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8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

trixter.oldskool.org

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Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

#81

Post by Scuds »

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…

> I think to reverse this there will need to be some very massive changes within CS education.

For instance, starting it elementary school. A surprisingly large amount of the mathematical portion of CS has very little in the way of prerequisites.

Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

#82

Post by Scuds »

StillBored wrote: post #56
userbinator wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

why the Apple II was still kept around for that long is kind of a mystery to me. It's not games. Maybe educational customers? Maybe next to no migration path for business users? I had an uncle who ran a veterinarian clinic off of Appleworks and several floppies worth of data for god knows how long. "Works for me" is a powerful force, and they'd probably squeezed all the costs out of the Apple II line.

Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

#83

Post by voidlogic »

Audrey_II wrote: post #79
ajross wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth pointing out (on a quick scan I don't see this called out in the article itself) that the preprocessing involved in generating these executables is almost certainly not meaningfully possible on a 5150 PC. So while this might run on 1978-era hardware, it wouldn't have been possible for 1978-era hackers to create.

Incredible work! If only we had this kind of ingenuity today to get a simple graphics card working with Linux! Imagine the possibilities. One day, I might even have an option in Ubuntu to change the refresh rate to 60hz without entering 'xrandr -r 60' into the console EVERY DAMN TIME I REBOOT. Now, I know I'm going on a limb with this next one, but imagine if someone had the intelligence to code a universal installer…

IMHO you are being down voted for being off topic, not necessarily for the accuracy of your thoughts. (I did not downvote you BTW, I take pitty on gray comments)

Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

#87

Post by gwern »

mmastrac wrote: post #67

I imagine that part 2 is effectively going to involve "compiling" the sequences to assembly and executing them. You just don't have a lot of cycles to do much math on the 8088, so you may as well just write compile this as a big assembly program and start running it. Looking forward to part 2 very much.

Part 2 is already up, no? http://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/20/8088-domination-post-...

Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

#89

Post by johansch »

MattBearman wrote: post #14

The 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.

The Amstrad PC1512/PC1640 actually had this quirky 640x200x16 color mode. I only ever came across one piece of software except the bundled GEM that supported it though...

Re: 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

#90

Post by ketralnis »

Audrey_II wrote: post #79
ajross wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth pointing out (on a quick scan I don't see this called out in the article itself) that the preprocessing involved in generating these executables is almost certainly not meaningfully possible on a 5150 PC. So while this might run on 1978-era hardware, it wouldn't have been possible for 1978-era hackers to create.

Incredible work! If only we had this kind of ingenuity today to get a simple graphics card working with Linux! Imagine the possibilities. One day, I might even have an option in Ubuntu to change the refresh rate to 60hz without entering 'xrandr -r 60' into the console EVERY DAMN TIME I REBOOT. Now, I know I'm going on a limb with this next one, but imagine if someone had the intelligence to code a universal installer…

> imagine if someone had the intelligence to code a universal installer that works every time and installed every piece of needed software all at once with zero user interaction

What's stopping you?

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