8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1 • Hacker News Board

Post by anon4 » Thu, Jun 26, 2014, 11:48 AM UTC

ajross wrote: post #73

Arjuna wrote: post #31

Wow... for that hardware, a 4.77MHz 8088 PC with CGA graphics and Sound Blaster audio, those stats are overwhelming: 1. Variable frame-rates up to 60 FPS. 2. Audio rates to 45kHz. 3. 16 colors through composite artifacting. 4. Simultaneous color and B&W output. On a related note, you will probably be interested in Michael Abrash's Zen of Assembly Language . From the "README.md": "This is the source for an ebook versi…

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.

Seems like memory would be the only limiting factor here, i.e. storing both the previous and current frame, computing the difference between the two, then sorting the runs. My hunch is it should be possible with a large enough HDD for swap space (obviously you'd have to swap yourself) and waiting a day to render a short movie.

Edit: and now I realise you need a movie source, which in 1978 means a VHS tape most likely. Reading that and converting it to a sequence of dithered frames (or "just" straight 24-bit 4:4:4 YUV) will definitely need some special hardware.