
The Polygons of Another World: IBM PC - ingve
http://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_PC_DOS/index.html
======
nwallin
The EGA color situation isn't as bad as the author described.

CGA had a 16 color palette. In text mode, every character could be rendered
with the background and foreground of any of the 16 colors. In graphics mode,
you had to select one of two horrible combinations of 3 colors, and could pick
any color to be the fourth color. It was awful for games, being mostly
oriented around having brightly colored text on a black background.

TGA's graphics mode had 4 bit color, which gave it the complete 16 colors of
CGA. It was less terrible, but still pretty garish as you can see from the
screenshots in the article. It inherited the overly bright colors designed for
differentiating text on a black background.

I believe that both CGA and TGA used the a digital connection to the monitor,
and they were compatible with each other. There were on/off RGB lines and a
half bright line that made stuff half as bright, with additional logic for
another independent grey instead of duplicating another black.

EGA had 4 bit indexed color into a 6 bit palette. I honestly think its 6 bit
palette is passable for the darker, moodier environment of Another World,
unlike the CGA palette. But relatively few games used it. Most games
(including, apparently, Another World) used the CGA palette, because then you
would still be compatible with CGA monitors. IMHO the developers would have
done their users a favor by making a third EGA only palette.

I don't recall how EGA's cable worked, whether it was analog like VGA or used
a six bit digital scheme not unlike CGA.

~~~
henrikschroder
Oh shit, did EGA have a different cable? My first PC had VGA, and since the
DE-15 cable ruled for a decade until DVI, I had just assumed that CGA and EGA
cards and monitors used the same cable...

It's always so crazy how creative and bespoke all the early PC tech was,
because the hardware limitations were crippling, in every single dimension.
And that in turn makes it so fascinating to read these articles, because the
limits of the hardware was so well-known, that you could do things like
counting actual cycles and basing your timing off of that or similar.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
I think they all had different adaptors and cables back then. Until the NEC
multisync, different monitors too! The article isn't wide enough to need to
mention the whole world of semi-compatible and non-compatible clones, such as
the Tandy mentioned (that I think was a semi), others were from HP, Apricot
(who were quite successful for a while, and at least one of their machines had
a switchable semi mode, and a "better" Apricot non-compatible mode. Different
stuff ran in each), Tulip and probably dozens of others I forget. Some ran
DOS, had a x86 and all the other toys, but wouldn't run certain software,
others deviated in hardware rather more to try and do something "better".

The whole PC market was a bloody confusing, incoherent mess for a while. A
quagmire for a not fully clued up buyer.

~~~
pjmlp
It also meant that if you waited long enough, replacing a computer part
triggered a cascade of hardware updates, that in the end you would be better
off just buying a new computer.

~~~
soylentcola
True, but it's how I learned a lot about PC assembly and setup as a teenager.
Prior to then, I had a Commodore 128 which, while pretty cool, was mostly a
box that did what it did.

I had an old PC (I bought it used from some guy advertising in the local
paper) and when that fancy new Windows 95 came out, I wanted to upgrade the
old 486 processor.

There wasn't any Microcenter at the time and I didn't know about any of the
catalog sales companies like TigerDirect yet. What I did know was that summer
there was a "Computer Show and Sale!!" at a local event space so I took what
meager cash I had on hand to see what I could buy.

Knowing nothing about CPU sockets or brands, I was happy to find a shiny Cyrix
6x86 CPU that was clearly like a Pentium, but better (because Pentium was 586
so 686 is more 86's obviously). 133Mhz was double what my 486 ran at! Plus
this thing was so much cheaper than the other stuff they had for sale. Got
that and a compatible motherboard and headed home to work on my new amazing PC
(holy crap Doom and Dark Forces were gonna look so good!)

So, you can imagine my disappointment when I got home and found that I could
no longer slot my video card or internal modem into the new motherboard. I was
so disappointed. It would be another month or so before I managed to save up
more money to buy a compatible video card from some other guy selling parts. I
forget what I did about the modem.

I'm also surprised I didn't need new RAM as well but the old stuff worked for
the time being. Before it was all said and done, I'd at least learned what to
research (and that it even needed to be researched) before upgrading anything
again.

It's gotten so much easier to research online, part out a desktop PC, and
drive 20 minutes to Microcenter where I can be back at home assembling
everything that afternoon. I don't have to do it very often anymore as they
remain useful for a lot longer (although it helps that I have more than a
couple hundred bucks to spend now). But it's still useful to know how it all
fits together when some friend or family member wants a basic workstation or
something to edit family photos/videos on.

I can't justify upgrading my current i7 3770k system yet because the damn
thing still just works as well as I could ask after 7 years, but sometimes I
secretly wish it would crap out in some minor way so I could have an excuse to
build a new one.

------
jmccorm
As someone who played it on the PC back in the day, the visuals were nothing
short of amazing. Why? The whole experience was both _different_ and _beyond_
what other titles delivered. What made it so memorable for me? Consistently
smooth animation even with large sections of the screen being updated from
frame to frame. Its polygon graphics which were solid-fill and not wireframe,
which was a big leap. They're right. Ordinarily, the early PC was a real turd
when handling full-screen animation.

The sound wasn't ahead of its day, but it was still quite good, even with the
PC speaker rendering music, alien language, and effects in a better-than-
average rendition. Nobody had high expectations for PC-speaker output.

Only a few years after its release, it was sad to look back and not find that
any new action games using similar methods. Did I miss any good knock-offs
over the next few years of its PC release, or was it just as much ahead of the
curve for years to follow?

~~~
CoolGuySteve
A lot of the 3D games I played back then used a HUD to fill a lot of the
screen.

Another World was different in that it was carefully made to not blit too many
polygon scanlines over the background. In that way, it had more in common with
the Sierra/Lucasarts adventure games of the day.

In terms of gameplay, Flashback or Prince of Persia are probably the most
similar.

But nothing really matches the art style other than 2016's Hyperlight Drifter,
which is excellent.

Formula 1 Grand Prix, 1988:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLVkS7TMl9I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLVkS7TMl9I)

And Grand Prix, 1992:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4fC9CAjJPE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4fC9CAjJPE)

Gunship, 1986:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCZUc0d8ol8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCZUc0d8ol8)

Mechwarrior, 1989:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuxySqjb5X8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuxySqjb5X8)

Although to be fair, I played these games on an XT with monochrome Hercules
CGA emulation at 10 fps, so I don't know what they were supposed to run like
on a computer modern enough to have EGA or VGA.

Weirdly, Return of the Obra Dinn captures that 3D CGA emulation motif in a way
I never expected to see.

~~~
ido
Blackthorne is a slightly later game in the same vain (more similar to
Flashback than to AW or PoP).

------
na85
"Out of this World" was my second ever PC game as a child, after I believe
Blockout[0] or perhaps Mixed Up Mother Goose[1], all of them on DOS via some
weird blue menu driven entirely by the F-keys. I remember when we had to drop
out of the menu to get to the command prompt because the menu couldn't load a
program from another drive. We used to stay up late with my dad taking turns.
We never realized at the time we were playing such a classic.

Such nostalgia. The UX was horrid but we didn't know any better back then.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockout](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockout)

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-
Up_Mother_Goose](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-Up_Mother_Goose)

~~~
recursive
I believe that blue menu is doshell

~~~
na85
Maybe. None of the screenshots I could find via Google seemed to match my
recollection. It was accessed by typing "menu" at the command prompt and was
basically blue-on-blue with no mouse support.

------
codebje
I picked this up for Switch out of nostalgia. Plays well on that platform.
Well, the game does, I'm still terrible at it.

~~~
Glyptodon
It's really more like a puzzle than something to be good or bad at.

------
0xabe
I first played Another World (Out of this World) on the SNES. Even on SNES the
game stood apart from the competition. Since then I’ve played it on many other
platforms including PC and PS Vita. It never gets old.

~~~
Zod666
Did any other version have the sound of the SNES? That was my first experience
with the game and love the sound effects and musical score. I believe the
PlayStation or the Sega CD version had a technically higher quality score, but
sounded completely different which was off-putting to me.

The drawback of the SNES version is there are a few parts where it suffers
from slowdowns. I wonder could they somehow be addressed in an emulator.

~~~
corysama
The person who ported the game from the Amiga to the SNES made a video about
the experience:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=tiq0OL8rzso&t=2m](https://youtube.com/watch?v=tiq0OL8rzso&t=2m)

More stuff along those lines:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/)

~~~
Zod666
Really interesting thx. I feel a little bad for complaining about the speed
after what she went through. I could understand them wanting to drop the fX
chip version, but they used slower ram to save on 50 cemts a cart. I
appreciate the optimisations she put in but at the end of the day, it does
suffer from slowdowns. Again, maybe an emu can address them.

------
pjmlp
> Soon after the PC market was flooded with PC clones. IBM attempted to fork
> into a new standard using a copyrighted MCA bus. When this effort failed,
> IBM effectively lost control and quickly gained an overpriced reputation.

Indeed, had IBM been successful at this and the "computer as appliance" would
already been settled during the 90's, as the OEM PC market got to be the
exception to how everyone else was doing home computers.

------
Stierlitz
‘In March 1983 Compaq introduced an "IBM PC compatible" called the "Compaq
Portable"’ .. but Columbia Data Products got there first in June 1982.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Data_Products](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Data_Products)

~~~
fabiensanglard
Thanks for the input, I will fix the article ASAP.

~~~
jmccorm
Since you're here, I was curious about what you knew of the Atari 8-bit (Atari
800) ...tech demo? ...aborted conversion? ...fan creation?

It looks someone painfully down-converted a series of scenes from early in the
game. The original sound seems completely thrown out. The system required
trickery (usually hand-crafted) to gain more than 4 colors at once in high
resolution. It's been a while since I looked at it, but I seem to recall the
use of independently colored player-missile graphics (sprites) to bring more
fidelity to the main character?

For reference:
[https://youtu.be/PCa_0nXvfDg?t=6](https://youtu.be/PCa_0nXvfDg?t=6)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
That looks like it's hardly the same game… less port, more total rewrite. I
imagine Éric Chahi didn't like it?

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imglorp
Just a shout to the site design. Clean and sharp, nice on mobile, good font
and no funny business.

~~~
ilammy
And moreover, it’s a deliberate decision:
[http://fabiensanglard.net/bloated/](http://fabiensanglard.net/bloated/)

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sehugg
The Digital Antiquarian had a good article on this game in 2018:
[https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/another-
world/](https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/another-world/)

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TazeTSchnitzel
The table in the article claims the MDA had 16 colours, which seems suspect.

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Narishma
Is it me or are some of the SVGs in the article broken in Firefox?

