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8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators

trixter.oldskool.org

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Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators

#31

Post by vardump »

ekianjo wrote: post #23
frooxie wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 4096 color HAM mode was always part of the spec.

yes, it is, but it can only be used in very specific conditions (you cannot have the colors where you want all over the place), it's a pure hack.

You could either set any pixel color to any of 16 palette entries OR hold red & green from left side pixel, modify blue, hold red & blue, modify green, etc.

You could also change those 16 colors for every scanline (horizontal line).

Overall there was a lot of control, but software such as Deluxe Paint did not support full possibilities of HAM mode.

Oh and, btw, EHB (extra halfbrite) mode has 64 colors. 32 colors palette + second 32 colors with brightness halved. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Halfbrite_mode

Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators

#32

Post by logicallee »

blackhaz wrote: post #3

I can't believe my eyes. 256 colors on CGA?! HOW?!

the most impressive ascii art effect I ever saw was during movement. the minute it stops the motion blur goes away. in effect, I concluded I was looking at temporal antialiasing-like effects. (forget which demo it was, some 3d thing.)

I wonder how much you could improve the effect (i.e. the woman after the 4:00 minute mark) by making it move. From the way it's drawn I'm not sure if you could get even 2 fps though.

Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators

#36

Post by raverbashing »

Now, I wonder what people could be doing 10, 20 years from now on today's hardware

Probably a lot less tricks up the sleeve are possible (especially with 3D accelerators and dependency on a lot of proprietary AND very complex software)

Or maybe just drop to the framebuffer and push pixels like it has always been done

Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators

#37

Post by detaro »

ekianjo wrote: post #16
skrebbel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop generalizing. Plenty will.

> Stop generalizing. Plenty will. Look at modern forum discussions on Smartphones, it's full of youngsters comparing specs of their respective phones without grasping at all what they mean. Or maybe you are referring to a highly educated subset of youngsters, but that's very few of them.

As if the majority of people had a clue about these things back in the day.

Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators

#39

Post by ekianjo »

detaro wrote: post #37
ekianjo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stop generalizing. Plenty will. Look at modern forum discussions on Smartphones, it's full of youngsters comparing specs of their respective phones without grasping at all what they mean. Or maybe you are referring to a highly educated subset of youngsters, but that's very few of them.

As if the majority of people had a clue about these things back in the day.

Probably more than now because computing was not really "mainstream" at the time. Before Win95 at least.

Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators

#40

Post by userbinator »

ekianjo wrote: post #15
geocar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your game could dynamically modify the instructions.

Sure, but wouldn't that incur a loss of performance ?

On a modern pipelined CPU with separate instruction/data caches self-modifying code does have a rather large penalty since it has to flush the pipeline and the caches, but on the original 8088 PC which has no cache and no pipeline (there's only a 4-byte prefetch queue), the penalty is much smaller.
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