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Video on 5150

I think that video has been discussed here before, but I can't find the original thread.

It's done by Trixter (Jim Leonard) on a 5150 with a 10MB hard disk and a SoundBlaster card. The video is actually text mode, not the graphics modes.
 
If I were to guess, I'd say that the scenes were rendered elsewhere and the PC just slams data into the video card memory space (B800) and uses page flipping (the CGA supported 8 pages of 80x25x16 color text mode video) to get the effects.

Assuming 30 frames a second that's about 60K a second and probably a total of about 1MB or so for the full video. All well within the PCs capabilities.

Very impressive, though! :)
 
mbbrutman wrote:

> I think that video has been discussed here before,
> but I can't find the original thread.

Never seen anything like that before.

> It's done by Trixter (Jim Leonard) on a 5150 with a
> 10MB hard disk and a SoundBlaster card. The video is
> actually text mode, not the graphics modes.

Boy he looks a lot like Bill Gates (guess he gets that a lot).
The big man must have an eye scanner so they know it's him &
that he can get into wherever he needs to.

Neat demo, would an EGA card work on a 5150? Must be 100%
Assembly if that demo is for real. Looking at the video it
looks like it got some sort of Bufferning thing at the start.

CP/M User.
 
mbbrutman said:
And please, don't anybody toss any more sh-t on this video.
Click to expand...

I thought it was pretty cool. Thanks for sharing. I was impressed and don't care at all where it was created. It shows incredible ingenuity, and shows what the hardware of the time could do.
 
What I'm wondering is why this wasn't done 25 years ago! :p

(By the way BBCMicro, you should really consider buying a sound card... A 24-Bit sound card goes for around $25 here! That's like 17 or so pounds!:p)
 
atari2600a wrote:

> What I'm wondering is why this wasn't done 25 years
> ago! :p

This has never been the way, unfortunately. For the system
I've come to know over the 20 years it's been around -
software has developed over time - most of the clever demo
trickery came towards the end of the systems life-cycle.

It's merely a case of what people come up with in order to
make things (particularly Demos) look impossible to do.
Internet though would certainally assist since information can
be easily distributed - if people dived into the secrets &
posted it - others could probably improve or incorporate
routines for their programs.

Occassionally though a program written for a specific hardware
device of a certain company could also assist in making things
look good (e.g. It was good to get my Cirrus Logic VGA card to
display itself onto an external colour monitor on my Laptop
within CP/M-86).

CP/M User.
 
|I don't think it was possible 20 years ago, because in my personal opinion a lot was done with the assitance of modern hardware...btw, did they even have digitised video back then? I would have thought it would have been impractical on the current hardware...

I would buy a sound card, but until I get a crappy machine off ebay to tide me over till Christmas, I'm on my parents. And that means absolutley no touching! not allowed to open it, nada. For some strange reason my parents dont trust my computer literacy :roll:
 
It used to be the same way w/ me! (When I was 9-12ish, Back when anything electronic I touched the insides of died :p)

Now, at least at my mother's house, I'm basically labeled as the house-wide repair man, for everything! Even rebuilding the toilet's reserve tank :p! You just have to prove that you're capable of something as simple as sliding a card into a slot! :p

As for it (the IBM video) being impossible for the time, I don't think it'd be COMPLETELY impossible. W/ a mainframe computer doing all the rendering (which would probably take months of programming a renderer), It would be possible. I think that if IBM did that & gave away the demo at electronics stores, they would've sold ALOT more units...
 
As a demonstration for the IBM PC this would have been very impractical. In 1981 the PC didn't have a hard disk option available from IBM, and to get one would have been extremely expensive.

As for the rendering, it would have been hand drawn at the time. I don't remember any digitized video systems from the late 70s or early 80s. The CPU power certainly existed - it just would have taken a while, much like the computer generated images of recent movies take a while to render.

Another thing to keep in mind. When you pay $4000 for a business machine, you don't really care if it can play a video. Even modern servers don't always have video cards.
 
mbbrutman said:
When you pay $4000 for a business machine, you don't really care if it can play a video.
Click to expand...

Agreed. That's how we felt at the time. Video was not in our minds at all. Spreadsheets, letters, and the occasional database - that was it.

Some years later, on the 286 or perhaps 386 (?) hardware, we tried to make a presentation with high quality pictures that would rotate through and a soundtrack that would play in synch (something that is done by pushing a buttin in iPhoto today, for example). That was almost impossible at the time. We did it, but never as good as we envisioned.

The point is that software to generate this kind of stuff did not readily exist and everything had to be created by hand.

At least that's how it was in my small corner of the world.
 
If you had an IBM PC or XT back then, it was probably a business machine. They were just too expensive for home users until the clones became relatively cheap in the mid 80s. In fact it was a good bet that a PC had a monochrome card or a Hercules card and a 5151 monitor, because using a CGA monitor for word processing would make your eyeballs bleed after a few hours. :)

That being said, spreadsheets and word processors made the investement very worthwhile. A 256KB machine with floppy drives was very useful compared to a typewriter and a calculator. The ability to rapidly edit and recalculate was a big factor in the adoption of all personal computer technology in the business environment. And for most of those tasks, 4.77Mhz was overkill.

Software gets more advanced and expectations change ..
 
http://www.oldskool.org/pc/8088_Corruption

Download the program from there!!!!:p

As amazing as it seems, it runs flawlessly on my Dual-core Centrino laptop! (W/O Emulation!!! It'll run poorly unless you disable a couple memory settings on the executable's properties in Windows. While you're in the properties window, set it to run in full screen.) Total 13374g3!!!

Now if only I had a 5150 w/ a 10MB HD...

EDIT: (By the way, when I first saw the video (on Google Video), when it cut to the guy break-dancing, I said "Ah Sh!t!" I was so suprised! :p)
 
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I know this might go off topic, but I love talking about the "good ole' days".....

I remember being a little kid in the 80's. The reason stuff like this was not around back then, on up until a little while after Windows 95 came out was because computers were not considered "consumer toys" like they are now, they were purely work machines that just happen to have some gaming abilities.

Back then, if you had an IBM PC or even a clone, chances are you were from a rich family, or the parents had some kind of work program that got it for them through their job, and because of such, they were not considered worth playing with at the time, actually, it was very much frowned upon.

I remember being a little kid in 1990, and thinking a computer was the most boring, pointless device, then I discovered computer games. And I don't even know where to BEGIN with the trouble me and my friends got ourselves into putting Monkey Island, Freddy Pharkas, 7th Guest, X-Wing, Ultima VI, and a lot of other big name games of the time on someone's parents computer without permission. I remember being blamed for a $60 correction to my sister's Autoexec.bat file, and I even moreso remember my friend's dad paying $200 to get their Deskpro 386 fixed because my friend fooled around in the control panel in Windows 3.1 and messed something up.

What impresses me about 8088 corruption though, is how it shows, if there's a will, there's a way. The last thing I'd expect for full motion video would be text mode.
 
I didn't wanted to make new thread, so I'll continue here.

Have anybody tried to run 8088 corruption on his old PC?
I was trying to run on 8086 8 MHz machine with music card and hard disk.
At start it had one floppy drive and 512 Kb of memory.

When I added HDD it crashed after a while running the demo.
I expanded memory to 640 kB and defragmented disk using Speed Disk from Peter Norton.
Then computer was able to pass trough whole demo.

Now the only my problem is... re-buffering.
It stops from time to time, and after few seconds continue...

I installed faster 40 MEg drive instead of ST-225, still needs to re-buffer.
I tried another WD controller, still no succes.
Installing old DTC controller heleped a bit, but it still need to stop...

Have anyone succesful runned the demo and it didn't lagged from time to time?
 
I am having the same problems, rebuffering every 15 seconds or so. I think the WD25 hard drive / controller is the bottleneck.

Did you set config.sys with BUFFERS=20 ? That helped a little bit.
 
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