> "[Step] 5. Effect starts, magic occurs"
8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
91–100 of 102 posts
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#92Possibly 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.
It runs on top of DOS, using INT 0x21 to spawn the effect executables. The loader doesn't read the executables directly, it just decides when to start and stop them, plays music and bounces some text up and down while the effects are loading/decompressing/precalculating. Writing a demo that is it's own OS and has total control of the machine is definitely something like I'd like to have a go at in the future, though.
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#93Earlier 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…
Lol, I don't feel any pain. :) I can see that my words can be easily interpreted like you did but I was quite literal is stating that the culture is WONDERFUL. I have no hatred against them although I'm definitely an outsider. Also, I was literal when I referred to the closed source of these creations. I don't demand or expect them to release any source code. I'm merely wondering whether these demos would be MORE int…
> But I don't get your sexism comment. I maintain that the sub-culture involves some behavior that can be described as "alpha-male". Maybe I was inaccurate with the wording. Could have said "competitive" as well.
I don't think you've ever been to a demoparty :-)
If there's any "alpha male" behaviour whatsoever, it's purely in a self-ridiculing way. It used to be there, back in the nineties when all demosceners were insecure teenage nerds and some of them felt a need to compensate for something. That part of the scene is gone for twenty years now, but it's still a lot of fun to make references to that part of history.
My favourite example of this is the demo "Regus Ademordna" by Excess [0]. The title is the reverse of "Andromeda Sucks" in Norwegian. Andromeda is another Norwegian demogroup who had just made a reappearance in the demoscene at the time after having been gone since those nineties. They hadn't gotten the memo that all that alpha male stuff was something of the past, so they took serious offense, much to the enjoyment of the rest of the scene.
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's actually cool, as it would also allow clipping against a "foreground" by varying the address of the scanline mask. E.g. imagine foreground trees in a jungle scene.
Exactly! I did extend it to use a full-screen foreground mask that implemented this sort of clipping. I was able to make the mask scrollable which allowed the compiled sprites to appear "behind" fences and other complex shapes with per-pixel accuracy. It could even be used to mask out individual pixel bits that allowed for fake "lighting" changes with a carefully chosen palette.
I keep wanting to do a "retro-game" and make use of what I've learned about these types of effects now. Despite how far machines like the C64 for example were pushed, I don't think they were pushed nearly as far in terms of games as with demos and it'd be fascinating to try to push the limits..
(maybe one day..)
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#95I found the raw video awesome enough to submit a few days ago, but the super-detailed explanation in this blog raises this to a whole new level of epic. I wonder if youngsters who didn't grow up thinking 1 MHz is a perfectly acceptable CPU speed and that 640 KB is a whole lot of RAM will understand what the fuss is about here...
I would love to see what could be done with a CPU running at 100KHz
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know, how was the video uploaded to the YouTube made, if the emulators don't work? Was it really recorded with the plain camera?
We used a real PC obviously (my machine), and a capture device plugged into the NTSC composite output of the CGA card.
There is a link to download the music of the ASCII credits at the end ? I really like it.
Also, I would like to propose a little challenge. What do you think that could do you archive on this "virtual" computer :
- Specs : https://github.com/trillek-team/trillek-computer
- Implementation/Emulator : https://github.com/trillek-team/trillek-vcomputer-module
In a short resume :
- 32 bit RISC CPU running at 100KHz (to 1MHz)
- CGA like text mode, but can be remaped to any desired RAM address and the font can be changed on the fly. Fixed palette of 16 colours
- VSync interrupt + two timers
- 128KiB of RAM (to 1MiB)
- Floppy drive (max 1.2 MiB)
Extra : Displaying it against a Commodore 1084S monitor -> http://imgur.com/GuTVEdj
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Didn't ask. Probably just the standard Processing for Android thing? I'll get some more information next time I seem him.
Yes it's probably tedious, but when you're really into something, at that age, you just persevere because you can :) Also young children are incredible on touchscreens, small fingers and they grew up with them :) [I'm the opposite, I have some stress/burnout related tremors in my fingers, some mornings (when it's worst) I can hardly control the device's apps, let alone typing]
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly! I did extend it to use a full-screen foreground mask that implemented this sort of clipping. I was able to make the mask scrollable which allowed the compiled sprites to appear "behind" fences and other complex shapes with per-pixel accuracy. It could even be used to mask out individual pixel bits that allowed for fake "lighting" changes with a carefully chosen palette.
I keep wanting to do a "retro-game" and make use of what I've learned about these types of effects now. Despite how far machines like the C64 for example were pushed, I don't think they were pushed nearly as far in terms of games as with demos and it'd be fascinating to try to push the limits.. (maybe one day..)
I'd love to see a demoscene version of "Hacker's Delight" [0]
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's harder is clipping against the sides of the screen. With no branching, there's no way to prevent the sprite from writing past the end of a line/screen (wrapping/mem-stomping). So, there does need to be a test per sprite to detect that case and fall back on a more complicated blitter. In fullscreen modes, you could also just make your screen buffer bigger than the actual screen by the width and height of your l…
In my game engine I wrote for the Apple IIgs a long time ago, I used compiled sprites and maintained a 1-scanline-wide mask that I used to clip the compiled sprite to the screen edge. This only cost one extra AND instruction and allowed the sprites to be clipped to any size rectangular playfield while still maintaining almost all of the speed benefits.
I don't quite understand, could you explain?
Re: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
#100These 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 co…
Besides, I don't think my interrupt handler and API would be of that much interest (oOoooh, sexy, an API!)