Meanwhile on 8088

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

The composite mode looks even better, not sure if that's been done by 'tweaking' the hardware and accessing it directly. Fantastic.

Probably some emulation - it doesn't look like captured from CGA over CVBS into PC... but who knows... not sure if and how composite CGA mode looks in digital NTSC decoder... it may be not so nice as in analog.

Originally Posted by Thorham

Perhaps time for a network?

Today we have PXE but in 286 times everything was different - forget what was used in those ancient times - RPL?
Afraid that creating such solution nowadays can be more trickier than just using floppies.

[paraj]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

[..]it's hard to judge how fast it would be on a 4.77MHz 8088 with CGA (I'm guessing 1-2 fps).

Originally Posted by pandy71

Probably some emulation - it doesn't look like captured from CGA over CVBS into PC... but who knows... not sure if and how composite CGA mode looks in digital NTSC decoder... it may be not so nice as in analog.

Originally Posted by paraj

Video of it running on a 5160 (XT): https://twitter.com/pixelpipes/statu...54597429657603

Should be 8088 + CGA composite.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by paraj

Should be 8088 + CGA composite.

My point was that composite mode is trick so to be seen correctly or you need to emulate NTSC decoder on RGB or capture NTSC signal and decode it.

Composite mode described https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-...e-illustrated/

[sandruzzo]

Originally Posted by pandy71

My point was that composite mode is trick so to be seen correctly or you need to emulate NTSC decoder on RGB or capture NTSC signal and decode it.

Composite mode described https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-...e-illustrated/

It can be use on Amiga as well???

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

It can be use on Amiga as well???

You laugh, but considered most chunky-to-planar take lot of time and that reduces to using only two planes and have more colors MIGHT come out handy (given you use CRTs)

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Sure, so if you would play with these severely downgraded graphics, you could have something similar on the Amiga.

But who wants that? I think I would get motion sickness after a while.

I didn't read the blog but before Wolf 3D existed many high street 8086 PCs did have VGA so I don't know why the videos are in this screen mode.

8088 was abandoned after the mid 80's, last batch of 8088 based PCs I remember is one from Atari (The PC1 that looks like the original Mega ST).

68000 was one of the best CPUs of its time, I remember a guest lecturer at my University who was an ex IBM engineer singing its praises. 486 is when Intel actually started making CPUs worth talking about, so about 1993/94 for high street PCs a family would buy. 386 was OK but........

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Did you try the composite video, or is it not supported?

The Amstrad PC2086 has onboard VGA, so CGA output is to the VGA monitor.

I have an EGA card with composite output that might work. Watch this space...

Perhaps time for a network?

Unfortuantely I don't have an 8 bit ISA bus network card. Or a laplink cable. So floppies it is!

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

It can be use on Amiga as well???

Probably not on PAL Amiga's but True NTSC Amiga may work - SHRES NTSC may be even more fancy as phase resolution will be 28ns. Also more quantization levels means better sine/cosine approximation if more bitplanes used in grayscale mode.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I didn't read the blog but before Wolf 3D existed many high street 8086 PCs did have VGA so I don't know why the videos are in this screen mode.

Because it would look identical to the original Wolf 3D (except slower).

I doubt that there were many 'high street' 8086 PCs with VGA. The only ones I can think of are the IBM PS/2 Model 30 and the Amstrad PC2086.

8088 was abandoned after the mid 80's, last batch of 8088 based PCs I remember is one from Atari (The PC1 that looks like the original Mega ST).

8088 was popular throughout the 80's. Commodore released the PC10-III and PC20-III in 1989.

[Tsak]

Originally Posted by paraj

Cute, even if it is more of a curiosity in practice. Video of it running on a 5160 (XT): https://twitter.com/pixelpipes/statu...54597429657603

On Amiga my money is also on Dread or something similar that's tailed to the platform, rather than creating an inferior port that's bound to disappoint.

If somebody with the patience and skills were willing to put in the effort, I think a reasonable port could be made though, if you're willing to accept some compromises (like the 8088 port). Some time ago I played around with a small raycasting "engine" and used assets from wolfenstein (level 1 + textures) for testing. Floor/ceiling/doors/sprites missing of course which would cut down the framerate quite a bit, but I think it could work at a playable framerate. Big caveat that it's 2x2 and I've almost exhausted RAM on a classic 512+512 setup, but for the second part that's a matter of extra CPU time + code.
Note: without game context it seems like some kind of crazy fascist shrine...

Wolf 3d should be fully doable on Amiga using the Dread engine (in fact a 1 level demo has already been made). That is if you can accept 1x2 res and the gfx been downgraded to 16 colors.

Worth noting also is this demo/engine for a500: [ Show youtube player ]

Relevant discussions here on EAB :
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=89766
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=90115

Btw for performance of this EGA demo on 8088 check this : [ Show youtube player ]
I'd say this looks like ~8 fps? (which is not bad at all basically).

[idrougge]

Wolfenstein 3D has already been ported to the ST. http://s390174849.online.de/ray.tscc.de/wolf3d.htm

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Because it would look identical to the original Wolf 3D (except slower).

I doubt that there were many 'high street' 8086 PCs with VGA. The only ones I can think of are the IBM PS/2 Model 30 and the Amstrad PC2086.

8088 was popular throughout the 80's. Commodore released the PC10-III and PC20-III in 1989.

Amstrad were selling the PC2086 with VGA and Adlib for 799.99 in the high street stores in 1992/1993. It was the direct rival in their preferred retail store to the A1200.

Amstrad chose to launch the 1986 PC1512 and 1640 PCs with 8086 not 8088, they came with either CGA or EGA and cost the same as an A500 in minimum spec of FDD and monochrome monitor with CGA and 512k RAM. Once Amstrad had gone all out for blood with a base spec of 8086 for the price of an A500 there were no new 8088s in the high street in the UK. Not sure what Olivetti was doing in Europe though.

Atari moved to the 8086 with their later models, then 286, after the 8088 PC1 and I can't remember if the Commodore's PC-1 (the model that looks identical to the plastic cased 128D) had 8088 or 8086 and can't be bothered to check as both actually cost more than the PC1512. The Amstrad PC compatible slaughtered the market in the UK, they were everywhere from estate agents to mom + pop video rental stores.

I actually have an Atari PC1 but no EGA monitor so I've not got any real hardware to play old mid 80s PC games on, do have a copy of The Pawn though! EGA monitors are impossible to find anywhere near me, would get one via a courier from ebay either. Shame, as the Atari PC1 is probably the smartest looking 8088 PC I know.

[PortuguesePilot]

My parents got me my first Commodore Amiga 500 in Christmas of 1989. By that time the common house-hold PC were XT-based, and were equipped with an Intel 8088 processor at either 4.77MHz or 9.54MHz, CGA graphics, no hard disk drive or a 20MB MFM HDD that made more noise than an airplane turbine, dual low-density (720kB) floppy disk drives (3.5" were starting to get the norm but 5.1/4" were still very common), PC Speaker sound and many times a green, amber or phosphate yellow 13" monochrome monitor. All this for the modest price of 800 "contos" in the old Portuguese coin, which would translate to about 4000 Euros on today's money (roughly the same in US Dollars). The Amiga was superior in EVERYTHING and a lot cheaper. The only way the PC outsold the Amiga was because it already had a firm grasp of the professional market and people just translated that to home because of compatibility and because it was seen as a "serious" thing while the Amiga was seen as a "kids machine", much like the ZX Spectrum had been before. I think that the single-form wedge shape didn't help. In the heads of the people of that time, serious machines had to be modular, single-form computers were usually regarded as "toys" and furthermore, strangely, the Amiga was sort-of victim of its own graphics and sound: they were so above the norm for the common house PCs that they reinforced the idea that the Amiga was for kids (just for games) and not a serious computer. A shame. Given the head-start that the Amiga had on common household PCs at the time, one would have thought that Commodore could have won the race right there...

The 386 VGA 40MB HDD 2MB RAM Ad-Lib card PCs that sort-off equalled the Amiga in terms of gaming only became the norm in 1991 or 1992, at least here in Portugal and the Amiga-crusher 486DX2@66MHz with VESA SVGA 4MB RAM 120MB HDD only became the norm in 1994 around these parts. Sure, some extremely wealthy people had VGA in 1989 and even AT-based 386 and 486 CPUs at the time (never personally saw one), but the PC gaming universe was just not up to the high standard that by late 1989/early 1990 the Amiga had developed. Looking at hindsight makes realize even more just how wasteful Commodore's management was...

The oldest PC I own today is an 1987 Amstrad PPC512 which has the common PC specs of its day (NEC V30 processor at 8MHz, 512kB RAM, CGA, PC-Speaker, no HDD and dual low-density floppy disk drives. Runs on MS-DOS 3.33). These specs were sort-of replicated everywhere from the Schneider EuroXT to the Olivetti M19 or even the Philips P3103.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I actually have an Atari PC1 but no EGA monitor so I've not got any real hardware to play old mid 80s PC games on, do have a copy of The Pawn though! EGA monitors are impossible to find anywhere near me, would get one via a courier from ebay either. Shame, as the Atari PC1 is probably the smartest looking 8088 PC I know.

https://github.com/hkzlab/EGA-2-RGBS

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

Amstrad were selling the PC2086 with VGA and Adlib for 799.99 in the high street stores in 1992/1993.

I didn't know that (my PC2086 didn't include an Adlib card and there is no mention of it in the manuals). Not that it would make any difference. The machine is dog slow, the 8086 is not compatible with games coming out then that needed a 286 or 386, and the memory isn't expandable. So in 1992/3 it was pretty much worthless (despite having VGA). It can't even run Windows 3.x in VGA mode because nobody produced an 8086 driver for it.

It was the direct rival in their preferred retail store to the A1200.

In my shop the direct rival was a Commodore 386SX-16 with 2MB RAM, 80MB hard drive and VGA monitor. Commodore NZ was dumping them so we got a special deal and were able to sell it for the same price as an A1200/HD40 with 1084 monitor. That 386 PC was way more powerful than the PC2086, and yet the A1200 ate it for lunch in the games department.

Amstrad chose to launch the 1986 PC1512 and 1640 PCs with 8086 not 8088, they came with either CGA or EGA and cost the same as an A500 in minimum spec of FDD and monochrome monitor with CGA and 512k RAM.

Actually the PC1512 was better than CGA. It also had 640x200 in 16 colors, which worked quite well with Gem.

In 1987 a friend of mine ran a computer shop in Auckland - which is where I got my A1000. He wanted to expand into PCs so I loaned him NZ$7000 to buy some PC1512s. Unfortunately things didn't turn out well and I ended up with several of them, which I had to sell to recoup some of my money.

I have a soft spot for the PC1512 because it was different from most PC clones at the time (of which we had some of the worst junk in NZ due to our 'special relationship' with Taiwan). But in truth the 8MHz 8086 was underwhelming compared to a 68000, it only had slow 8 bit bus slots despite the 16 bit CPU, and 512k was rather limiting in a PC. It dated quickly.

The difference between NZ and the UK was that we were saturated with Asian PC clones from the beginning. Anybody could order a bunch of parts from Taiwan and become an 'OEM', selling the worst PC crap possible (I did warranty repairs for a local PC 'manufacturer' and was appalled by how awful it was). Many hobbyists and savvy business owners also built their own PCs from parts.

In that environment a machine like the PC1512 was out of place. It used many non-standard parts which made it a nightmare to repair or upgrade. You couldn't even change the monitor because the power supply was built into it. The keyboard used a non-standard protocol and the mouse was quadrature with a 'reversed' 9 pin plug. Amstrad went out their way to do everything differently - partly to make it cheaper and partly to avoid IP issues. They did a good job of it, but all the customer saw was a lack of compatibility.

Atari moved to the 8086 with their later models, then 286, after the 8088 PC1 and I can't remember if the Commodore's PC-1 (the model that looks identical to the plastic cased 128D) had 8088 or 8086 and can't be bothered to check as both actually cost more than the PC1512. The Amstrad PC compatible slaughtered the market in the UK, they were everywhere from estate agents to mom + pop video rental stores.

Atari's PCs didn't do well. They had no presence here and I have never seen one. Commodore PCs were moderately successful. They had a good reputation for solid reliability in the business sector.

Performance-wise Commodore's PC10 series was nothing special, but in the 80's most businesses were running DOS accounting packages that only needed an 8088. That changed in the 90's, and Commodore tried to keep up by making 386 and 486 models, eventually just using OEM motherboards rather than designing their own. If they had kept going that way they might have done quite well, but of course that would mean dropping the Amiga.

I actually have an Atari PC1 but no EGA monitor so I've not got any real hardware to play old mid 80s PC games on, do have a copy of The Pawn though! EGA monitors are impossible to find anywhere near me, would get one via a courier from ebay either. Shame, as the Atari PC1 is probably the smartest looking 8088 PC I know.

I'm quite lucky in having an NEC Multisync-II which I bought in the late 80's. I now have an EGA card too, which I must try out!

One option for playing games in EGA 320x200 mode (which is 15kHz) is a circuit that converts digital to analog RGB. Then you can use any old TV with SCART, or a 1084 monitor etc. Example devices that do this are the mce adapter and CGA2RGBv2.