Viewing profile — Scali

On a PC it is different, because you need to render the polygons in software. On an Amiga you basically draw lines into each bitplane, and then do a single area fill at the end, al…

That is an interesting difference with the 8088+CGA platform by the way. The Amiga has no problem displaying entire screens of uncompressed data. CGA however is so bandwidth-limite…

Well, I would argue that a 'conventional' video codec would not work nearly as well on a stock Amiga 500 as this polygon approach does. The closest thing to full-motion video on th…

The Amiga had a hardware blitter that was very good at drawing lines and doing area fills, so it made perfect sense to encode video to polygons on that particular hardware.

It was actually patented by Access Software, under the name of RealSound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealSound

Having said that, the CGA card does not actually have its own clock. It takes the NTSC base frequency of 14.31818 MHz from the OSC-pin of the ISA bus. On early PCs, such as the IBM…

Yes, thanks! Fixed the original text.

Yes, combined with streaming the data from disk in realtime, and playing the audio over the PC speaker in this case, bit-banged. Given the limited performance of both the HDD syste…

The video clock (I assume you mean pixel clock) isn't relevant. The synchronization of video and audio happens on a per-frame basis. And since the frames are clocked out on the aud…

Yes, I posted a followup which investigates the issue somewhat further. It appears to be some bug with the message queue handling, specifically when the UI is in Aero mode. In clas…

Exactly. As I tried to explain, you NEED a context switch (which doesn't make it a spin-wait) in order to avoid the deadlock between your main loop and the processing of the Window…

Some will agree, some won't. This is a good watershed moment to cut off the ones that won't.

"Justify why people died" Lol, you sound as unhinged and radicalized as Jim. The point I was making was that all these people had a criminal record that showed they had a violent n…

The ATi Small Wonder is not entirely cycle-accurate. When I studied the CGADEMO by Codeblasters, I found that the scroller didn't look entirely correct, because the Small Wonder wa…

Given that the demo targets AT-class hardware, it is unlikely that something like PCem or MESS was used, because in those cases you'd actually have to select an AT-configuration to…

I wonder... certain software, such as Flight Simulator and Lotus 1-2-3 had a profound effect on the level of compatibility of clones. So perhaps if software was released that deman…

That is known to happen, yes: https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2015/08/09/fixing-genesis-proj...

What may also have had an impact was that clones were generally XT-clones (using the newer, smaller ISA card layout, and no cassette port), not PC-clones. And indeed, they were spe…

Yes, especially somewhat later in the life of the 8088, most applications would demand quite a bit of memory, and the 640k configuration became standard for the later 5160s and mos…

I wouldn't know if 'most of them' don't work, but I know for a fact that I have one (made by Vivanco, using a Prolific chip) that works fine in combination with my IBM 5160. I use …

Not on the original PC/XT machines, as the ISA bus was basically the CPU data bus. So regardless of whether you had memory on board or on an ISA card, data transfers were exactly t…

In short, textmode gives you 80x25 characters of 8x8 pixel resolution each, making 640x200 resolution, with 16-colours, where each character can be assigned a foreground and backgr…

Correct, as "XT" stands for eXtended Technology. You can't extend it without having the basic technology first. The 5150, aka the PC, was that basic technology. However, in terms o…

That was how the predecessor 8088 MPH worked. Area 5150 however is aimed at a TTL RGBI monitor, and as such, does not use NTSC composite artifacting. It can only display 16 colours…