We WON a Democompetition! Area 5150 @ Evoke 2022 Alternative Platforms 

Thanks, those are kind words. But your Teletext demo was really quite amazing, It was lucky the Amiga demo didn't stomp all over everything.

420 Years of Teletext rocked! And yeah, the extremely narrow margin is a testament to how good it was :-)

That teletext demo was mind blowing though. What a comp!

Thanks. Yes it would be nice to see some improved games on this platform.

Ah don't worry, I also get that. Managing to be involved in something cool doesn't mean that there aren't other areas I neglected. Ask any nerd at the local pub about their social life for example. :-) Actually, in my case I didn't even start working on this stuff until 2020, so there's almost always time to start something new and interesting!

It all depends, of course, on what you define as 'older'. ;-). The moment you start thinking in terms of 'when you reach a certain age...', all bets are off and everything goes downhill...

Unfortunately the financial incentives of RU-vid are rather perverse in that it is financially rewarding to grab the attention of as many people as possible with the least actual work or expense. This is probably why you don't see more of that kind of technical content. Of course there are notable exceptions, but these are rare. The other factor going against it is that RU-vid videos take a lot of time to produce, usually taking up all the time that would be available to write demos. So if people were doing this sort of thing, they probably aren't demo writers themselves, and then they don't have the technical skills to work out how the demos were actually done. I tend to be somewhere in the middle, holding a full time job so I don't have to rely on RU-vid income and am therefore not subject to perverse incentives, and then balancing my spare time between making videos and demos and not doing either particularly well. There are of course independently wealthy people who could probably do all three.

@@PCRetroTech That's so true about making content *about* your content taking up all the time you'd use to make that content. I'm a video game programmer and musician and I struggle with that too! I'm making a Gameboy game and love retro tech so that's why I like videos like this

@@MaxOakland Yeah, one could probably make one decent demo a year at best, which is not quite enough content for a RU-vid video every week/month, even if there was time left to make those. I don't think there are any easy solutions to these problems. There are producers and consumers in the economy, and let's hope the consumers actually want the type of technical content that we like to make and are happy to pay for it.

It's unlikely I'll be at any of these comps as travel these days is just prohibitively expensive. I'm glad we inspired you to visit Evoke in person though. It's becoming quite the compo these days!

Thank you, and I am sure the guys are also very pleased with the high praise!

Thanks a lot. Yes it was an honour to work with those guys.

It was a great event. You certainly missed a good one!

@@PCRetroTech Hoping to see some more demoscene activity! Greetz from Slipstream

Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks. We have to do a final version of the demo and a writeup of how it works before moving on. But I'm sure we'll keep working on demos.

It should run on a 5160 so long as you have a genuine CGA card.

@@PCRetroTechYes, I can confirm it runs great on a 640k/10mb 5160 with CGA and a 5153. My friend was completely blown away by the demo as well. I made a little bootdisk to free up some memory and keep it running in a loop. Took a few loops before I shut it off. Guess I got in some kind of trance, being hypnotized by the amazing artwork ;-) Some really clever CRTC wizardry you guys did here! The cool thing is that this demo has completely gone viral. Everyone I know is running this demo including The Home Computer Museum here in the Netherlands for which I am a volunteer 😄

@@pipschannel1222 That's great to hear! 8088MPH did that too, so I'm not at all surprised. 🙂

Thank you!

Ha! Really!? They'll get a shock when they run it!

The landscape movie part had me going “WTF”. It’s really hard to believe. The PC has no business doing something like that. It can’t even print a directory listing quickly.

@@nickwallette6201 Yes, IBM did that quite badly actually.

It'll definitely crash. But you might get some way through it and as you say, the fun of getting the machine working is what it's all about. Thanks for the positive feedback!

@@PCRetroTech Hehehe. Thanks and you're welcome. All this makes me wonder if my card has some tricks up its sleeve that we (or at least I) never knew about. It's a C&T based card, and from what I can remember from back in the days when I used it as a daily driver, it did a couple of things that a run-of-the-mill EGA card should not be able to do.

@@damouze Don't quote me on this, but I think Chips and Technology had the first clone of the EGA chipset and they did a pretty good job of it. They might have even implemented the EGA standard better than IBM themselves. But yeah, it is always interesting to wonder what other goodies might be hiding away in there.

@@PCRetroTech I think you may be right. I am at least interested the 640x480 mode, which I know the card supports, but I never got it working with my old monitor back in the day.

The Micro8088 is alive! It was a bit of work, because I don't have a floppy controller for it. Instead I opted to modify my 486 retro PC slightly to allow for a second CF card slot in the front (which meant I had to remove the ZIP drive I installed about two years ago, as I currently only have one set of 3.5" to 5.25" montage kits handy), format a CF card in the second slot, create a 500MB partition on it and copy over all the DOS files and my standard set of utilities. Then I had to activate it in Linux, because MS-DOS 6.22 does not allow you to activate a primary partition on a second drive. Finally, as MS-DOS 6.22 fdisk does not allow you to write the MBR to the secondary drive either, I had to create a raw device mapping for it in a Virtualbox instance, boot from an MS-DOS 6.22 installation floppy image and run FDISK /MBR. I have it currently running with a VGA card, but I still plan on using my old EGA card in the future. The bonus is that I finally also installed a SCSI card in my 486 system, although something tells me that a Adaptec 29160 is a bit overkill for that machine...

Thanks!

Oh wow, you are the first person to find the Easter egg. I'll let the guys know, as they'll be pretty happy about that.

@@PCRetroTech aha! So you knew about it, but are there any more…

@@MrBuzzy Yes I knew, and we believe you are the first to notice. There aren't any other Easter eggs of the same kind that I know of. Some of the graphics do contain quite a few nods to various pieces of PC and gaming history, but if you call these Easter eggs they are certainly much more obvious if you are familiar with the references.

@@PCRetroTech Well that's my 15 seconds of fame :) Yeah the nods are great, the Doom one being obvious and some less so. Maybe you could do a wrap of them for us. The closing credits gives me IK+ feels, but that's a C64 thing so I'm probably off track there. I wanted to control the marble in marble madness.

@@PCRetroTech Actually the blocky Digger characters get me the most.

I'm not responsible for the apparent 640x200/16 graphics so you should wait for a writeup by one of the others, but you are definitely overthinking it. As I said in the video, there are certainly restrictions when doing graphics with that much detail, and I would add that whether you want to refer to it as a "mode" really depends on how literally you take things. A lot of demos try to convince their audience that hardware limitations of the machine have been overcome, when in reality the demo runs on stock hardware with all the usual restrictions. This is one of those demos.

No, it's 'just' 80-column textmode. That mode has a native resolution of 620x200, and 16 colours. So the pixels are drawn as regular pixels. The only manipulation is done on a per-scanline level, so that you have much better vertical resolution than the standard 80x25 character resolution would give you with ANSI graphics. So the graphics are effectively 80x100 or 80x200 ANSI graphics in 16 colours.

Yes, and yes. Avoiding snow was a major challenge for almost every high-res effect in the demo.

You're not seeing snow in the various videos captured from real hardware, so there's your answer.

PC hardware was evolving really fast and it was no time to discover how to fully utilize it. We got VGA cards just after 5 years since CGA release and there was EGA in between. There're very few CGA-only games. Most games that run on CGA usually had EGA and sometimes VGA support. This meant that CGA was used in very basic way. EGA was supported much better, since shareware companies like Apogee targeted low-end hardware in early 90's and Commander Keen by ID software showed that EGA can do fast full-screen scrolling that lead to a tons of EGA 2D games. VGA wasn't supported that well. Many games used VGA as an EGA with customizable 16-color palette, while most of early 256 color games relied on static screens of choppy scrolling. There was a short period of games that used VGA hardware features like smooth 70 Hz scrolling, but when EGA was dropped, 486 with VLB become the new target. On such machines software rendering was the way to go.

@@Leeki85 theres way too many cga only games Some like quadralien only have cga and mcga and no ega tho too Edit: 320x200 vga was main target for games foe many years though

@@Leeki85 i don't really need a lecture repeating the catchphrases from computer magazines dictated to by the industry how to present things to the public whose purpose is to fund their agenda. and i stand by what i meant, slow down and actually learn what you have. and i immediately stop reading when people talk about 'evolving really fast' and there was no time to learn to utilize it. such a person will say nothing of interest to me.

@@lasskinn474 320x200 was the target for many years, but most games used VGA as a simple framebuffer. When games finally dropped CGA and EGA support, they started targeting 486 as well. On 486 it was no need to use VGA hardware features, since drawing in software in main RAM, while using VGA RAM as a double buffer was really fast. With that approach developers could simply port games from Sega Genesis or SNES, by simulating hardware sprites and tiles in software. As for way too many CGA only games. PC is an open platform. Anyone could make games and shareware CDs were filled with them. However such small games rarely used hardware in any interesting way.

@@Leeki85 well yeah that's what made vga targeting so easy. there were a lot of 386 targeted vga stuff though for couple of years. as a sidenote there were even a few games that had been in development for longer than you'd think kind of just waiting for the hardware to get popular enough, since you could buy a 386 quite early but it just cost a lot of money. so for like ultima underworld they had been working on the engine for quite a while when it finally got released. 1992 was a banger of a year for pc gaming, imho the single best year for pc and most/everything 386 targeted. edit: of course from coding techniques perspective it's not that interesting now but back then there were so many games doing new things just the sky seemed to be the limit

I'm very surprised you got so far with the 486. This demo relies on very specific timing and anything other than a 4.77MHz 8088 CPU is likely to throw that off, with later effects being generally more sensitive than former ones. There are some Hitachi CRTC's that seem to hang on the final few effects in the demo, but I'm not aware of any others at the moment which fail. As a data point, I was unable to get my effect (the Glenz effect) to run correctly on both the 86box emulator and on a real system. That should give you some idea just how sensitive this is. Also, we do occasionally rely on undocumented behaviour of the CPU, though nothing that wasn't already known before the demo was produced. I'd really love someone to try the demo with the CGA Redux card on an actual PC. I don't believe we have a report for this combination yet, and it would be very interesting to try.

Neat. I don't have access to a PC or XT as they are rare here in Germany. Would love to try it though. Slowest board I have on hand might be a 286 but even that I have to fix up first. So if anyone could borrow or donate an XT or PC board, I would be immensely grateful!

@@root42 Unfortunately I don't have a spare board and I'm no longer in Germany, otherwise we could have possibly set something up. A 286 would suffer from similar timing issues of course. I *might* be in the Cologne area around Easter if you happen to live anywhere near there, but otherwise maybe another viewer will find this.

@@PCRetroTech nice. I actually live an hour by train/car from Cologne so if you want we can stay in touch and maybe arrange something around Easter. Even if just to chat!

@@root42 Sure. My reason for going there would be to attend the Revision 2023 democompetition, though not to compete on this occasion. Perhaps a little closer to the time you can email me via the email address on the channel About page and we can arrange something (I could most probably bring a PC board).

It might work, but the odds aren't high. It does need to run at 4.77MHz and the CGA card has to be extremely compatible with the IBM one, which is very rare.

@@PCRetroTech okay! I'll let you know how I do when I get this computer's RAM issue sorted out :)

@@PCRetroTech GREAT NEWS!!!!! I fixed my XT clone machine AND THIS DEMO WORKS!! It was beautiful! There were some minor graphical glitches but it ran like a champ. Thank you so much. It was definitely a treat to see this running on my repaired machine! Machine: Zenith ZF-151-52, CGA graphics, 8088 running at 4.77MHz, XTIDE, 640KB of RAM displayed on an IBM 5153 CGA monitor

@@theblubus That's fantastic. I'm so pleased you've been able to join the exclusive club of those who have seen it run in the flesh. And thanks very much for the report. I've passed that on to the rest of the team as well.

@@PCRetroTech I posted a video of it running on my clone machine ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-W-xH7QVZhnw.html. For giving credit to the team, who's YT page should I link in my description?

I think so, as it uses borderless graphics.

I believe it uses the same video mode as the 'mugshot' that is shown before the endpart in 8088 MPH: 80-column textmode with 1-row characters. This gives you just enough for 100 lines of 'text' in 16k. In 8088 MPH, only 100 lines were shown, the rest was inactive display. In Area 5150 the same scanlines are repeated, so you display a full screen of 200 scanlines, even though the water effect only repeats the original 100 scanlines from the top picture. This is very tricky to do on CGA of course, especially if you also want to output one sample of digital music on every scanline.

It's spelled Glenz. I didn't come up with the name. It's been around at least since Second Reality and probably earlier on other platforms.

The effect comes from the Amiga scene, where translucent poly objects were first done. The name 'Glenz' is derived from the Swedish word 'Gläns', which means as much as 'shine', 'glare', 'glitter'. So it was likely first used in a Swedish demo. The name is credited to Photon, and his dentro S.T.U.N.N.E.R. from 1991 for Scoopex may be the first glenz routine ever. It names the effect 'glenzvector' in the scrolltext.

@@Scalibq Oh cool, thanks very much for that piece of demoscene history! I had wondered about the name. The first place I saw it was in the source code of Future Crew. I can't remember the exact word they used, but it was Finnish.

​@@Scalibq In German we also have the verb "glänzen" which can be translated to "shine" and "glare".

@@OpenGL4ever Yup, in Dutch it is 'glanzen'

I was there.

@@PCRetroTech Cool, congratulations, I was sure demo effect could be done with your code. I asked Jim and he want to stick on 5150. Too slow for my MOD player code.

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.

@@PCRetroTech Ack. Thanks for the info!

40-column textmode uses the same timings as 320x200 graphics mode... so if you set up the relevant CGA registers *just right* at *just the right time* you can perform the transition 'seamlessly' between two scanlines on screen. This specific implementation won't work on VGA hardware, as it is not compatible with CGA to the required level, but it may be possible to find a VGA textmode and graphics mode that allow a similar transition.

Yes, what Scali says is correct. The 80 column text mode is a different matter. So far we believe it is impossible to switch to that mode seamlessly on the same screen from graphics mode or the 40 column text mode.

@@PCRetroTech I suppose I could add that 640x200 graphics mode would work as well, since it has the same timings as 320x200 graphics mode and 40 column text mode. 80 column mode is a different beast.

@@Scalibq Ah, yes, I forgot about that. Thanks!

@@PCRetroTech as a child I had a trident or oak isa card and I could swear one day it crashed the system and there was a mixture of text and graphics mode. This haunts me since roughly 25 years and the older I get, the more the pictures in my mind get blurred.