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8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

trixter.oldskool.org

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Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

#51

Post by jacquesm »

Two9A wrote: post #35
sgt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

I have, in the past, been forced to type an Xmodem transfer program into debug.com's hex mode, to get to the point where I can transfer files over a null-modem connection from another box. I can dig up the file in question, if that'd help you out at all. I ended up typing it in 1k at a time, and independently typing in a CRC32 utility to check that I'd done it properly. (That was to install Windows 98 on a computer w…

That's how I used to transfer files to my coding buddies.

On the phone, hex dump in S-record format, then read out loud while the other side would type in the line. Checksum matches? Next line...

Our respective parents were not too happy about this unplanned usage of their phone lines but it saved a ton of cycling.

Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

#52

Post by jacquesm »

frownie wrote: post #23
transitorykris wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That caught my attention as well. I wish I knew this trick 3 decades ago.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#160.C3.9...

Interstingly they talk about the "change palette in the middle of the screen" tricks that we used in Imphobia. The precision timing was certainly tricky, especially when playing a MOD-file while drawing ! Ahhh memories...

Try changing modes in the middle of the scan :)

Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

#53

Post by Intermernet »

jacquesm wrote: post #46
Intermernet wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, as someone who saw some "cutting edge" 3D as a young student in the early 90's, this is beautiful. Weren't the Tseng cards in the 80's pretty much the first consumer cards with features hinting at fmv / 3d ? I was a tad young to know the details, I know their cards in the early 90's were incredible, but I wasn't there for the first Tseng labs stuff. Friends of mine claim that the early Tseng stuff was so impress…

I loved the Tseng mostly because of its nice memory map and the fact that the registers weren't very secret. Before that it was "VGA Wonder" (ATI). The Tseng vesa cards did not do 3D but they were blisteringly fast (for the time) if you knew how to hit them 'just so'. Do everything by the row and avoid bank switches at all cost. The funny thing is that the driver I wrote for the card was only about 2% or so Tseng spe…

Your clocking trick is exactly what I spent 3 weeks swapping CPU / MB combos trying to avoid!

Kudos for actually doing it, and making it work!

Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

#54

Post by chillingeffect »

userbinator wrote: post #47
lloeki wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more I progress in our domain of expertise, the more I observe we're being incredibly wasteful† all over the place. For all the expressiveness power of our platforms and languages it somehow sounds insane that time (ruby -e '100_000_000.times {}') takes four solid seconds on my 3.4GHz machine††. I know, bogoMIPS are no benchmark, this is just to exemplify that layers of abstraction, while useful (necessary even),…

I think the underlying cause of this over abstraction is largely a result of abstraction being excessively glorified (mostly) by academics and formal CS curricula. In some ways, it's similar to the OOP overuse that has thankfully decreased somewhat recently but was extremely prevalent throughout the 90s. In software engineering, we're constantly subjected to messages like: Abstraction is good. Abstraction is powerful…

> abstraction being excessively glorified (mostly) by academics and formal CS curricula.

It's not just academics, it's many developers, too.

We're in an old-school thread. We like what's really going on. Hang out in the Web Starter Kit from last night though, and you'll find tons of people who glorify abstraction.

The reality is that competing forces spread out the batter in different directions: the abstractionists write Java-like stuff. The old-schoolers exploit subtle non-linearities.

Actual commercial shipments rely on a complex "sandwich" of these opposed practices.

> Demoscene is all about creative, pragmatic ways to solve problems

Yes and I grew up with the demoscene (c64 and amiga 500) and it's also about magic, misdirection, being isolated for long winters and celebrating a peculiar set of values. Focus is shifted toward things that technologists know are possible, such as tight loops running a single algorithm that connects audio or video with pre-rendered data, not on what people want or need, such as CAD software or running mailing lists. Flexibility, integration and portability are eschewed in favor of performance.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the demoscene - it's the path that got me to love music. And I have near-total apathy for functional programming. I only code in Javascript when weapons are pointed at my heart, but with the proper balance, there are some very real reasons to make use of abstraction. It's not just academics, it's people solving real problems. The trick is to act strategically with respect to the question: which parts will you optimize and which parts will you offload to inefficient frameworks?

Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

#55

Post by jacquesm »

Intermernet wrote: post #53
jacquesm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved the Tseng mostly because of its nice memory map and the fact that the registers weren't very secret. Before that it was "VGA Wonder" (ATI). The Tseng vesa cards did not do 3D but they were blisteringly fast (for the time) if you knew how to hit them 'just so'. Do everything by the row and avoid bank switches at all cost. The funny thing is that the driver I wrote for the card was only about 2% or so Tseng spe…

Your clocking trick is exactly what I spent 3 weeks swapping CPU / MB combos trying to avoid! Kudos for actually doing it, and making it work!

Oh trust me if I had had the money I would have happily pursued your route. Cutting a trace on your only working computer and soldering bits & pieces onto the motherboard in order to land a job (talk about risk/reward here, I'm not sure how I would have worked without that machine but I really wanted that engine ;) ) made me pretty nervous. If I could have saved myself that batch of cold sweat I would have happily done so.

What got me is that it did work, I fully expected there to be some level of synchronization between the chips that would require both of them to be clocked at the same rate. The only reason I tried this is that the main CPU appeared to stop working and I figured it was worth a shot to see if the FP could go faster. And it did, and not just a little bit faster! Apparently Intel engineers were quite friendly when they designed the interaction between the two processors because in spite of the huge discrepancy in clock speed between the two chips it worked incredibly well.

Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

#56

Post by StillBored »

userbinator wrote: post #20
jacquesm wrote: post #12

That'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…

> the true limitations of hardware from over 30 years ago are still rather elusive

That was the basic idea that kept the Apple II line alive for ~15 years on an 8 bit processor running at 1Mhz. Of course at the end, there were a handful of faster configurations but the IIgs @ 2.5Mhz and the short lived IIc+ at 4Mhz were the only machines apple produced with faster processors.

Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

#57

Post by crististm »

sgt wrote: post #17
jacquesm wrote: post #12

That'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?

You can run Norton Commander on both computers and set them on connect mode. One PC is set as master and the other as slave; connect them physically with a parallel cable.

Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

#58

Post by zak_mc_kracken »

jacquesm wrote: post #13
dennisnedry wrote: post #8

This 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.

And it wasn't Bill Gates who said that.
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