What is Digg?162 Comments
- absurdist, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7For those of you whose reaction to this is a collective "big deal", I'll be generous and assume your average age is 14.
The whole point is similar to Mark Twain's famous comment about the singing dog: "The marvel is not that it does it well, but that it does it at all."
MAJOR digg. - antdude, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5This is actually a true demo. You can try it from http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=13722 ...
- awhite2600, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Anyone that doesn't digg this probably never used (or programmed) hardware of this vintage. This is an awesome accomplishment. Well done!
- plarp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4i had full motion full screen video and 256 colors from a pc and it was still the 80's.. it was called an Amiga..
- alloneword, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Most of you guys seem to to be too young to have any sense of nostalgia.
That was very impressive (whether of not it is new, or old news), and just goes to show how powerful assembly can be.
To those who said, it isn't cool, it is an old 8088, I doubt you could do anything like that on the computer you used to post your comment, and no, I don't mean double clicking on a movie file, and pressing play. - whitesanjuro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness." ~ rms http://www.stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html
- Chris_F, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"WOW Why couldn't Microsoft do that back in the day."
They had no way to capture and encode the video. - lilrabbit129, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The reason everyone is loving this is because it reminds us of a time when the solution to a slow program WASN'T to throw hardware at it. Back in the day, programmers actually had to think about their algorithms and not rely on people upgrading to make them usable.
- mancat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Okay.. It's really not "full motion video." It's full motion video, but converted to ASCII characters. It's still an achievement, though. What's even cooler is that the coders made full use of some of the more obscure CGA hacks that produced more colors than the original CGA palette was intended for. Not a lot of coders of the era used CGA hacks to their fullest. Of course, they could be lying about CGA, and are using EGA instead, but I have no reason to doubt them.
I wish I could find the link for it, but a while back I stumbed upon a page that described how to mix CGA palettes in assembly code to display more than 4 colors at a time without dithering. - butchcassidy503, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Couldn't this be accomplished by converting each frame of a video file to ASCII, then playing the animation in text mode on the machine. Used to see fast ASCII animations all the time back in the day, we just didn't have the video rendering capability.
Am I missing something? - dickmnixon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I digg it simply for the sweet sound of that keyboard. I miss Ultima ][ and Wizardry. Most of you are to young to remember these games but they where our "halo". Why can't they make 'em like that anymore?
- Ruckus21, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2WOW Why couldn't Microsoft do that back in the day. I might have kept my 8086 instead of unloading $1500.00 for a killer 286. No good old days when it comes to tech.
- sstidman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Back in the day, programmers actually had to think about their algorithms and not rely on people upgrading to make them usable."
Good point. Makes you wonder how insanely fast modern computers would be if programmers coded with similar efficiency these days. - omegadan, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5I did a LOT of asm programming in that era ... and i am sorry to say, while cool, this is really not anything to write home about. Assuming standard text mode (2h if memory serves), a screen is 4000 bytes of data (80 chars * 25 lines * 2 bytes). So, to do 30 frames a second, the computer would have to move, 4000*30 or, 117k/sec. That is a trivial ammount of data even for an 8088. I would guess this would take less than 100 lines of code..
The complicated part is of course preparing the video -- fitting the colors to the text palette (I think some VGA cards could alter their text mode color palettes -- Id look it up but I just threw out my copy of the EGA/VGA refference thinking, "when the hell am i ever gonna use this"), and then scaling the video down. If he was clever he could do a sub-pixel rendering type deal with the background and foreground colors, and half character blocks -- that was a very common technique back then, esp. if anyone remembers "The Draw".
While I'm glad to see someone still programming in asm ... Anyone who is impressed by this doesn't know ANYTHING about the actual hardware. - sundancekid503, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Kinda neat, but I'm sure rendering the video into text was done on a powerful modern machine. After that's done playing the results on a machine this old, though not trivial, probably isn't as hard as you might think.
- monolith, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This is neat, dugg.
but it really is just ASCII art. The big deal is that now he could render the video to ASCII art quickly and then just encode it... probably wrote a program to read in the ASCII art and output assembler. Maybe even C?
I will say that at the time that machine was the *****... If I had all that the machine has on it now... I would have been VERY happy. 10Meg hard drive was virtually unheard of. Wonder what that machine would have cost back in the day?
and a sound blaster! and all of 640K. I was lucky to get 16k. A fracking tape recorder... and that little ***** beep... the beep was even limited in frequency... a limited number of tones... I LUSTED after 32K. The fraking cool thing was I HAD to carry the tape recorder around... it was computer stuff man... it was useful before football practice... and the tapes just happened to have VanHalen on side B.
ah crap... my geek is showing. - Trixter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hey, the REAL Trixter here. Just wanted to answer a few questions about 8088 Corruption:
It doesn't load off of floppy drive, it's the 10MB MFM hard drive.
Yes, that is one of my cats meowing at the end.
The conversion algorithm was greatly optimized and enhanced by gODjR, he deserves the image quality credit. I coded the playback system (buffers from HD in background using interrupts).
The program is downloadable, see previous digg comments for link. You can run it on your own 8088 if you have a Sound Blaster Pro! Also runs on modern machines, and DOSBOX.
There is a bug in the program that may cause it to crash :-)
The conversion algorithm takes several seconds per frame on my Athlon 2500+. A brute-force approach is used, along with MMX speedups.
All CGA characters and all CGA colors are utilized in the video. Subsampling is used; check the B&W cartoon for an example of "anti-aliased" lines :-)
Finally, I'm very flattered by all the nice comments, now you go do something better! That's what the demoscene is about -- I have a 60fps system working but won't get it released until after some other projects are done -- I want to see someone else do better than me!
PS: thanks for crashing my home network :-D !! - mateo60, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2That is SO impressive. Nice nice work.
If you're not impressed by this, then you don't get it. Really. - harshbarj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I ran it on my own 8088 and it works. I also ran it on an emulated xt and that to worked. Download it and give it a try.
- BugMeNot2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"Terrible video quality... no digg"
Are you talking about the pixelation on the monitor? - timmyallen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1damn right, loved it.
- Mads, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1this is what diggs all about digg+
- tylerni7, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That was incredible...
- Trixter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1jaggededge: Check www.oldskool.org/pc/chunk for a utility that will let you split to 5.25" disk-sized 360K parts. Or, just use a serial cable and FastLynx (google it) for no-floppy transfer. FastLynx can install itself over the serial cable if your destination machine has a hard drive and is running DOS and you have the MODE.COM command on there.
Backpack: Not sure, although there is a free (time-limited until you register) iomega parallel-port ZIP drive driver out there - subhuman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Big deal. My new AMD 4400 can do that with much higher resolution."
.... I hope that is your attempt at sarcasm. - Jibberish, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Very impressive, and how can anybody diss this post? If all is true with how it was said to have been accomplished, then that took some mad skills.
- tastypastry, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Awesome.
- MatthewDoucette, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Very cool, Trixter.
- MatthewDoucette, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1AFAIK, the term "hack" fits.
- plasma, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1A "serious computer person" would know their roots. This demo is old news in the 'scene, but it still gets my respect.
- leobaby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Complaining about this being a waste of someones time on a Digg comment stream, thats just classic.
- rompom7, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1this indeed was a hack.
- johnnylambada, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Ah, those were the days. Everything was so simple -- instead of
You - C# - .Net - CLR - Win32 - Kernel - Hardware
there was just
You - Hardware
Most programmers who graduated college in the last ten years, very smart cookies I might add, wouldn't know a register from a hole in the ground. Sure we're more productive -- back in the day you'd have to start building your web site by building a web server (let's see, I'll have a loop that accepts socket connections, no wait -- I have to build the interrupt service routine that accepts ethernet frames first, hmmmm) -- yes, we're more productive today, but alas, the joy of hardware is gone. - ZekeSulastin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1(Sorry for the double post) Yeah, an ASM demo and video done in text - brings ASCII art to a whole new level of meaning :P
(go look at the link to the actual file and look at the screenshot) - tetfsu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Cool... Now watch out the MPAA is coming after you for ripping the Tron DVD and publishing it on Google Video. ;-)
+Digg - SilentBobSC, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"I wish I would have never wasted those few moments of my life.
Okay, cool for the technology then, but THIS IS 2006. Who gives a piss, no serious computer person would still use that piece of *****."
You.... do realize that this is a technology website and many of us appreciate legacy systems and our "roots"? - CadMasterAdam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sir I Bow to you.
I shall sacrifice 5 fat goats in your honor. - coachace, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The secret force behind this ability is seen at the very end of this video. It can be plainly seen that hooked directly to this PC is a high octane Starbucks cup!!
- rm999, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Ah, this isn't a hack. You don't just call anything dealing with a computer or other electronic device a hack. People just through that word around. Also it would really be 8086 assembler because the 8088 was just a 8086 with a 8-bit data bus."
Actually, that is a hack. The guy used text mode to display video - a genius hack! - r3zonance, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0BTW, that should read "the processor and custom chips..."
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I never saw the NES do that..
Anyway, modern software is largely inefficient because of layers of abstraction. Look at what they had to do with MacOS/System. I read all of those articles about how System 1 was made, but they essentially had to re-create the OS multiple times just to keep it up to date with the latest hardware. Super-tight code doesn't seem to work well on a broader scale.. - spankaccount, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Fun. It runs under dosbox on my powerbook...
- RadiatedAnt, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0nay
- DenDen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Gotta love assembly! DUGG!
- pjvdg, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Makes me wanna get a 8088
- dpk87, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0mmm pixely
- antdude, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0 silentbobsc: scene.org would be a good start.
- yi_shiang, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0that is awsome
- tbn97, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0And I thought the more recent demos on my A500 were impressive! Woah! Hats off!!
- dbzer0, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Impressive
-
Show 51 - 100 of 162 discussions
Check out the new & improved 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is