PCRetroTech is all about retro PC hardware of the 1980's and 1990's and programming it, pushing it to the limit and doing deep dives in the history and technology that defined our childhoods. It's about the retro nostalgia of that old technology that we all know and love!
one of my machines at that time (lan party gaming!) had a 200Mhz 6x86 that I got running at 166Mhz using 83Mhzx2. Was mostly stable but got VERY hot on 83Mhz bus. Was ALWAYS stable running at 75x2(PR200+).
I actually use an ET4000 card in my 5150 since I have no CRT monitors. It has excellent CGA/EGA support. I think it will even do Hercules monochrome but I haven't tried it.
i think in the 90s up to 1997 video cards made no difference on frames as it was all done by the CPU the video card just game you the image buffer and colours... my ISA 8900C trident card could play everything from 1991 to 1996, even red alert ran great with a 486 dx4 100 i had no idea later on i learn that the trident cards were bare budget min cards at the time that were common, i could even play duke nukem 3D the cpu and ram was the biggest difference.... later on in 2006 or so the video card was very important
Dave Haynie from commoder amiga team said in interview the BOB (blitter object) is more universal and better technique than hardware sprites. Usability of this solution depends on color depth and RAM + gpu frequency. Need of two raster operation to remove old BOB and write BOB on new position. If graphics hardware has enough off screen dedicated video RAM to store sprites like BOB only graphics card is involved in operation without slow down system RAM.
Flex architecture - compaq was first who divided pc common bus to system and external (ISA, EISA, etc) by bus bridge. Then every manufacturer copied this in 386 ant newer machines.
Great video! I'm already eagerly awaiting part 2. Transparency effects (for fog, water, light...) for games in low resolutions (320x200 16bit) would be particularly exciting.
YD380bB drive that does the clacking noise has a bad track 0 sensor. If you move the head to the inside of any drive, and apply power it will home to track 0 (either initially or after loading a disk) (Also, not the old old drives without microprocessors like the tm400) Forgive the rambling. There is a switch or sensor that tells the electronics when the heads are at track 0, this is your culprit
I think I would be good working on this microcomputer because I am an avid and a staunch typist who can work on anything that has a typewriter-like keyboard. Otherwise, I relish seeing people use microcomputer technology, whereby, today this act is rare.
Our family PC was a 1640MD, but we modded the B/W screen to support ega with 16 shades of grey. I want that machine back, the 20mb hdd made sooo soothing bird chirp sounds. ❤
Grand Prix Circuit has a conceptual framerate limit or something. If you use the successor game, Grand Prix: The Cycles, you get an improvement in framerate/smoother gameplay.
Just picked up one of these - the VGA card on the motherboard looks the same, I'm pretty sure there isn't any cover missing - this was one owner from brand new. Has a 40MB hard drive, the official Compaq joystick adapter card (for two joysticks) and a very proprietary 4MB RAM expansion too!
@@PCRetroTech our parents had a Packard Bell 386/16 with 1MB RAM/105MB as our first ever PC so fairly similar spec on this! I buy and sell retro kit and this came in as part of a largish bundle, it's cleaned up near perfectly but it's not my bag really, I'm into vintage Commodores and early IBM stuff. Mine is just the base unit as well, no keyboard, mouse or monitor sadly.
I had the 1640 after my grandad upgraded to a 386. Mine had a 20MB hard disk mounted directly on an ISA card. I remember before powering off the computer, I had to type "wdpark" to park the hard drive heads.
20:43 CP/M had a graphics layer called GSX which abstracted away the underlying hardware. The downside of this is that no matter how good your assembly coding skills were, they didn't matter, b/c everything had to go through the GSX layer.
Not yet. There's been lots of progress, but life continues to be chaotic for all of us for one reason or another, so there are still numerous quite difficult tasks remaining. It'll be worth the wait, don't worry.
A pretty nice computer for the time. the 8086 and EGA together would have made this a desirable home computer in the late 80's. Just add an adlib sound card and it would have been a pretty good home computer and still usable for business applications as well.
You completely missed the point of those purple CGA graphics.. Search for the video titled : "CGA Graphics - Not as bad as you thought!" you might learn a thing or two.
So I watched over half of this and I guess I missed why you shouldn't put a 1981 graphics card in a 1994 PC except for some CPU speed issues? It looks like it worked just fine except for the required tinkering for the bus speed. Is there some reason I couldn't put a Hercules in any ISA slot and use it with appropriate software on any PC?
18:34 For Tseng ET3000AX, you need a VBE driver loaded to enable its 640x480 8bpp mode. I believe the same applying to the Oak and Paradise VGA ISA. ET3000AX scores 2.2 point on my DX486-33Mhz on PC Player Vesa Mode 101h test, and it scores 17.5 on 3D Bench ISA test, which is pretty close to your test, 17.8 points. So I think this is a valid value. And as for Chris 3D test, this one is CPU related, comprehensive test, Therefore, it cannot be used as a performance comparison of a graphics card. The ET3000AX got 20.9 and 6.6(640x480) respectively on my 486.
Good times of the old CPM/80 I used on my Brazilian clone of "Apple//e" in 1990. MBasic, dBase2 was complex for a kid but with the help of some books I was able to learn a few things. This PIP command is very powerful for copying data segments between devices, memory, disk, etc. What became obvious is the superiority of MSDos and especially PC/Dos in its time. Whoever said Unix is difficult never had to deal with the limitations of CPM! Good job.
I have a Windows 98se computer built around this same 3dfx Voodoo 1 card (the same card I had back in 1997), paired with a Nvidia MX400, and a SoundBlaster Live sound card; it has a AMD K6-2/500 CPU, and 256mb of PC100 ram. I have 42 games for this machine, many are Glide games, such as NFS2se, POD, Wing Commander Prophecy to name a few.
Would it be faster if you created a 320x200 byte map in main memory, and used only the first two bits in each byte (4 colors) for all graphics primitives (no need for four different sprite drawings, perhaps easier calculations since each pixel is one byte), but then copied that into CGA memory with packing 2 bits of 4 bytes into each CGA video memory byte?
I'm not sure. Shifting is unfortunately very expensive on this platform, basically 4 cycles per bit that you have to shift, plus some overhead. Also, main memory is not *that* much faster than CGA memory, maybe a factor of 2 or so. So I think this is a case where more precomputation is better. However, there might be other benefits from your idea, such as being able to deal with sprites partially going off screen for example. So I guess it would depend on the particular problem you were trying to solve. Nice idea though. Could be worth a try!
Normal density (Mitsubishi MF504B,C 5.25" HD Drive) Logical ‘1’ selects high density read/write operation and logical ‘0’ selects normal density. With option jumpers SS shorted and SB open, this line changes the motor rpm and read/write 'operations are performed 400mS after density change, to allow the motor speed to stabilize. When motor rpm is switched the head must be moved to track 00 before reading or writing. With SB shorted and SS open the motor speed is always 360rpm so no waiting or track 00 seek is necessary.
Maybe the interrupt in the Gauntlet screen is used for displaying the HUD or status bar at the bottom at the right time? (Thats usually the way it was done in C64 games)
Funnily, some 8bit machines had somehow better graphical capabilities than the CGA, namely the amstrad CPC... from a basic CGAesque "Mode1" in 320x200x4 your could go full screen (384x256), have various "raster" palette changes on the screen (change inks for the next lines), set each 4 inks from 27 colours, perform some 25hz palette/screen flipping to soften some ditherings or add extra colours. But those machines also lacked RAM and CPU power to run proper 16bit games such as Populous (being 8bit machines). But the 320x200x4 can really displays some great Pixel arts if only the fixed palettes of the CGA could get more freedom... EGA's 640x350x16/64 mode often feels like some untapped potential awesomness and the Demoscene and Pixelart community should really give it some more love, but the strange pixel ratio and limitations and current rarity of the format won't help. A shame CGA and EGA lacked some decent character attribute graphical modes or CGA being sooo lackluster in palette/ink customisation (could only custom set the background ink ? srsly ?). Some colours from the palette were never to be seen by the average young gamer with a CGA computer. The 640x200 modes in 16 (or even 4 ) colours also have some massive untapped potential but EGA would often get bad case of very heavy scanlines in "vertical 200 pixels" modes (on EGA HD monitors especially).
Would be great to see some specific PC1512 demo, perhaps a PC1640 one too, not sure a lot of hidden tricks may be found for those machines, that remains to be seen. What about adding the Mathematical co-CPU too ?
