
An IBM XT with 4.77MHz can display color video - sgt
http://www.oldskool.org/pc/8088_Corruption/#de
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mililani
Those demoscene guys are probably some of the most impressive programmers I've
ever seen. It's amazing the kind of visual displays they can produce with just
4kb or 64kb of code.

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ekianjo
Yes but this has nothing to do with the video at hand. Most of the time the
4kb and 64kb demos are using procedural algorithms to fit in small amounts of
memory, and with modern PCs it's kind of cheating because they use system
libraries which are much bigger than 64kb in the first place.

Here, what's impressive is the ability to render video full speed on something
AS SLOW as the first 8088. Pretty cool.

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fuzzix
Here's a presentation from Notcon '04 which shows FMV on the ZX Spectrum,
arguably even more limited than the original PC/XT:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhpN0vcHH9c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhpN0vcHH9c)

You can see the video itself around 6:30 in.

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agentultra
I remember seeing the first demos of streaming video off an XT back around
'03/'04 iirc.

Friend of mine at the time had collected about four of the machines. Full-size
disk drives are real beasts! Needless to say the project that never happened
was to write a little program to control all four from a central PC by
signalling over the unused serial pin or something... never happened, but
would have been lots of fun.

Cool stuff and thanks for the link! :D

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yuhong
I sometimes switch my new Win8 machine to BIOS mode and boot FreeDOS from a
USB stick and then run 8088flex with the /Q switch. No sound, but you can
still see the videos.

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unoti
If you have never played with libcaca, you might have fun with it:
[http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca](http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca) It's a
codec, essentially, and it's possible to connect it to VLC to play any video
clip.

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WalterBright
My original IBM PC won't boot anymore.

I recently tried my PC AT clone, the first time I applied power to it in
probably 25 years. All I got was a loud beeping and a smell of burning
electronics.

~~~
patrickyeon
If you're interested in getting that clone running, most likely it's some
elecrolytic capacitors (they're relatively colourful, and look like cans
sitting on the circuit board) that degraded and failed. They are two pin
devices, almost guaranteed through-hole at that vintage, and cheap to replace.

You may also be able to just replace the power supply, as it's usually the
first thing to fail.

~~~
WalterBright
There are hundreds of caps on it, it may be a while before I figure out what
went wrong :-)

On a related note, I bought a Carver stereo in the early 80's (M-200t amp and
C-1 preamp). I run it every day all day. That's 30 years of daily use. And yet
it still works like a champ (I replaced the on-off switch as it wore out). I
guess they didn't use cheap caps in it!

~~~
TerraHertz
Electrolytic caps go bad when left unpowered for long intervals. The plates
depolarize - but can be usually be restored by slowly raising the applied
voltage. Gear that has been left off for years should be slowly powered up
over a day or two in small steps with a variac.

Walter Bright! I remember Zortech C, and some micro cross compilers. Thanks.

~~~
WalterBright
I never thought that that might be necessary. Thanks for the tip! But it's
probably too late now anyway :-)

I was going to see what I had on that old AT hard disk.

I had a 486 that hasn't seen power since 1993. I tried powering that up, but
the POST beeps suggested the keyboard controller had failed. Oh well. So I
pulled out the drives, and my external IDE controller wouldn't recognize them.
But my old Windows XP box's controller did, and I was able to read the old
drives (200Mb and 500Mb respectively). It was kinda fun to see what detritus
I'd left on them, but sadly no gold bullion.

That 486 was the last machine I had that would boot OS/2\. Oh well! To the
dustbin of history.

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benologist
Seeing that big heavy box and screen brings back some memories although ours
was monochrome. Very impressive accomplishment.

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ballard
Can't remember too much modex assembly, but ...

Does the CGA have a vsync non-display blanking interval that could prevent
tearing?

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bryanlarsen
In the video when he talks about future possible enhancements he mentions that
the system timer could be set to provide an interrupt to use for page flips.
So it sounds like the answer is technically no, but practically yes.

~~~
ballard
It looks like he's using text mode.

IIRC text on VGA (not this) has 4 pages and supports blanking interval stuff
by virtue of VGA. 80x25 is 80x9 x 25x16 = 720x400. The character maps are
actually 8x16 with the right pixel duplicated into the 9th. And in VGA there
are two character planes (512 chars total), which explains Norton weird cursor
that could go anywhere later copied by FreeBSD and others.

It maybe possible to change the character planes to be optimized for drawing.
That would be cool.

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mjg59
So being horribly pedantic, but: That's a PC, not an XT.

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greenyoda
It looks like an XT to me. The PC/XT looked identical to the original PC,
except that the XT had one of the two floppy drives replaced with a 10mb hard
drive. You can see that in the video at about 0:38: the floppy is on the left,
the hard drive is on the right, with a light flashing on it as the data loads.
(The next model, the PC/AT, looked different from the original PC.)

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mjg59
The author claims it's a 5150 (ie, a PC), and it's fairly reasonable to
believe that it's an after-market hard drive.

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leoh
To be fair, it seems to me that a lot of what's being displayed was rendered,
if you will, on a more powerful machine. It seems to me a video was made on a
modern machine and converted to a format for the IBM machine. I'm not saying
this is a non-trivial process. But creating all this content on the IBM? I
don't think so. Though I could be wrong.

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noonespecial
Old hard drives... beep. I'd completely forgotten that part. Why did they make
that beeping sound when you accessed them? Some sort of PWMed control of
something? Heh, we used to joke that they were signaling our government
overlords in morse code. Yeah, that used to be funny.

That was some serious nostalgia right there.

~~~
joezydeco
I believe the older hard drives used stepper motors to move the read head.
Those can get quite musical when they're working hard.

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dmead
i had one of them from a garage sale, it came with a joystick and tetris... so
cool

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jebblue
Why does that, IBM XT, sound like yesterday? I mean it sounds like just
yesterday?

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Zoomla
surely not with flash.

