• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Area 5150 for IBM PC 4.77MHz

Looks impressive, need to test it on real hardware... Anyone already tested it already on Olivetti M24 / AT&T 6300 ?
I really need to get my 6300 psu issue resolved.. Or install a meanwell or something.

I was setting it up to try area 5150 on my Visual commuter PC but then I realized it only has 360KB floppy drives and 128KB of RAM... So that stinks.
 
Looks impressive, need to test it on real hardware... Anyone already tested it already on Olivetti M24 / AT&T 6300 ?

It is not going to work on a 6300/M24. The video controller is close, but not 100%, 6845-compatible. It is also a 400-line CGA display, so for anything that counts individual scanlines, they're going to be 50% up the screen than intended. The only effect that might work (and at an eye-blistering speed) would be the voxel landscape, but I'd be shocked if the demo made it that far.
 
Area 5150 also runs on Pentium II/III machine with CGA or CGA compatible graphic card (including MC6845 or 100% compatible chip)
 
Does this one rely on the DMA controller to pace any of the sections, like I recall 8088mph doing? (8088MPH was never going to run perfectly on a Tandy 1000, but I found some particularly unusual fail conditions running it on my Tandy 1000 HX with a homemade DMA-less RAM expansion.)

I'd download it and just give it a spin but I have a VGA card stuffed into my machine at the moment. (My Commodore 1084 is feeling very old and cranky as of late.)
 
To recap, the following specifications are required for Area 5150 to work.

1) CPU : 8088 or compatible CPU. (It also works on Pentium II/III)
2) RAM : 640KB
3) Graphic Card : IBM CGA (with MC6845) or CGA clone with MC6845 or 100% compatible chip. (No run on Hercules / EGA / PGC / VGA Card,)
4) DOS : 2.0 or higher for Hard Disk Drive, 3.2 or higher for 3.5" Floppy Disk Drive.

*This program doesn't run on IBM PC 5150 with BIOS (04/24/1981 and 10/19/1981) due to RAM limitation (544KB) and BIOS Extension issue (No HDD support.)
--> BIOS should be upgraded to later Revision (10/27/1982)

*About CGA card, I recommend IBM CGA, but it can't be installed on 16bit ISA bus due to slot interference.
--> To solve this problem, CGA clone card has no problem.
--> Some users may try to remove only the 16-bit bus slot to install the IBM CGA, but even if it works, I don't want to recommend it at all.

*I've heard that it doesn't work on AT&T6300 (M24), Tandy 1000, IBM PS/2 8530&8530 (MCGA) mode too.


This is just my personal opinion.
It might be very interesting if someone makes a CGA card in a PCI-e slot type and implements it as an HDMI output port.
It might be fantastic if Area 5150 runs after booting into Real DOS on a modern PC.
 
Last edited:
How about Olivetti M19 or M200? (Ok, unfortunatelly my M19 has only 360 kB floppy, no harddisk, and only green monitor..., My M200 has only black&white monochrome... - both with color monitor are very rare...), Olivetti PCS-86 is there, too, but it has VGA card.

So I think I have to get out my Atari PC3 again, it already did a good job on the 8088mph demo.
 
Last edited:
It might be fantastic if Area 5150 runs after booting into Real DOS on a modern PC.
Really? What's the point? The whole reason for the demo is to show what a "stock" 5150 can do.

If you want to see it running on a modern PC, use emulation.
 
86Box holds it, not 100% perfect but does it quite well, except for some effects like the layered rectangles (~4:07), polygons over the city (~6:55) and it doesn't get right any of the reflection effects (~8:14 onwards).

DOSBox does a epic failure here: you'll see nothing on its place, since minute 0:00, and on every flavour I tried (official 0.74, SVN with enhanced CGA support, DOSBox-X, you name it...).
 
This brings up an interesting point: how to develop such a demo. I'm sure most of it was written using modern tools, but does everyone on the team have to have a stock IBM PC where they test their code? Makes for a long development cycle.
 
This brings up an interesting point: how to develop such a demo. I'm sure most of it was written using modern tools, but does everyone on the team have to have a stock IBM PC where they test their code? Makes for a long development cycle.
If your going to do it... do it right.
 
Why waste something as cool as this on emulation? Get the real hardware.. Its abundant.
Would love it! But my PS/2 with VGA doesn't support it :-( And my Turbo XT has a dual Hercules/CGA clone... but I don't have a 9 pin color monitor, and they are not easy to get (nor cheap, if some rare one is found...) in my country.

I don't think emulation is a waste, sometimes is the only option for many.
 
Would love it! But my PS/2 with VGA doesn't support it :-( And my Turbo XT has a dual Hercules/CGA clone... but I don't have a 9 pin color monitor, and they are not easy to get (nor cheap, if some rare one is found...) in my country.

I don't think emulation is a waste, sometimes is the only option for many.
I watched the demo from the Composite connector on my CGA card. My 5160 has a vga card in it so I had to swap it out to see the demo. You know it may be possible to connect a 2 wire CGA composite connector to your cga card. You would need a composite input CRT monitor or a modern LCD TV with a composite input. Worth a shot. Start a thread for it.

Emulation is a complete waste!!!
For DOS computers....
I have been in the console emulation scene since the 486 days.. Back then the most advanced/modern thing I could run would be the Gameboy emulators.... I like emulation.. Certain types.. DOS emulation is pointless.. Because I own several hundred computers.. And DOS computers can be had cheaply.
 
Last edited:
It may be a waste for you, and I respect your opinion... But definitely it's not a waste for me. I don't have unlimited space in my house to have several ready to run PCs from different eras, nor I have money to buy one PC of each era (even if they are sold for only 100-300 eur each). So for me emulation is quite handy. Not perfect, of course, but for most cases it comes close enough, specially 86Box and PC-EM.

Also, for developing new software for old machines, emulators save a lot of time/money/space, three things I'm not plenty of. I just cannot have a real 386/486 for compiling and an XT for testing, running at once while connected through a local area network, I just haven't enough space. I live in a great European capital, and we have beautiful monuments, but the price we pay is having a smaller space to live ;-)

I own, as I said, a PS/2 Model 30 and a Turbo XT clone, but I can only have one of them active at a time. I don't usually compile on my PS/2 or my XT because it's desperately slow. Yes, I know in the 80s had to be done that way, but programming for old platforms is a hobby for me: I don't have 10 hours a day to develop my game, including the dead time waiting to compile, so I run my compiler on DOSBox at 10000 cycles (more or less equivalent to a 486DX-50Mhz), and run the result in another DOSBox window at 550 cycles, to see more or less what would be on a PS/2 Model 30. If I want more accuracy on the result, I test it on 86Box and, finally (and rarely), on the real thing. So I can program like it is 1991, without the need of another bulky computer I cannot have in my space. I can assure you that my software, programmed via emulators, runs perfectly on my real hardware.
 
It may be a waste for you, and I respect your opinion... But definitely it's not a waste for me. I don't have unlimited space in my house to have several ready to run PCs from different eras, nor I have money to buy one PC of each era (even if they are sold for only 100-300 eur each). So for me emulation is quite handy. Not perfect, of course, but for most cases it comes close enough, specially 86Box and PC-EM.

Also, for developing new software for old machines, emulators save a lot of time/money/space, three things I'm not plenty of. I just cannot have a real 386/486 for compiling and an XT for testing, running at once while connected through a local area network, I just haven't enough space. I live in a great European capital, and we have beautiful monuments, but the price we pay is having a smaller space to live ;-)

I own, as I said, a PS/2 Model 30 and a Turbo XT clone, but I can only have one of them active at a time. I don't usually compile on my PS/2 or my XT because it's desperately slow. Yes, I know in the 80s had to be done that way, but programming for old platforms is a hobby for me: I don't have 10 hours a day to develop my game, including the dead time waiting to compile, so I run my compiler on DOSBox at 10000 cycles (more or less equivalent to a 486DX-50Mhz), and run the result in another DOSBox window at 550 cycles, to see more or less what would be on a PS/2 Model 30. If I want more accuracy on the result, I test it on 86Box and, finally (and rarely), on the real thing. So I can program like it is 1991, without the need of another bulky computer I cannot have in my space. I can assure you that my software, programmed via emulators, runs perfectly on my real hardware.
You must have not read my comments on modifying your cga card which was the main point of my thread.
 
Another positive thing that this demo will bring out is that it will force the emulators to be better and more accurate, like happened with 8088 Mph and 86Box... ;-)
 
Back
Top