Trixter

As a 90s Amiga kid, I am deeply offended by the cultural appropriation. ;-) This was an excellent read. It always amazes me when people discover functionality in old hardware, even if it couldn't be exploited at the time. It reminds me of "8088 MPH", the demo of 1024 colors on CGA, from 2015: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emu…

From the Wikipedia article's citations: http://www.oldskool.org/sound/pc/#digitized I lived through the PC speaker, and never heard anything like this ever emitted from one. It's crazy how good those waveforms sound, if they're representative of the hardware… I remember how amazing it was when we got our first soundcard installed and working, too. Games were much more interesting with real sound-effects.

It would be a shame not to mention Jim Leonard's 8088 Domination, which pioneered (I think) the whole idea in 2014 for the original IBM PC, by also converting Bad Apple as full-motion video into 8086 machine code (8088 is the same software-wise)! https://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19/8088-domination-post-mortem-pa… The video is linked at the top of the excellent writeup, the Bad Apple part starts after an initial color video part. It's truly amazing, and I wonder what I would have felt if I had seen that on an IBM PC back in its day.

Do demosceners keep secrets like that? I only know of the ones who publish super detailed blogs about techniques, because... those are the ones I read. E.g. https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emu… And a much more recent one, video here (I recommend watching the chat replay! Should start ~ 7h02m40s) https://www.twitch.tv/videos/589179638?t=7h02m40s and blog post http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Memories

It's simple enough to explain in a page of pseudocode More like a paragraph... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Welch#Encodin… Personally, I like LZ more than LZW because it doesn't have to slowly "build up" the dictionary in the same way as LZW nor need bit-I/O (because you can have an 8, 16, or 32-bit "indicator", followed by that many literal or length/distance pairs) and thus makes for an even simpler (and faster) algorithm. The only downside is that it's more asymmetric, in that compression is usually far slower than decompression (which can be faster than memcpy() - see http://www.oldskool.org/pc/lz4_8088 ) because the former has to do a lot of searching while the latter is mainly copying memory.

> I think I later upgraded to a 100MB IDE disk, but was still lucky. Well, it really wasn't luck as much as keeping with the electrical specs. Do that, you'd never see a problem, and the later IDE "cable select" schemes did really help to mitigate a lot of the damage from improperly terminated cables. > Anyway, thanks for contributing to a great OS! Well, other than living in infamy due to introducing that bug, I didn't start there until the push to turn 4.0 from a tech demo into a real product. So really all the credit for 3.2 and earlier which set the foundation for Coherent belongs to the other guys, many of whom were long gone by the time I got there like Dave Conroy (who wrote the MicroEMACS I loved to use) and Randall Howard (who went on to found MKS). There were some great people from the earlier days still there though, like Norm Bartek, Hal Snyder and La Monte Yarroll who where there when I joined and of course Steve Ness who was the sole man behind the MWC C Compiler (much as Fred was responsible for that remarkable manual). Also worth a mention, among all the other notable characters I remember fondly is one of the support/QA folks at MWC: Jim Leonard aka Trixter, who became a notable demoscene figure - https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emu…

I learned this lesson many years ago, back in the early/mid 90s. There was a well known American developer named Tran (Thomas Pytel) who wrote some mindblowing stuff back in those days...very proper hacky things in bizarre screen modes using more colors than should have been possible, and using sound hardware in crazy ways to produce more sound channels than anybody thought possible in those days, and all running faster than should have been possible on the hardware of those days. Incredible optimized stuff for the early 90s. My friends and I would always try and by the best hardware available to run this stuff as quickly as possible. The first person with a 486dx2-66 pretty much ended up running their system on display mode during meetups on all the old demos. What did Tran have? A 386sx16 if I recall. A machine that was so slow, so last gen, that he was probably unable to even watch most of the demoscene releases available at the time. No math co-processor, 16MHz, and yet he managed to write an amazing amount of highly influential and important code used far outside of the demoscene (most notably PMODE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMODE which was used in many game productions during that era). I remember him crediting the fact that his home machine was so slow that it forced him to optimize the hell out of his code to make it run decently, and the side effect was that people with faster machines had their minds blown. I personally think that Tran, and his works, should…

If you pay extra for that. Meanwhile _any_ CRT could trade off resolution for refresh rate across a fairly wide range. In fact the standard resolutions for monitors were all just individual points in a larger space of possibilities. They could change aspect ratio as well. This can be quite extreme. Consider the 8088 MPH demo from a few years back (<https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emu… See the part near the end with the pictures of 6 of the authors? That video mode only had 100 lines, but scrunched up to make a higher resolution.

256 colors? VGA? Bah! You kids with your newfangled graphics modes. 320 x 200 CGA and 16 colors is more than enough. See the linked "8088 MPH" video for proof: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emu…

There is a 10-byte assembler (Intel) port of the same program: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2012/12/17/maze-generation-in-thirteen-by…

Some of the ports of Bad Apple have had to deal with this and they narrowed it down to the few changes needed for each frame. When there were too many pixels to change all at once, they would make fewer changes in exchange for a loss of quality. https://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19/8088-domination-post-mortem-pa… https://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/20/8088-domination-post-mortem-co…

It's an odd submission, as there's very little in the discussion, and what there is, is a quote of the introductory paragraph of https://trixter.oldskool.org/2011/06/04/at-a-disadvantage/, which actually goes into detail.

Related: discussion[0] of the article[1] mentioned here comparing C64/6502 and IBM PC/8088 performance. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345672 [1] https://trixter.oldskool.org/2011/06/04/at-a-disadvantage/

I think they specifically meant in the context of this site. When the title doesn’t have a date here, the assumption is more-or-less “fairly recent.” It is an odd post though, it really is like just a couple comments, and then the real content is in a link in one of the comments https://trixter.oldskool.org/2011/06/04/at-a-disadvantage/ So the actual content is a 2011 article talking about historical processors.

I wonder if the composite emulation is good enough for 8088mph[0][1][2]? :) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNRO7lno_DM [1] https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emu… [2] https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrate…

in 30 years we have gone from the idea that your computer could accidentally brick your monitor, to the idea that your monitor could accidentally brick your computer. https://trixter.oldskool.org/2006/02/02/computing-myth-1-software-cann…

See also: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators, a demoscene project that got 1000 colors out of 4-color CGA PC card from 1981: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emu…

Cannot wait to read the writeup. The one for 8088mph was epic: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emu…

Windows 3.11 on a Tandy 1000... that's a hack right there (http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/1kfaq.html#III.C.1) ;)

It seems to be a Tandy 1000 RSX which supports Windows 3.1 Original photo is from here, which has Windows 3.1 running: http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/RLRLX.html

Watch the 8088MPH demo on youtube, then read how it was done [0], it's absolutelly insane what you can extract from an IBM PC 5150. [0] https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emu…

Meanwhile, in NTSC land, people were expanding the colour palette by generating interference that would be interpreted by NTSC TVs as additional colour information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors PAL wasn't as amenable to this sort of endeavour, so platforms that were more popular outside the US tended to focus on effects like those described here - give the impression of more colour space even when it wasn't there. Efforts like 8088mph (https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emu… that create much more colour than the hardware was nominally capable of are solidly tied to NTSC, and it's interesting thinking about how much the demo scene ended up split by the behaviour of their TVs.

For anyone else curious about the index hole thing, there's a diagram here: http://electronicstechnician.tpub.com/14091/css/The-5-25-Inch-Floppy-D… This page discusses a hardware modification that can be done to allow two TEAC-55GFR drives to work together, where one is loaded with an unflipped disk and supplies the required index signal to the other drive: http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi/FLIPPY.htm

Huh, I'm surprised to find that you're right, unless you count NASM. Randall Hyde last updated HLA in 2015 (and it didn't support the 8086 anyway), WalterBright last updated DMC in 2013, and SDCC doesn't support the 8086. But I remember the 8086 as being a lot of needless effort that we had to cope with because it had a large installed base: near, far, and huge pointers, EMS bank switching, shitty TSRs that would stomp your registers, and so on. MS-DOS made it worse. What are you up to? Something like https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emu… where the needless effort is the whole point?

To be fair, that whole demo is a technical tour de force. Some more information about it: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emu…

see also: squeezing 1024 colours out of a 1981 IBM 5150 with a CGA display: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emu… Explanation & pictures of how some of the techniques work: https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrate…

the effort to install a hard drive in a PC was pretty small Relative to today, it was non-trivial though physical access tended to be easier. http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/1kfaq.html#II.D.1

The minimalist scene is still out there, it's just a niche within a niche. For instance, here's a demo from 2015, done in immediate mode and 256 bytes - I've got a feeling you'll enjoy it as much as the live audience clearly do: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07KHwjebf7k For another recent example, also in 2015 some wizards managed to coax 1024 colours (among other impressive visual effects) out of an original IBM PC - as in, hardware from 1981: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emu…

Speaking of CGA... did you know that an IBM PC 5150 (4.77 MHz Intel 8088) with a CGA card can display full framerate video? http://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19/8088-domination-post-mortem-par… This is accomplished by compiling the video into branch-free code that sends minimal updates to the CGA.

AFAIK yes, the demoscene is still quite active. There are contests every year, and new demos get written for recent or older hardware altogether. See the recent 8088 mph [1] or more generally, the pouet website [2] [1] http://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emul… [2] http://www.pouet.net/