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1981 IBM PC (515X) kicking some SERIOUS ass !


Faicuai

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In case you have not yet seen it, you should definitely check this out...

 

 

All with a puny 4.77mhz 8088, tied to a puny CGA adapter (and sub-par infrastructure for graphics), an NTSC video display, and barely any sound to speak of...

 

Absolutely F-SICK (!!!)

Edited by Faicuai
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IBM? Wrong forum ...

 

I'm typing and responding (as usual) from either my iPad Pro or on my HP Z-840 workstation... none of which are any of my sweet A8's, but still let me talk about them in length and detail.. And without mentioning that IBM itself considered and studied the 800 as their OEM product for launching the personal computer revolution...

 

Wrong forum? Keep dreaming...

Edited by Faicuai
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Impressive programming considering the hardware, but nothing really to compete with similar Atari demos and graphics. Not even the '1K color on an '81 IBM CGA' considering the Atari can do RGB mode ala Colorview with 4096 colors. Not to mention sound. But I agree with DrVenkman, wrong forum; this should have been posted in the classic computing general forum, not here. And that's no dream, though I do expect to continue dreaming, just not right now.

 

1K CGA on Atari! Rasta-style.

post-149-0-30776100-1558920946.png

CGA1Kcolor.xex

Edited by Gunstar
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OMG. Make is STOP! I think I'm having seizures!

 

I hated the demo scene back in the 80's and 90's in the 8- and 16-bit Atari daze. I think I'm having an Acid Flashback (© 2019 Atgames, Inc.) and I never actually did any acid.

 

All the hackorz posting their "names" and mocking the "copy protection" software companies used. The loooong horizontal scrolling bouncing soliloquies that just went on and on and on and on...

 

This is the same as all of that...

 

and worse.

 

I mean, kudos for doing that on an old computer, but it's hardly a fair comparison, really. 16-bit registers and address space, along with (what?) 3-4 times the CPU speed?

 

-Todd

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In case you have not yet seen it, you should definitely check this out...

 

 

All with a puny 4.77mhz 8088, tied to a puny CGA adapter (and sub-par infrastructure for graphics), an NTSC video display, and barely any sound to speak of...

 

Absolutely F-SICK (!!!)

 

You made very good use of an old International Bowel Movement.

:)

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Impressive programming considering the hardware, but nothing really to compete with similar Atari demos and graphics. Not to mention sound.

 

1K CGA on Atari! Rasta-style.

 

 

 

But that's 90 colors at best, though... although wonderful for the 8bit, though...

 

Surprisingly, no one here seems to wonder if the IBM PC (515X) generation could do real-time video like Atari (just external linear storage attached to the system bus), though... And if it does, I wonder how it would look..

 

That would be REALLY interesting...

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Apples vs Oranges Todd. Look up 6502 vs 8088 cycles per instruction. CPU is a fairly even match. Video and especially audio is severely lacking.

Atari will kick it's PC ass any day.

 

Remember I was the one to post direct comparisons (in plain BASIC) with the 5150... right here... You are preaching to the preacher... ;-)

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But that's 90 colors at best, though... although wonderful for the 8bit, though...

 

 

That's not why I posted it! But ever heard of Colorview RGB graphics with 4096 colors?!? On the A8?!?

 

https://www.atariarchives.org/cfn/05/08/0026.php

RGBPROGS.zip

Edited by Gunstar
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But that's 90 colors at best, though... although wonderful for the 8bit, though...

 

Surprisingly, no one here seems to wonder if the IBM PC (515X) generation could do real-time video like Atari (just external linear storage attached to the system bus), though... And if it does, I wonder how it would look..

 

That would be REALLY interesting...

Spoke with one of the authors of that demo when at VCFMW2017. They saw phaeron's video player on my 8-bit. They had something similar on the XT using text mode IIRC. It was impressive for what it was (the IBM demo), but didn't hold a candle to the Atari for sound / video quality.

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Actually I was very impressed, and although there are some demos on the 8-bit that are better, there aren't as many as people seem to believe. I also found the contrast ratio and color saturation to be quite excellent. Something that is sometimes lacking on our systems when trying to do a lot of colors.

 

Bottom line is that this was being done with very basic hardware, not having all the advantages of the custom chips on the Atari or C64.

 

Because of how good this was considering how little the authors had to work with, I think this should be taken as a kick in the butt as to what should be possible on the Atari 8-bit with all of it's perceived hardware advantages. I also think it's good to see stuff from other 8-bit systems occasionally posted here to remind us that we can do even better then what we have already.

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"Painful to hear" would be my description - obviously with a lot of the goings on there was little CPU left to do other than simplistic audio.

The "proper" music at the outro part seems to be PWM done with some sort of deliberate noise to reduce the annoying carrier tone you'd otherwise get.

 

But impressive nonetheless. As for one machine vs the other, well we're talking a CPU about 3 times faster, suffering less wait/DMA penalties and having closer to a 16 bit architecture than our own. In fact, at the point in time the IBM came out I imagine the CPU in itself probably cost about half what a new 400 would have.

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I feel like I've walked in on one of my OT posts :)

 

But what you have made that unwanted offspring of a PC do is incredible....Nice work Fac..

 

And this is why I think OT does indeed work sometimes...(Just not my stuff it seems :) 0

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I don't hate IBM, but like the C64 it was late to the party. You just can't change Atari came out with the 8 bits in time for Xmas 1979.

 

That sound is atrocious! Much later but even early on they had the AdLib board and Tandy clones had a ~3 voice(?) sound chip. I remember building a R2R ADC for my printer port that even had a MOD player that worked with it. Things eventually got better, just operative word would be 'later' to go with better.

 

The original PC was OK for playing text adventures or running spread sheets. That was really about it, couldn't even do a preview of graphics for Lotus 123 unless you had two monitors IIRC until the Hercules board came out. It was a solid piece of hardware, just like a tractor or maybe something made in Russia would have been done.

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The original PC was OK for playing text adventures or running spread sheets. That was really about it, couldn't even do a preview of graphics for Lotus 123 unless you had two monitors IIRC until the Hercules board came out. It was a solid piece of hardware, just like a tractor or maybe something made in Russia would have been done.

 

The PC was far more capable than that. Go compare something like Ms. Pac-Man on PC vs. basically any other system at the time. The PC could do basically arcade-perfect ports, often at high resolutions (640x200 in composite mode, which is kind of an oddly little-known fact). You can see a list of these games here: http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2013/11/ibm-pc-color-composite-graphics.html

 

The one thing it couldn't do well initially was sound. That's not something I'd ever argue with.

 

One of the big myths that's grown up around the PC over the years is that it was underpowered. It wasn't; it was actually very powerful. It just wasn't built to do certain things that home users had taken for granted by then, like play music. Over time, I feel like that's morphed into people thinking it couldn't do much of anything. But it actually runs many games of that era better than other home computers of the time, and they look better on PC too. There *is* a reason the PC eventually took over as the primary computing game platform... all it really took was the introduction of sound cards for that to happen.

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Great desire demo and Scali et al did a great job.

 

Have seen it live on big screen at Revision and the PC speaker sound wAs loud but ppl liked it... so it was ranked 1st.

 

A lot of tech under the hood... remember thats CGA, banked etc no Raster Counter nor IRQ etc...

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Remember I was the one to post direct comparisons (in plain BASIC) with the 5150... right here... You are preaching to the preacher... ;-)

 

The biggest issue M$ BASIC had on the PCs is that it used the interrupt vector table for making simple calls. The entire upper half (128 to 255) were claimed by BASIC for extensibility. The ROM had cassette BASIC. Disk BASIC would set a few interrupt vectors and then make the main call to enter cassette BASIC, which then used interrupt vectors to back-communicate with the disk BASIC version.

 

There was an interrupt that fired for text entry. There were some that fired for any of the floating point ops (probably so that X87-optimized versions could be installed). There was an interrupt for handling extended BASIC commands and tokens (DRAW in advanced BASIC, for example).

 

The point is, interrupts are quite an inefficient way of calling procedures, and M$ BASIC used them mercilessly.

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For comparison sake we should be looking at what was actually available in the day rather than what's being done today.

 

I can't recall any games of the early to mid 80s on the PC having decent colour before EGA. And the ST + Amiga put the PC to shame until the '386 came along.

I do remember Leaderboard on the PC having "Looks like he... hit the tree, Jim" half decent samples going through the internal speaker + VGA graphics which would have matched or beat the former two though that was probably just before the likes of Wolf3D and Doom came along.

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For comparison sake we should be looking at what was actually available in the day rather than what's being done today.

 

I can't recall any games of the early to mid 80s on the PC having decent colour before EGA.

That's because you don't know about CGA composite mode, which I linked to a good article about above :)

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(...) There *is* a reason the PC eventually took over as the primary computing game platform... all it really took was the introduction of sound cards for that to happen.

Ding, ding, ding! We got a winner, here!

 

There is absolutely a reason, of course... and that reason also explains why our beloved A-8bits remained with the SAME chipset all the way to their extinction in the mid 80's (!!!) (not to mention the exact same fate my ST suffered, before buying my first PC-based architecture machine...)

 

,,,but even so my appreciation for the wholeness and relevance of the 800 has not waned a tiny bit... on the contrary, it seems to strengthen over time! ;-)

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The biggest issue M$ BASIC had on the PCs is that it used the interrupt vector table for making simple calls. The entire upper half (128 to 255) were claimed by BASIC for extensibility. The ROM had cassette BASIC. Disk BASIC would set a few interrupt vectors and then make the main call to enter cassette BASIC, which then used interrupt vectors to back-communicate with the disk BASIC version.

 

There was an interrupt that fired for text entry. There were some that fired for any of the floating point ops (probably so that X87-optimized versions could be installed). There was an interrupt for handling extended BASIC commands and tokens (DRAW in advanced BASIC, for example).

 

The point is, interrupts are quite an inefficient way of calling procedures, and M$ BASIC used them mercilessly.

Oh wow, this is VERY interesting!!!

 

Do you have access to MS-Basic compiler for the 515X or a solid 8088 cross-compiler like CC65?

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