn't it all yellow, purple, and cyan? Actually maybe no yellow. Can't remember now......

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
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Kangaroo2 BETA2
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2006 19:53
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From what I remember it was Cyan, Magneta and White? Unless you count "black" as a colour, but being that the screen was black unless it was displaying something, I would only count "lit up" pixels as a "color". I may be wrong though, its been YEARS since I last used one, I tended to use Hercules Higher res monocrome cards, and EGA cards instead, never really liked CGA models...


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Grog Grueslayer
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2006 21:15
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Wow! If he did that back when that's all we had he'd be a rich man.

Yeah those were the colors of CGA... Black, Cyan, Magneta, and White.


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Torrey
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Posted: 2nd Feb 2006 21:25
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Quote: "Wow! If he did that back when that's all we had he'd be a rich man."


That's true, but the problem being that back then there wasn't huge amounts of storage space to store such high quality video for him or others to encode it in this low quality format. Also I don't the video technology was up to technology level at that time, so if it were possible it would have costed a lot of money.

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Dazzag
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2006 00:36
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I'm telling yah, the video I saw was of a fairly decent quality. Just didn't last long because was stored on 5.25" disks (360k?) and hard drives were very rare at the time. Think the main server (that was in the staff room) had a mighty 20mb drive or somesuch to store things like WordStar (although took ages when all 20 or so machines were trying to load at once, so we just all booted up off floppy). Heh. The example above just looked a bit smoother. Plus when it came to sound, I seem to recall some shareware program that worked in a similar way to simcga to produce soundcard (once they came out) effects on machines with no soundcard (using the internal speaker). Was suprisingly good

Everyone remember turbo buttons? Oh yeah....

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
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Kangaroo2 BETA2
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2006 00:55
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I had a 486dx4 100mhz (power house at the time) and you could depress the turbo button for programs that ran too fast in it lol

"I seem to recall some shareware program that worked in a similar way to simcga to produce soundcard (once they came out) effects on machines with no soundcard (using the internal speaker). Was suprisingly good"
Yes it was awseome you could make the internal speakers reproduce any wav sounds, speach etc. goodness knows how it worked. Tourble was you couldn't control the volume and on some pcs was deafenning and on others you could hardly hear it


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Torrey
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2006 05:49
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Quote: "I had a 486dx4 100mhz (power house at the time) and you could depress the turbo button for programs that ran too fast in it"


I remember that turbo button! Even though the increase of speed wasn't very much during certain loading times it really made a difference.

Quote: "Yes it was awseome you could make the internal speakers reproduce any wav sounds, speach etc. goodness knows how it worked. Tourble was you couldn't control the volume and on some pcs was deafenning and on others you could hardly hear it "


There was a driver I had for windows 3.1 that produced sounds through the PC speaker. My parents were kind of poor when I was young so any computer I owned was basically crap, and to finally have some sound like that was a God send.

I bet if I searched hard enough through the floppies I have all around the driver is still there some place.

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SirFire
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2006 07:25
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My P4 3ghz tower is a recycled case from the old days, it still has a turbo button on the front, with a little yellow light to tell you if you are screaming fast. I had to cut out a section on the back to accomodate the newer mobo. It also features a led segment display to let you know what mhz you are running at. I set that to display HS when turbo button is on, and FU when the turbo button is off. HS stands for high speed, and you can probably guess what the FU stands for. The button has absolutly no connection to the mobo other than for power

And if you want to know why I'm using such an old case, it's because it was laying aroud my garage, it's got 6 full size drive bays, a floppy bay, and 4 HDD bays inside.

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Phaelax
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2006 08:25
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I had a pc with a turbo button!

Didn't he say the video was stored on the computer in raw data form? With nothing to decode, it just be like reading from an array sorta. hence a major speed advantage


Deadly Night Assassins
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Dazzag
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2006 09:43
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Quote: "I remember that turbo button! Even though the increase of speed wasn't very much during certain loading times it really made a difference."
It was supposed to be used in a reverse fashion. ie. you always use turbo on your bleeding edge 286, but when you run an old app or game they nearly always didn't have clever timing calculations to run at the same speed on any CPU (mainly because there was only really one when they were written), and basically ran flat out. So your 286 would run too fast. Turning off the turbo would slow it down to the old speed so you play the old stuff at the correct speed. That was the idea anyhows.

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
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Kangaroo2 BETA2
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Posted: 3rd Feb 2006 14:08
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"Didn't he say the video was stored on the computer in raw data form? With nothing to decode, it just be like reading from an array sorta. hence a major speed advantage"
Yes. If it could take any "normal" vide file and convert it then play it, that would be a huge achievemnt, but, I'm 99% sure, impossible on the computer. You chave to convert it on a modern computer first.


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Les Horribres
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Posted: 4th Feb 2006 00:52
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There was definatly yellow in there.
And with yellow you get the complete secondary colors of light! Whoo!

I wasn't that old to know the 4mhz, but I did have a windows 3.1 < (don't know the exact version and it broke down years ago). So this is pretty impressive. Although, stuff like this has been floating around for a long time, just not for the low system plats.

Quote: "They should hire those guys to be micro$oft's lead programmers. Can you imagine how fast windows would be?"

Do you think M$ cares about how fast their software is? They only want to get people to buy upgrades. And their way of doing that is by changing the GUI.

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SirFire
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Posted: 4th Feb 2006 03:44 Edited at: 4th Feb 2006 03:45
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And leaving holes everywhere.

M$ has a no-bugs policy: If there are no bugs in your code, you're fired.

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Grog Grueslayer
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Posted: 4th Feb 2006 05:05
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@ Dazzag

I was so amazed when I heard a Sound Blaster for the first time... I was like "No more beeps and bops!!!!"... I still to this day have never bought a sound card that wasn't made by Creative Labs.

It was always funny to me why they even bothered to put a turbo button there in the first place... my computer always had it on no matter what. To me it should of just been on all the time anyway. When I started building computers turbo buttons were still around... I was amazed when I would get calls from people "My computer is slow!"... "Is the light by the turbo button on?".

To Everybody

Since we're going down memory lane... check out a picture of my Dads computer. He insisted I put something in his that's not normal on a modern computer.


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Dave J
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Posted: 4th Feb 2006 07:52
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5&1/4 Inch Floppy? Why bother? People don't even use 3&1/2 anymore!


"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers."
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Dazzag
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Posted: 4th Feb 2006 17:09 Edited at: 4th Feb 2006 17:10
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Quote: " was so amazed when I heard a Sound Blaster for the first time"
Too right. I first heard one on my mates PC. I had an Atari ST at the time, and so far (especially with MIDI) Atari and Amiga owners had pretty much laughed at PCs. When he got a soundcard it totally blew us all away. Awesome really, with so many channels. And the instruments sounded leagues above what we had ever used before. Totally amazing. Even now a crystal clear sounding tune can remind me how good they are.

As it happens I should be getting my new PC in a couple of weeks. It has one of those new X-Fi soundblasters in it. I wasn't going to bother, since a normal soundblaster is normally good enough, and anything above is normally just extra fluff. But then I read a review and basically they said the marketing says something like "Will make MP3's sound *better* than the original CD". No way says the review (as do you probably), it's just marketing rubbish. So they try it. And it's true! They were totally amazed and gave it top marks. I'm betting that there is a certain limit of bitrate (otherwise just do everything at the lowest bitrate) to make it sound better than the original CD, but with that sort of review it was the extra £30 on top of the standard soundcard to try it out. Should be good. Hopefully Apple or some industrious iPod hacker can work out a way to incorporate into players so I can get better sound out of my iPod and therefore increase it's 15000 song storage (at 128 bitrate). Tops.

Cheers

I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
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Grog Grueslayer
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Posted: 4th Feb 2006 21:32
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@ Exeat

He still has (in the closet) about 5,000 5 1/4's. My Dad has a hard time letting go of 5 1/4's. My first 5 1/4 (for the TI Pro) is in that collection too. It still has notes on the sleeve he wrote me on how to save/load programs in Basic.


@ Dazzag

I instantly believe anything they advertize... of course blind loyalty like that is probably bad.

An extra $30 isn't too bad for the higher quality. I looked it up and saw this for the gaming mode:

Quote: "Know exactly where your enemies are whether you're using headphones or speakers. You won't believe how good X-Fi CMSS-3D positional gaming audio is; in fact, it's so good you'll forget you're wearing headphones!"


With headphones!?... that's truly amazing... I gotta get one!


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