This is truly impressive, I'm amazed by how fast it renders. So I guess Mr. Gates was right, you only need 64k...
and no more than 4.77mhz.
8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
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Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
#12That's absolutely insane at that clockrate. The way I would get 'animations' (for want of a better term) done is by rendering them frame-by-frame, compressing that and then playing it back at high speed. And even that was next to impossible. Decompressing video @60fps, and doing real-time dithering to increase the effective number of colours and still have time enough for 45KHz audio is totally nuts. This qualifies as art, not just software.
Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
#13This is truly impressive, I'm amazed by how fast it renders. So I guess Mr. Gates was right, you only need 64k...
> So I guess Mr. Gates was right, you only need 64k...
That was 640K.
Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
#14The PC I ever used was an Amstrad 8086 CGA, seeing the 4 colour palette 1 again made me super nostalgic. Somehow back then playing games with only black, white, magenta and cyan didn't bother me.
Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
#15I never knew CGA could do 16 colors. In my memory 16 colors is EGA.
My family had a CGA pc when I was young, and while it could do 16 colours, the horribly low resolution of the 16 colour mode meant very little ever made use of it.
Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
#168088 Domination is one of the examples of truest hacking and deserves to be sticky on HN. I mean it!
Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
#17That's absolutely insane at that clockrate. The way I would get 'animations' (for want of a better term) done is by rendering them frame-by-frame, compressing that and then playing it back at high speed. And even that was next to impossible. Decompressing video @60fps, and doing real-time dithering to increase the effective number of colours and still have time enough for 45KHz audio is totally nuts. This qualifies a…
"This qualifies as art, not just software."
For me there was never any doubt.
A bit unrelated, but I've got an old 5150 at my parent's place, so when I'm visiting next Xmas I'll try to load this demo onto it. The only problem is that of transferring files to it. It only has a 5.25" floppy drive, and I don't have a means to copy files onto those floppies.
Any suggestions?
Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
#18That's absolutely insane at that clockrate. The way I would get 'animations' (for want of a better term) done is by rendering them frame-by-frame, compressing that and then playing it back at high speed. And even that was next to impossible. Decompressing video @60fps, and doing real-time dithering to increase the effective number of colours and still have time enough for 45KHz audio is totally nuts. This qualifies a…
"This qualifies as art, not just software." For me there was never any doubt. A bit unrelated, but I've got an old 5150 at my parent's place, so when I'm visiting next Xmas I'll try to load this demo onto it. The only problem is that of transferring files to it. It only has a 5.25" floppy drive, and I don't have a means to copy files onto those floppies. Any suggestions?
Laplink?
Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
#19That's absolutely insane at that clockrate. The way I would get 'animations' (for want of a better term) done is by rendering them frame-by-frame, compressing that and then playing it back at high speed. And even that was next to impossible. Decompressing video @60fps, and doing real-time dithering to increase the effective number of colours and still have time enough for 45KHz audio is totally nuts. This qualifies a…
"This qualifies as art, not just software." For me there was never any doubt. A bit unrelated, but I've got an old 5150 at my parent's place, so when I'm visiting next Xmas I'll try to load this demo onto it. The only problem is that of transferring files to it. It only has a 5.25" floppy drive, and I don't have a means to copy files onto those floppies. Any suggestions?
Squirt it in bit by bit down a serial port?
Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
#20That's absolutely insane at that clockrate. The way I would get 'animations' (for want of a better term) done is by rendering them frame-by-frame, compressing that and then playing it back at high speed. And even that was next to impossible. Decompressing video @60fps, and doing real-time dithering to increase the effective number of colours and still have time enough for 45KHz audio is totally nuts. This qualifies a…
For me, the most interesting part is that his solution - updating only the changed parts between each frame and the previous one, and approximating the changes so that they're not (too) visually perceptible in order to satisfy a bitrate constraint - is one of the ways that modern video codecs achieve their compression.
I agree it's also amazing that apparently, the true limitations of hardware from over 30 years ago are still rather elusive... this is the complete opposite of the "throw more hardware at it" attitude towards most software problems today, but instead it's "throw more brainpower at it".