More nostalgia

[cguy]

I thought this video was great. It triggered a lot of old memories. I expect that I played about 80% of these.

 

[adamr]

Cyan and pink graphics were the ****

Thanks for the memories especially the latter end of the 80s. A game I always wanted to get and never did was willy Beamish. Played at a friend's house and did not finish it

 

[ponder]

What I find incredible is how quickly we've got to where we are. Man those CGA and old EGA/VGA graphics were crap lol.
Even the old 8 bit NES system and ZX Spectrum beat so many of those graphics wise at the same time. Graphics were not the calling card of the early PC.

I skipped early PCs and got Amigas instead.

 

[saor]

I love how old games look like worlds of their own.

 

[cguy]

What I find incredible is how quickly we've got to where we are. Man those CGA and old EGA/VGA graphics were crap lol.
Even the old 8 bit NES system and ZX Spectrum beat so many of those graphics wise at the same time. Graphics were not the calling card of the early PC.

Something that I found interesting is that a lot of the terrible dithering in CGA games is actually intended to generate different colours when scanned out. In SA we almost exclusively had the wrong monitor types for many CGA games.

 

[Lupus]

...oh, and I don't miss having to run software to slow your game down between frames when the faster CPUs started showing up.

You mean the turbo button? That was it's job.

 

[RonSwanson]

What I find incredible is how quickly we've got to where we are. Man those CGA and old EGA/VGA graphics were crap lol.
Even the old 8 bit NES system and ZX Spectrum beat so many of those graphics wise at the same time. Graphics were not the calling card of the early PC.

Yeah they had crap graphics, but they were every bit as much fun games are today, we spent enormous amounts of time on them.

 

[Lupus]

The turbo button? Software?
No haha.
I'm referring to software that we used to run to slow down faster CPUs to allow you to play older DOS games that operated off CPU cycles and would run too fast on a more modern PC (pentium)

There was a button on older computers when pressed it dropped to original speed.

Turbo button - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

So you could play older games on more modern computers.

 

[cguy]

There was a button on older computers when pressed it dropped to original speed.

Turbo button - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

So you could play older games on more modern computers.

Yeah, but the turbo buttons were only effective for a few years. They would put the CPU clocks back to 4.77mhz, but over time, as we moved to 286, 386, 486, Pentium, etc. the instructions per clock increased, caches were introduced, etc., and it wasn’t possible to revert the CPU all the way back, with the exact timing characteristics needed.

There was software called something like “slow” or “goslow”, that would install itself as a TSR in the timer interrupt, and periodically waste the appropriate number of cycles to keep the game running at the correct speed.

Today you can run most of these games through DosBox, where you can dynamically control your emulated clock speed, which is pretty cool.

 

[cguy]

Yeah they had crap graphics, but they were every bit as much fun games are today, we spent enormous amounts of time on them.

I’ve always found it amazing how the quality of experiences are never absolute, but relative. I had my mind blown from Hercules to CGA, CGA to EGA, EGA to VGA, VGA to SVGA and then once again through the whole 3D accelerator cycle.

 

[Lupus]

I’ve always found it amazing how the quality of experiences are never absolute, but relative. I had my mind blown from Hercules to CGA, CGA to EGA, EGA to VGA, VGA to SVGA and then once again through the whole 3D accelerator cycle.

Hercules came out after CGA, but was only monochrome. Hercules had a better text resolution and was used for more technical things.

 

[Lupus]

Yeah, but the turbo buttons were only effective for a few years. They would put the CPU clocks back to 4.77mhz, but over time, as we moved to 286, 386, 486, Pentium, etc. the instructions per clock increased, caches were introduced, etc., and it wasn’t possible to revert the CPU all the way back, with the exact timing characteristics needed.

There was software called something like “slow” or “goslow”, that would install itself as a TSR in the timer interrupt, and periodically waste the appropriate number of cycles to keep the game running at the correct speed.

Today you can run most of these games through DosBox, where you can dynamically control your emulated clock speed, which is pretty cool.

Still worked right up till the first gen Pentiums. Only after that would you need to start using software.

 

[cguy]

Still worked right up till the first gen Pentiums. Only after that would you need to start using software.

The 386s and 486s had caches. Also, IIRC, the later CPUs would drop to higher frequencies than 4.77mhz.

 

[cguy]

Hercules came out after CGA, but was only monochrome. Hercules had a better text resolution and was used for more technical things.

True. I got a machine with a Hercules before I got one with CGA. Both of them when EGA was technically available, but expensive and uncommon.

 

[Lupus]

True. I got a machine with a Hercules before I got one with CGA. Both of them when EGA was technically available, but expensive and uncommon.

Yeah it was, first time I actually saw a hercules graphics card was in 2001 at IBM strangely enough, was in an A400 machine and it was a later model, think it was using MDA? IBM's own bus standard can't remember it's name.

 

[Lupus]

The 386s and 486s had caches. Also, IIRC, the later CPUs would drop to higher frequencies than 4.77mhz.

I still remember my old 386 sx25 working, by my 486 dx2-66 I couldn't be bothered with older games anymore.

 

[Binary_Bark]

 

[Binary_Bark]

Thanks. The fact that you associate that ad with nostalgia makes me feel like an old grandpa lol... I mean, what kind??
If it was the morkels woman, or the "beef has it all" guy, or even Farmer Brown, I'd understand... But that thing is from like the 90s not?

What about this?

 

[cguy]

One Word
phix

Heh. I used it extensively. Only after many years, I realized that it was probably just copying and dithering data from the CGA memory segment (B800) to the active Hercules segment B000) in the timer interrupt.

 

[cguy]

Good observation. But how frustrating for the games that didn't work with it lol.

I know! Phix b (autoboot games). Phix2, mda2cga, etc. all did slightly different things so I had to try them all. I suspect that the copy was done in the timer interrupt, and that if the game cleared interrupts (it was a performance trick back in the day), or replaced it with their own, it wouldn’t work.

Eventually I got a CGA and then jumped straight to VGA. VGA on an XT! It was pretty, but also pretty slow! IIRC, I benchmarked around 700KB/s.