Possibly stupid question: does the demo run inside DOS or is it completely self-contained? (I would assume the latter.)
8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
81–90 of 102 posts
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#82These days I find it slightly weird that they don't share the source code of the demos or related tools. Demo scene has this wonderful alpha-male thing going.
Their culture sure is a bit alien. The authors are boasting about the dosbox they've broken, yet (it looks to me that) not a single bug/crash has been reported. Edit: happily I'm wrong. Quoting ajenner below, "there are emulators (for other targets) which do emulate NTSC decoding properly, but until I did the research for this demo nobody understood how the CGA card generates composite signals well enough to be emula…
Thanks for the edit!
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am sorry for whatever pain you're feeling. I don't feel the ethics of open-source apply here or to any works of art. Programs like Microsoft Word, which have a near-monopoly on the work that literally billions of people do everyday to be productive and feed their families, when not distributed in a free manner, are tools of unjust power. I don't feel this person's expressive work, a lifelong dream with no monetary…
the bizarre condescension in your comment seems utterly unnecessary.
The condescension is a work of art. You can't achieve that level of elevated dismissal without years of practice.
/joke
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#84Possibly stupid question: does the demo run inside DOS or is it completely self-contained? (I would assume the latter.)
Not clear. They mention writing a custom loader, reading EXE files; whether that's calling the INT21h DOS functions or the INT13h BIOS disk loader is unclear. I don't see why they'd bother to write a custom disk filing system when you can just use the DOS one.
DOS is more something you run "on" than "in". It's just a filing and utility layer, no task scheduler, no memory protection.
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#85Earlier 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.
You should meet some of these youngsters :) A few weeks ago, I taught 12 year old kid to write a mandelbrot zoomer in Processing--no, really I taught him the required basics of complex numbers, took about 2.5-3 (very fun) hours[0]. Afterwards we had a big A3 piece of paper with notes, graphs and formulas all over it, which he took home with him.
Two weeks later I met him again, of course I wanted to continue teaching him. I thought maybe the Z^4+C variant would be a nice step further. Turns out he already had written the Julia version of the zoomer ... on his Android phone, while waiting at the dentist's ... O_o
Now I used to be all about fractals when I was his age, later grew up to be a 4096 byte democoder (around 2000), I was sooo jealous, what I wouldn't have given for a pocket computer that powerful! Lucky kid :)
Aaanyway, apart from sharing this cute anecdote, my point is this. There's some extremely clever young bastards out there. Now there's not many, but they're also not extremely rare. I know a handful, although this particular guy is probably the cleverest right now. They come from all sorts of backgrounds, too. But the important part is not that they're highly educated, but that they're highly educatable, and given the opportunity to develop this. Their little hacker brains are hungry enough :)
Having written their own graphics code, running against CPU-limits (although we hit float precision before it got really slow), I'm sure he'd appreciate some of the awesomeness of stunts on a limited machine like the 8088. In fact one of the earlier graphics I programmed with him was something very similar to the circle interference pattern described in the article (it was mostly his own idea, playing with interference patterns, I just carefully nudged towards the classic demo effect, because I knew it'd result in a really cool effect).
[0] He already knew how to draw stuff with Processing. He already tried to look online for how the Mandelbrot algorithm works, but couldn't quite wrap his head around it. Missing bit of information turned out to be (a+b)(c+d)=ac+ad+bc+bd, hadn't learned that in school yet. If you explain i as rotation by 90 degrees, the rest becomes quite intuitive, visually. We also took a quick skim through that great WebGL-illustrated article about "How to fold a Julia fractal" (google it), while coding, way better than the five stapled pages I had when I was 15 :) :)
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#86These days I find it slightly weird that they don't share the source code of the demos or related tools. Demo scene has this wonderful alpha-male thing going.
There's loads of demo source and demotools source been and being released.
The main reasons, afaik, for demo sourcecode to not be released are mostly circumstantial. Either the democoder forgets about it, because a lot of the code is one-off stuff and the next demo is going to be fresh and new! The other reason is that their code is a terrible mess of glue, ducttape and kludges, hacked together moments before the compo deadline (see article ;-) ). The democoder intends to clean up the code (see elsewhere in this thread ;-) ) but then forgets about it because after-demoparty-crash. Occasionally, however, they rest up a bit and later on write a great article about the tricks they pulled (while promising to clean up the code and release it "soon") -- saying this with a great big ;-) of course.
And when something happens to be not released, I've always found just mailing the coder about it incredibly helpful, they're happy to explain, I've made great friends, and learned amazing stuff.
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#87These days I find it slightly weird that they don't share the source code of the demos or related tools. Demo scene has this wonderful alpha-male thing going.
The demoscene grew out of the cracking/warez scene, so it's somewhat implied you should take a disassembler to it if you really want to figure out what a demo is doing. It's the complete opposite to the OSS culture, where the prevailing assumption is that the source code is most important and nothing can be done without it; in the demoscene, it's more like "we don't need no stinkin' source!" I think these two approac…
The demoscene and cracking/warez scene grew apart many decades ago. Even back when I was active (1998-2000 or so), they weren't a big influence any more. There was enough source and tutorials floating around. Just not for every demo released. Mainly because of the hassle with releasing somewhat "presentable" code. Many coders are happy to explain, if you just ask them, though.
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
the bizarre condescension in your comment seems utterly unnecessary.
The condescension is a work of art. You can't achieve that level of elevated dismissal without years of practice. /joke
Too bad HN is usually not a very fertile ground for such works of art .. But this is a demoscene thread ;-)
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#89Now, 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
> 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)
Sorry but doesn't that mean there are a LOT MORE tricks up the sleeve possible? They might be hard to find if you have to reverse a proprietary driver, but why not? :)
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#90Earlier 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.
You should meet some of these youngsters :) A few weeks ago, I taught 12 year old kid to write a mandelbrot zoomer in Processing--no, really I taught him the required basics of complex numbers, took about 2.5-3 (very fun) hours[0]. Afterwards we had a big A3 piece of paper with notes, graphs and formulas all over it, which he took home with him. Two weeks later I met him again, of course I wanted to continue teaching…
What environment did he use on an android? I would think programming on a small touchscreen device would be really tedious, wondering if there's something good out there.