Games for the IBM 5155 portable (or XT desktop)

[Gib]

Sadly, after many more hours of experimenting with various games, several suggested by members, I've come to the conclusion that I was right in the first place. The 5155 portable is not much of a gaming machine.

The designers of this computer had productivity software in mind, and the authors of games had larger, color displays in mind. The same 9 in. composite monochrome CRT that I find perfectly acceptable for word processing, spreadsheets, and databases is very limiting and tiring and frustrating for games. Thus, a session of playing games on the 5155 is inevitably brief. I have to shut off the portable and move to another computer (I have a dozen or so PCs and Apples) on which game playing is a lot more fun.

BTW, as Trixter alluded to, even some non-game software is victimized by the snow effect of the CGA-composite monitor combo. I ruled out a text processing program that was otherwise acceptable because the snow was so distracting.

 

[Trixter]

My first personal computer had a monochrome-cga machine for 18 months and I managed to find plenty of games to play on it I suppose our tolerances of what "game" and "color" are are much different. Certainly if you have other machines built for gaming (C64, Atari, Amiga, etc.) then the 5155 is not going to be much fun. It is certainly nicer to play Infocom and other text adventures on the 5155 because the text quality is higher than on some composite fuzzy monitor.

About the only thing that the 5155 can do that the C64/Apple/Atari 8-bit/Vic-20/TI 994a/Pet/TRS-80 generation of computers cannot do is math. Flight Simulator, Jet, Starglider, Stunt Track Racer, Interphase, Indy 500, and some other 3-D games run at a pretty decent clip, whereas they absolutely chug (or cannot run at all) on anything lower. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUCh46_MzZU has a split-screen view starting at 16 minutes in that shows a 4.77MHz 8088 on the left playing some of these, if you want to preview what the speed of gameplay would be like.

As for snow, I learned to ignore it.

 

[vwestlife]

My dad had an IBM 5155 and I used it a lot when I was growing up. Its little 9-inch monitor was beautifully crisp and I loved its amber CRT with dark orange anti-glare coating, but the worst part about it was that IBM didn't permanently disable the color burst on its video signal, so certain color combinations would become nearly illegible when rendered in monochrome unless you used MODE BW80 to disable the color burst. But some programs, especially games, would override that command and force the color burst to go back on.

Combine that with the dreaded "snow", and it was not nearly as ideal for use as a business computer as the Compaq Portable's dual-mode monitor with hi-res 640x350 monochrome text mode was. The 5155 also had a rather loud fan, perhaps to help dissipate the extra heat produced by the built-in CRT. And of course most of the expansion slots are blocked by the disk drives, but an aftermarket multifunction card came in very handy to combine the functions of three separate IBM cards (floppy, parallel, serial) into only one card.

 

[Trixter]

But some programs, especially games, would override that command and force the color burst to go back on.

But you WANT that, because you get 16 colors in graphics mode if you do that. Hook your 5155 up to a TV and you can now see graphics like these:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/pc-booter/microsoft-flight-simulator-v20/screenshots/gameShotId,39386/

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/kings-quest-iii-to-heir-is-human/screenshots/gameShotId,409813/

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/mean-18/screenshots/gameShotId,32048/

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/starflight/screenshots/gameShotId,360475/

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/l...lounge-lizards/screenshots/gameShotId,140686/

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/c...light-simulator/screenshots/gameShotId,32055/

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/night-mission-pinball-v30/screenshots/gameShotId,113/

 

[vwestlife]

But you WANT that, because you get 16 colors in graphics mode if you do that. Hook your 5155 up to a TV and you can now see graphics like these:

Yes, it's good when you're using an external color composite monitor... but not so good on the 5155's built-in display. I don't know how easy it would've been for them to do, but IBM should have routed the color burst only to the RCA jack on the back panel, not to the pin header which the 5155's built-in monitor connected to (which I know was originally designed for use with an RF modulator, but I've never actually seen one designed to connect to that pin header!).

 

[Gib]

My first personal computer had a monochrome-cga machine for 18 months and I managed to find plenty of games to play on it ... As for snow, I learned to ignore it.

Well, I'm several decades past the excitement of my first computer (which was an Apple II, with 16K RAM and cassette storage). I would have been satisfied to play games on a 9 in. monochrome monitor back then, but I wanted the whole family to share my enthusiasm, so I sprung for an RF modulator and connected the Apple to our color TV. Everybody enjoyed the II, so they were happy to later get a II plus and color monitor and then a //e. I was never much interested in text games, when there was terrific software like Raster Blaster to play.

But, to each his own. I'm mostly using the 5155 for writing. I love the keyboard, and the 9 in. amber display is just fine for that. As for snow, I like some outside in the winter, not on my computer screen all year round.

 

[patscc]

vwestlife said

Yes, it's good when you're using an external color composite monitor... but not so good on the 5155's built-in display. I don't bknow how easy it would've been for them to do, but IBM should have routed the color burst only to the RCA jack on the back panel, not to the pin header which the 5155's built-in monitor connected to (which I know was originally designed for use with an RF modulator, but I've never actually seen one designed to connect to that pin header!).

The 5155 was designed as a business machine. Gamers, and I use that term loosely, couldn't have afforded one, or carried the money for one.
I say this because all of us serious gamers of the time carried quarters,because that was what our allowance came in, around, and it takes a lot of quarters to buy a new 5155. Modern hard-core gamers with serious cash didn't really exist.
So, who would have gotten 5155's back then ?
People with offices ( and we'll just ignore them for now)
Auditors(need to look at lots of other people's fiddley numbers)
Consulting Engineers.
Consulting Programmers.
Writers, as Gib mentioned.
How neat that someone came up with a PC-compatible with a razor-sharp display. And Amber, at that, so much easier on tired eyes.
I'm trying to recall a serious color business app of the time...
Well, as an aside, why is it suddenly the manufactures responsibility to anticipate everything developers might come up with, and develop proactive measures against them ?
patscc

 

[Gib]

vwestlife said
The 5155 was designed as a business machine. Gamers, and I use that term loosely, couldn't have afforded one...

Exactly. It's been so long since I had my first 5155 that I can't remember whether I brought it home from work or bought it to do work at home. Either way, I was using it for work -- writing policies and procedures with Multimate, doing spreadsheets with 1-2-3, and programming databases with Foxbase+. The 5155 was the perfect computer for such applications, and all these years later it still is. I can play games on my other computers, some of them also vintage, that are better suited for that purpose.

 

[deathshadow]

I don't understand where that 1.6K per frame figure came from. You said 48 bytes per sprite per frame and there are 5 sprites so that's 240 bytes. The blinking pellets look like they are 3x3 pixels or 6 bytes each, times 4 for another 24, and 8*4*5/2 = 80 bytes for the score. What am I missing?

It's blit to a back-buffer first (doesn't count), but when updating their positions you have to blit once from their old location in the back-buffer (erasing their old position), then a second time for their new position. There may be overlap, but it prevents the flickering and it's actually faster to blit twice per update than it is to run logic and/or write code to blit a larger area... the 8 extra bytes of blitting twice ends up faster due to doing less position calculations, since I can just re-use the old position data instead of having to calculate "which is farther up and left" on X and Y for an extra offset. That change along with manually time-slicing the tasks instead of trying to run them flat-out back to back brought it speed wise up to playable at 4.77mhz without the audio speeding up and slowing down willy-nilly, since prior to that I was having to say 7.16mhz as the minimum.

Ah, in that case I apologize for implying that you didn't care! I do wonder if maybe you didn't think of the technique of keeping the PIT and the CRTC in sync, though. I believe it should be portable enough - the only cards affected by snow will be those that use the ISA bus's OSC signal for their timing which is the same one that the PIT clock is ultimately derived from.

I tried, but it didn't line up with how I wanted the audio handled -- I made audio a higher priority than CGA snow. Adlib code made it far, far worse since it takes too long and puts in a really annoying amount of delay (the 'delays' needed between writing the Yamaha FM Chips registers leaves the CPU sitting there with it's thumb up it's arse). My manually timeslicing the tasks smoothed that problem out, but in the process calling certain audio boards (FM) for certain sounds (like the pellet eat noise) threw it out of whack... you think constant snow is annoying, try having it flicker semi-fullscreen on every other screen refresh. (give or take)

 

[Trixter]

Yeah, it's a shame the Adlib is so slow. It was originally designed and marketed as a music card, not a general-purpose gaming card, so they didn't take great pains to optimize writes to the card. When I wrote an adlib player I was astonished to see how much time was spent waiting for the card. When I moved that player to 8088 I took out all the wait delays and it STILL took too much time for the card to respond to a single port write.

You can drive an Adlib at 60+ Hz (by "drive" I mean "update all 9 voices' registers") but on 8088 you'll have very little time left over. Most games drive the adlib at 30Hz or slower. The only game I know of that drives it faster is Lollypop (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/lollypop) which drives it at 70Hz which, along with the graphics, requires a 386. (There's a good reason for that, the music and sound effects were done by Vibrants and it is hands-down the very best Adlib programming I have ever heard, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vh4wnHCeNI if you want to hear a sample)

 

[Great Hierophant]

Yeah, it's a shame the Adlib is so slow. It was originally designed and marketed as a music card, not a general-purpose gaming card, so they didn't take great pains to optimize writes to the card. When I wrote an adlib player I was astonished to see how much time was spent waiting for the card. When I moved that player to 8088 I took out all the wait delays and it STILL took too much time for the card to respond to a single port write.

You can drive an Adlib at 60+ Hz (by "drive" I mean "update all 9 voices' registers") but on 8088 you'll have very little time left over. Most games drive the adlib at 30Hz or slower. The only game I know of that drives it faster is Lollypop (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/lollypop) which drives it at 70Hz which, along with the graphics, requires a 386. (There's a good reason for that, the music and sound effects were done by Vibrants and it is hands-down the very best Adlib programming I have ever heard, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vh4wnHCeNI if you want to hear a sample)

How do you reconcile that with this : http://www.mobygames.com/game/windwalker/trivia

 

[Trixter]

I think the trivia is factually correct (Adlib's behavior and recommendations) but incorrectly implies why Windwalker's adlib support is so buggy. I personally think it's because they screwed something up, or followed odd practices (like trying to send multiple data commands after a register command, when you should really be sending a register, then wait, then data, then wait again).

If it really bugs you, I'd be willing to disassemble Windwalker to see what they're doing, and compare it to Adlib best practices.

Side note, I'd forgotten about that trivia -- I "interviewed" lots of people when I was starting up MobyGames, trying to get interesting tidbits. I talked to the lead programmer for the DOS Silpheed conversion, Michael Berlyn, Tony Van, and others. I had a full page of notes from the guy who patented RealSound that I unfortunately lost :-(

 

[barythrin]

Display and clarity of the 5155 (well Compaq as well, it wasn't just an IBM compliment) was still impressive. That was one thing that I noted having Commodores portable next to the 5155 and Compaq Portable. While the graphics and sounds the Commodore make are like a portable arcade (fun for everyone to even just listen to) you could see how the crisp display on the x86 line was much better at text. The Commodore font is quite blocky. I'm not sure I've ever really used any text only applications on the Commodore to see how crisp it could be (80 column mode?) but you could certainly have a sense of the sturdiness and which one you might look at for business vs home, kids, and pleasure. Both had their perks. I honestly wouldn't want to use the Commodore for business/productive applications but that's just my own experience.

 

[Maverick1978]

I talked to the lead programmer for the DOS Silpheed conversion, Michael Berlyn, Tony Van, and others. I had a full page of notes from the guy who patented RealSound that I unfortunately lost :-(

DOS conversion? You're speaking about the Game Arts/Sierra Silpheed release? I guess I was under the impression that Game Arts did the game and conversion, and that Sierra just acted as the publishing house in the US. I should probably pay more attention to the credits in the manuals (I'm notoriously bad for not looking at such things, nor for researching them online)

 

[Trixter]

Game Arts developed the game, but they did not do the DOS conversion. Silpheed was converted by two Sierra employees. The development machine was an 8MHz 286 with EGA (and unfortunately that's all I can remember from the interview as I seem to have lost those notes as well :-(

 

[VileR]

Game Arts developed the game, but they did not do the DOS conversion. Silpheed was converted by two Sierra employees. The development machine was an 8MHz 286 with EGA (and unfortunately that's all I can remember from the interview as I seem to have lost those notes as well :-(

Pity - could've been an interesting read.... Silpheed and Thexder always had me wondering why they came up with such a quirky EGA color-dithering scheme at 640x200, only to thoroughly waste its potential by using just 4 or 5 colors at a time. I thought Thexder's Tandy mode looked a whole lot better (let alone MCGA)!

and since this is still on-topic, sort of: do you happen to know if Master Miner has been archived anywhere? I ask since those box shots on MG have your name on them, and even after M.U.L.E.'s recent rescue mission, other beasts like this one remain elusive.

 

[Trixter]

Pity - could've been an interesting read.... Silpheed and Thexder always had me wondering why they came up with such a quirky EGA color-dithering scheme at 640x200, only to thoroughly waste its potential by using just 4 or 5 colors at a time. I thought Thexder's Tandy mode looked a whole lot better (let alone MCGA)!

They didn't come up with it, the original developers did. The original hardware Silpheed and Thexder were programmed for was the PC-8801, whose most popular video mode was 640x200 in 8 colors. The EGS 640x200 mode is faithful to the original game (and I like it, some of the corners are rounded better due to the higher horizontal resolution).

and since this is still on-topic, sort of: do you happen to know if Master Miner has been archived anywhere? I ask since those box shots on MG have your name on them, and even after M.U.L.E.'s recent rescue mission, other beasts like this one remain elusive.

The cover was sent to me by Mike Abrash (or maybe Dan Illowsky, I don't recall as it was 13 years ago), but not the software, sorry. It remains unreleased "in the wild".