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Hardware Hacking Hardware

First IBM PC Plays Full Motion Sound and Video 96

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the idle-distractions-and-other-amusements dept.
wally writes "Something for the older geeks; it 'started as a bit of a joke around the office, about doing stupid things with old technology' he said. 'Stupid things like, "Well, I can calculate fractals on an abacus!" or "Well, I can surf the web on my Game Boy!". Then one person said, "Oh yeah? Well, I can display video on my XT!". And later that day I kept thinking about it and came up with a way to do it.' And he really did. With video proof and a full explanation with all the needed code, full motion video on an original 8088 IBM."
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First IBM PC Plays Full Motion Sound and Video More

First IBM PC Plays Full Motion Sound and Video

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  • Please... if the only link in the story is broken, don't post the story.

  • Amigas did this at the same time and better :) (Score:4, Informative)

    by Amiga Lover ( 708890 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @12:17PM (#14559210)
    The Amiga did this at the same time and better :). Amiga 500, 68000 at 8MHz could do smooth fullscreen full colour video with stereo 4 channel sound booted from floppy with 1MB RAM AND multitask like Windows and MacOS didn't know how to do until 1999 or later.

    Sometimes the world forgets the technology we had yesteryear.
  • 100 people commenting "They must have run the web server on the 8088 too".

    Coral doesn't have it but google does. [64.233.167.104]
  • Found this link [google.com] on Digg the other day.

  • Wow (Score:1)

    by WWWWolf ( 2428 )

    That's pretty damn impressive!

    Almost as cool as Second Reality running on Commodore 64. Almost.

    Had only been cooler if they had done this on an unexpanded machine, that is, the music on the beeper instead of resorting to posh high-tech like SoundBlasters. And MS-DOS 6.22? Ridiculously luxurious updates =)

    • Did DOS really change anything major from 3.3 to 6.22?

      As far as I can tell they basically work the same, just came with different (shitty) utilities.

      • Hurm... I don't think there were major changes to the underlying OS, but there may have been minor tweaks. Some commands got some very handy parameters in 4.0 if I remember correctly, but it's been so long time since I went from 3.3 to 6.0 that I can't remember for sure =) 5.x and 6.x were mostly about the additional gunk though, that's right.

      • 3.3 was great for floppy-based systems. They added support for hard drive partitions over 32 meg, in 4.0 I believe. 4.01 was largely forgotten, and 5.x added good memory tools, himem and emm386. The 6.x series was mostly about doublespace/drivespace, which was Microsoft's take on Stacker.

        Somewhere in there, I think with 5.0, the interactive Qbasic editor, also known as Help, also known as Edit, came on the scene. It brought with it mouse-awareness, and funny things like clickable links in the helpfile.

        Anywa
        • I could be wrong but I think I remember having edit on DOS 3.3. I still have the manual to my grandpa's old NEC pc with DOS 3.3 somewhere...
          • Don't remember having edit on DOS 3.3, I do remember edlin however... I believe the GP poster is talking about edit that's based on qbasic's editor.

      • Re:Wow (Score:2)

        by pla ( 258480 )
        Did DOS really change anything major from 3.3 to 6.22?

        DOS 3.3 couldn't deal with HDDs bigger than 32MB (they actually added larger cluster support in DOS 4, but we all know how buggy that turned out).

        And yes, that reason alone eventually forced me to upgrade to such a nasty, bloated, memory-hungry Microsoft piece-of-crap as DOS 6.22.

        Ah, the good ol' days.
      • Here's a summary of major PC/MS-DOS revs and the key features they added:

        DOS 1: IBM PC compatiblity :)
        DOS 2: Hard drives, directories, loadable drivers
        DOS 3: Networking
        DOS 4: Hard drives >32MB
        DOS 5: 386 memory management
        DOS 6: Drive compression

    • I'm looking for a video capture of the "second reality" demo.
      I have it somewhere, but I'm too newb (old?) to even want to try to run it full-speed and capture the video. I wouldn't know where to start.

      When I say "you know, the future crew logo with the hex nuts, and the space ape, and the spinning stuff", people just give me blank stares until I show them. But somehow when I run it on my machine it hangs halfway.

      • I'm looking for a video capture of the "second reality" demo.

        Wikipedia has/had an ed2k link to a video of the demo. Though if I remember correctly, it cuts off just before the end credits. There might be some other .avis here. I hear someone had made a DVD of greatest PC demos too.

        The demo regrettably doesn't yet run on DOSbox, at least 0.63 (at least here it works just fine otherwise but it hangs mid-through, I've heard it's actually the demo's fault...)

      • Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)

        by Trixter ( 9555 )
        Not to pimp my own product too heavily, but you can get a perfect version of this, with commentary from Future Crew themselves, on Mindcandy Volume 1. See www.mindcandydvd.com for details.

  • Heck, I made a colour organ in MASM that had decent animation in a little known CGA mode between 80x25 and 320x200.

    I think he could've done better than 80x25 graphics mode. . . .

    Finally, Flight Simulator 2.0 ran on the 5150, and it was sweet..

    • Wow, i'll be happy if i never even see the word 'MASM' again. I can't stand assembly...

      They made the assembly class at my university extremely difficult on purpose, making that class one of the several meant to 'weed out' students that weren't serious. Of course it didn't matter that a class like this won't actually leave you with any useful knowledge... They can MOV AX, KISS MY @$$.

  • Putting it in perspective (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SigILL ( 6475 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @12:50PM (#14559694) Homepage
    Really impressive. Some numbers to put all this into perspective.

    If you just want to stream some pre-rendered data to your text-mode screen buffer at full-motion (25+ fps) speeds, you only need 4000 * 25 = 100 kbyte/sec. Even for a 4,77 MHz (about 1 MIPS?) 8088 that's not a lot. And if the CPU can't pull it there's always the DMA controller.

    However, the full demo is about 2 minutes long. If no compression was involved the video data file should be about 12 megabytes. That's larger than the mentioned disk-space requirements, so there's probably some simple motion compression involved.

    • Re:Putting it in perspective (Score:4, Informative)

      by Trixter ( 9555 ) on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @09:22PM (#14564297) Homepage
      You can't use DMA to transfer mem-to-mem if you are using a Sound Blaster. DMA has two usuable channels on 8088, 0 and 1. DMA 0 is used for RAM refresh, so that leaves 1 -- and Sound Blaster Pro can only use DMA 1. So no, I didn't have the option of using DMA for the memory updates.

      On a mixed benchmark of general instructions, integer math, register-to-memory, memory-to-memory, etc. operations, a 4.77MHz 8088 is generally 0.2 MIPs, not 1 MIPS.

      To the other posters: Yes, you can do digitized sound via the PC Speaker, but it almost completely ties up the machine leaving no free cycles for video playback. You need at least 30fps for decent motion (our brain is generally more sensitive to frequency than amplitude when it comes to motion) so that was the standard I reverse-engineered from.
  • was apparently hosted on the XT as well.
  • Gonna try it as soon as I get home! :)
  • You can download (from various mirrors), read comments, read information, vote (need an account), comment (need an account), etc. from Pout.net [pouet.net].
  • Being awed by a PC, either AT&T or Texas Instruments, it was a long time back, around 1982. Anyway, it had a cool realtime animated face with a fully digitized voice introducing the system. It had a color display with (for me) was new, since at the time the best I could find was monochrome systems.

    It was in computer stores about the same time as the Apple Lisa, before we had exclusive Apple VS. PC departments.

    And of course, there were videogames that had those features as early as 1978.

  • Was Bill Gates right? (Score:5, Funny)

    by geekwithsoul ( 860466 ) <geekwithsoul@noSpam.yahoo.com> on Wednesday January 25, 2006 @03:30PM (#14561496)
    Maybe 640K and a 10MB hard drive is enough for everyone :)

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