First IBM PC Plays Full Motion Sound and Video

wally writes "Something for the older geeks; it 'started as a bit of a joke around the office, about doing stupid things with old technology' he said. 'Stupid things like, "Well, I can calculate fractals on an abacus!" or "Well, I can surf the web on my Game Boy!". Then one person said, "Oh yeah? Well, I can display video on my XT!". And later that day I kept thinking about it and came up with a way to do it.' And he really did. With video proof and a full explanation with all the needed code, full motion video on an original 8088 IBM."

Comments

Poor Show

[millennial]

Please... if the only link in the story is broken, don't post the story.

Re:Poor Show

[TripMaster Monkey]

Here's a working link, courtesy of Digg. ^_^

Re:Poor Show

[fishybell]

Well, thanks to google, I found a link to the story.

Re:Poor Show

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a great many people find me trying.

Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[Amiga Lover]

The Amiga did this at the same time and better :). Amiga 500, 68000 at 8MHz could do smooth fullscreen full colour video with stereo 4 channel sound booted from floppy with 1MB RAM AND multitask like Windows and MacOS didn't know how to do until 1999 or later.

Sometimes the world forgets the technology we had yesteryear.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[thaerin]

Sometimes the world forgets the technology we had yesteryear.

I'm not sure it's so much forgetting as it is many folks never even knowing that it existed. I can remember one of the local Babbage's used to have one on display showing off The Killing Game Show. It was jaw-dropping gorgeous compared to anything you could find on the PC at the time. Unfortunately, Amiga was kind of a niche product that never had anywhere near the market share that your standard, run of the mill, IBM XT had.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[ZoneGray]

Well then, if the Amiga was so capable, it wouldn't have been very impressive to run video on it, would it?

If somebody wants to do something impressive on an Amiga, try setting one up to surf the web.

(and this being /., I imagine somebody will reply to me with a link....)

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[iainl]

I was running a web browser on my A1200 in '96, if that helps.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[The Clockwork Troll]

The Amiga did this at the same time and better :).

Nobody doubts the Amiga could do this better. The PC XT was introduced in 1983, based largely on a 1981 product. The first Amiga was introduced in 1985 and had purpose-built chipsets for multimedia.

Given the pace of graphics innovation in the 80's, it is unexpected (to say the least) that anything remotely resembling what the Amiga was capable of, could have been done on a 4.77MHz 8088 with CGA graphics.

That's the point :-)

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[91degrees]

Don't know why it didn't catch on everywhere. There were over a million installed in the UK, and by far the most popular gaming platform when I was at school.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[monopole]

Back in the day early 90's, one of my techs at Dove Electronics (Greg if you are out there say hi!) had an Amiga running the AmigaOS with windows running the MacOS of the time, netBSD, and Windows 3.1 simultaneously. Truly astounding.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[ZoneGray]

I'll be more impressed when somebody replies using an Amiga. ;)

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[Amiga Lover]

Actually the A500 competed with the first Macintosh from 1984, and the Amiga 1000 was released just before it in 1982 or 1983. The Amiga, after all, is the first consumer computer to have a GUI, something it beat the Macintosh by well over a year at. I remember scoffing at the first mac when it was released because my Amiga already did all that, and in color.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[aetherspoon]

Probably because they were very, very expensive to a lot of computer people compared to standard PCs in the US.
It caught on great in Europe by comparison, where PC prices were much higher.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[shawnce]

No the A1000 ("Commodore Amiga 1000") was release in summer of 1985 and the Macintosh 128K was released in January of 1984. The Apple Lisa which has aspect of the interface that was later used in the Mac was released in January of 1983 (but had existed in various circles near / external to Apple since around 1980... my Dad had early release access to a Lisa in mid 1982 IIRC).

So I think your memory is faulty on the dates.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[Black Cardinal]

This guy actually did this on a 5150, which is the original IBM PC from 1981. His system does have a hard disk, which makes it (almost) equivalent to the XT from 1983, so maybe that is a more fair date to use. One you add a hard disk, about the only difference is the number of expansion slots. The PC had 5 while the XT had 8.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[JackDW]

multitask like Windows and MacOS didn't know how to do until 1999 or later

Minor point - didn't the Amiga use co-operative multitasking without protected memory? By Windows 95, Microsoft had started using pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection, although it still didn't work very well!

Still, I agree with the spirit of your post. Amiga deserved a lot better than they got. It's rather sad.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[tverbeek]

An Amiga surfing the Web isn't so hard. In fact, you'd have a choice of browsers: AWeb Voyager, iBrowse, and perhaps even someday Amizilla.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[Doctor Memory]

ISTR (I have never played with an Amiga) that it was fully preemptive, but communication with the OS was through shared memory, so no memory protection. That's also one of the things that made it so fast, you didn't have to copy a lot of stuff between system and user space. It was all just one big, happy segment and everyone was supposed to play nice.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[Jurrasic]

nope. :) full threaded pre-emptive multi-tasking on AmigaDOS 1.0 fitting into 256k of RAM and bootable on a single 170k floppy. :) This was the god-machine of the 80s.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[ZoneGray]

You've renewed my faith in the /. community.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[phoenix.hornet]

"The Amiga, after all, is the first consumer computer to have a GUI, something it beat the Macintosh by well over a year at. I remember scoffing at the first mac when it was released because my Amiga already did all that, and in color."

Bwahaha! You, sir, are delusional. Learn the history of your beloved computer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#History

And I suppose you were playing Doom on your A500 in 1992 as well?

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[hob42]

You must be talking about a different Amiga than I'm familiar with.

The A500/A1200 models were so far cheaper than PCs that they were considered toys, or at best, a game console. They were stocked in our Software Etc store, right beside the NES and Sega. And the big-box Amigas were competitive until the mid-90's, when Commodore was finally going downhill.

I priced an A1200 system with an HD and monitor for $500 for a friend in '96, at least half the price of a PC that would run comparable software and games.

Now, I could see that argument being used about Apple. The Mac Plus debuted at $2600 in 1986, the SE/30 for $5000(!) in 1989. And it was still B&W. Ouch.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[Peredur]

Link:

http://www.ibrowse-dev.net/

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[Black Cardinal]

You are correct on the RAM. There were two options: smaller chips that meant a maximum of 64K on the motherboard, or the larger chips which took you up to 256K. 640K was only reachable by using an expansion card. I had forgotten that the XT's motherboard could go all the way to 640K without using an expansion card.

As for the 360K floppies, by the time my dad bought our 5150 PC in late summer 1983, they were available. I think once they were introduced they were the new default or at least an option on the original PC.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[complete loony]

Though I don't think he ever did it, a friend of mine figured he could push full motion video to a c64 from a pc link cable and software he made. We estimated the maximum theoretical transfer rate was about 36KB/s.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[drsmithy]

Minor point - didn't the Amiga use co-operative multitasking without protected memory?

Half right. AmigaOS was pre-emptively multitasking, but did lack protected memory.

GP is incorrect, however. Microsoft's first foray into pre-emptive multitasking was OS/2 (or Xenix, or the unreleased multitasking version of DOS, if you want to get picky). This was over a decade before 1999.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[Eivind]

Yeah, I know. There was even porn for it. Full-screen, 30fps porn.

Re:Amigas did this at the same time and better :)

[Malor]

The 500 didn't come out until '87, just a shade under two years after the A1000. It was a superb machine, lightyears past anything else on the market, but both the A1000 and the A500 came well after the first Macs.

Since I can't be proven wrong, I'll probably continue to assert for the remainder of my life that, had Apple's marketing and research muscle been behind the Amiga's hardware, the PC would have died by the early to mid 90s. Fortunately for Microsoft, Commodore's management was dumber 'n a box of rocks, and pissed away a machine that was, absolutely literally, eight to ten years ahead of everyone else.

Cue the jokes

[GigsVT]

100 people commenting "They must have run the web server on the 8088 too".

Coral doesn't have it but google does.

Google has it.

[gid]

Found this link on Digg the other day.

Video on Google

[HockeyPuck]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-588535134 2753379583

Coral cache

[TeknoHog]

http://www.oldskool.org.nyud.net:8090/pc/8088_Corr uption

Re:Ugh, Flash video

[b1t r0t]

With Google Video, the video isn't actually in the flash itself, so what I do is find the .flv URL in the source of the Google Video page, then download the .flv file and play it on VLC. It still generally looks like crap, but it's playable crap.

Also, for those running OS X, a .swf with embedded video may likely be playable in Quicktime Player.

Wow

[WWWWolf]

That's pretty damn impressive!

Almost as cool as Second Reality running on Commodore 64. Almost.

Had only been cooler if they had done this on an unexpanded machine, that is, the music on the beeper instead of resorting to posh high-tech like SoundBlasters. And MS-DOS 6.22? Ridiculously luxurious updates =)

Re:Wow

[GigsVT]

Did DOS really change anything major from 3.3 to 6.22?

As far as I can tell they basically work the same, just came with different (shitty) utilities.

Re:Wow

[WWWWolf]

Hurm... I don't think there were major changes to the underlying OS, but there may have been minor tweaks. Some commands got some very handy parameters in 4.0 if I remember correctly, but it's been so long time since I went from 3.3 to 6.0 that I can't remember for sure =) 5.x and 6.x were mostly about the additional gunk though, that's right.

Re:Wow

[Myself]

3.3 was great for floppy-based systems. They added support for hard drive partitions over 32 meg, in 4.0 I believe. 4.01 was largely forgotten, and 5.x added good memory tools, himem and emm386. The 6.x series was mostly about doublespace/drivespace, which was Microsoft's take on Stacker.

Somewhere in there, I think with 5.0, the interactive Qbasic editor, also known as Help, also known as Edit, came on the scene. It brought with it mouse-awareness, and funny things like clickable links in the helpfile.

Anyway, as far as video goes, I recall seeing a parallel-port frame grabber that worked fine under DOS on a 286. Actually you didn't want to use it on a multitasking OS because of interrupt latency! Various versions exist, with the Dirt-Cheap Frame Grabber being the simplest.

Re:Wow

[pla]

Did DOS really change anything major from 3.3 to 6.22?

DOS 3.3 couldn't deal with HDDs bigger than 32MB (they actually added larger cluster support in DOS 4, but we all know how buggy that turned out).

And yes, that reason alone eventually forced me to upgrade to such a nasty, bloated, memory-hungry Microsoft piece-of-crap as DOS 6.22.

Ah, the good ol' days.

Re:Wow

[tverbeek]

Here's a summary of major PC/MS-DOS revs and the key features they added:

DOS 1: IBM PC compatiblity :)
DOS 2: Hard drives, directories, loadable drivers
DOS 3: Networking
DOS 4: Hard drives >32MB
DOS 5: 386 memory management
DOS 6: Drive compression

Re:Wow

[emidln]

I could be wrong but I think I remember having edit on DOS 3.3. I still have the manual to my grandpa's old NEC pc with DOS 3.3 somewhere...

Re:Wow

[Destoo]

I'm looking for a video capture of the "second reality" demo.
I have it somewhere, but I'm too newb (old?) to even want to try to run it full-speed and capture the video. I wouldn't know where to start.

When I say "you know, the future crew logo with the hex nuts, and the space ape, and the spinning stuff", people just give me blank stares until I show them. But somehow when I run it on my machine it hangs halfway.

Re:Wow

[WWWWolf]

I'm looking for a video capture of the "second reality" demo.

Wikipedia has/had an ed2k link to a video of the demo. Though if I remember correctly, it cuts off just before the end credits. There might be some other .avis here. I hear someone had made a DVD of greatest PC demos too.

The demo regrettably doesn't yet run on DOSbox, at least 0.63 (at least here it works just fine otherwise but it hangs mid-through, I've heard it's actually the demo's fault...)

Re:Wow

[Trixter]

Not to pimp my own product too heavily, but you can get a perfect version of this, with commentary from Future Crew themselves, on Mindcandy Volume 1. See www.mindcandydvd.com for details.

Re:Wow

[cmtuan]

Don't remember having edit on DOS 3.3, I do remember edlin however... I believe the GP poster is talking about edit that's based on qbasic's editor.

Having programmed 8088 on an IBM PC in CGA

[DPJohnny Canuck]

Heck, I made a colour organ in MASM that had decent animation in a little known CGA mode between 80x25 and 320x200.

I think he could've done better than 80x25 graphics mode. . . .

Finally, Flight Simulator 2.0 ran on the 5150, and it was sweet..

Re:Having programmed 8088 on an IBM PC in CGA

[engagebot]

Wow, i'll be happy if i never even see the word 'MASM' again. I can't stand assembly...

They made the assembly class at my university extremely difficult on purpose, making that class one of the several meant to 'weed out' students that weren't serious. Of course it didn't matter that a class like this won't actually leave you with any useful knowledge... They can MOV AX, KISS MY @$$.

Well the HARD way

[SmallFurryCreature]

Is simple enough. This is a google vid. So it should be on google right? enter the url video.google.com enter the search "8088 corruption" click on the image and on the right choose to save. Tada. Instant format of your choice. Of course only evil formats belonging to nasty MS and Apple but should be enough for most people.

As for getting the vid out of flash, it is easy enough but if you can't even manage the above I think it is beyond you.

Oh and to avoid that horrible off topic nazi mod, nice vid. Reminds me of playing some ancient games that tried to do full motion when the hardware still wasn't up to it. Remember when FMV was actually thought to be the beginning of a new genre in gaming. Ah, those were the days.

Re:Well the HARD way

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I recall a female secretary loading a Ginger Lynn pr0n video on my 286, then asking me to start my computer to "get something" for her, then laughing when it started playing automatically. It was grainy as hell, but was, for lack of a better term, full motion video. God only knows what viruses would have been buried in that .exe file nowadays.

It occurs to me that, had this happened a few years later, I could have sued for 6 or 7 figures for permanent psychological damage and sexual harassment. She smoked at work at her desk, too. Son of a bitch was America a wild, crazy, lawless place back then before people figured out how to proscribe how other people should behave in intimate detail.

Re:Well the HARD way

[starakurva]

What a woman!!!!

Hey, I remember having about 10 or 20 seconds of a He-man cartoon in just about the same vid quality of that XT demo, but on a Commodore 64 in about 1987 as well...

Putting it in perspective

[SigILL]

Really impressive. Some numbers to put all this into perspective.

If you just want to stream some pre-rendered data to your text-mode screen buffer at full-motion (25+ fps) speeds, you only need 4000 * 25 = 100 kbyte/sec. Even for a 4,77 MHz (about 1 MIPS?) 8088 that's not a lot. And if the CPU can't pull it there's always the DMA controller.

However, the full demo is about 2 minutes long. If no compression was involved the video data file should be about 12 megabytes. That's larger than the mentioned disk-space requirements, so there's probably some simple motion compression involved.

Re:Putting it in perspective

[Trixter]

You can't use DMA to transfer mem-to-mem if you are using a Sound Blaster. DMA has two usuable channels on 8088, 0 and 1. DMA 0 is used for RAM refresh, so that leaves 1 -- and Sound Blaster Pro can only use DMA 1. So no, I didn't have the option of using DMA for the memory updates.

On a mixed benchmark of general instructions, integer math, register-to-memory, memory-to-memory, etc. operations, a 4.77MHz 8088 is generally 0.2 MIPs, not 1 MIPS.

To the other posters: Yes, you can do digitized sound via the PC Speaker, but it almost completely ties up the machine leaving no free cycles for video playback. You need at least 30fps for decent motion (our brain is generally more sensitive to frequency than amplitude when it comes to motion) so that was the standard I reverse-engineered from.

The server

[mr.newt]

was apparently hosted on the XT as well.

On an HP100LX...

[marciot]

Gonna try it as soon as I get home! :)

Re:/.ed ALREADY?!

[Guspaz]

No, you don't need to forward port 8090.

Making a connection to Coral is an OUTGOING connection. You only need to forward ports for INCOMMING connections.

So, the people who "don't know how to configure their routers" can still uses it, which means that it ISN'T generally useless.

Now, firewalls that restrict outgoing traffic, that's another story. But there are ways around this. HTTP proxies through Hamachi or SSH tunnels for example. Or if the only connection to the outside world that your workplace gives you is their own transparent HTTP proxy, TCP over HTTP. That's where TCP packets are encapsulated and sent as HTTP requests. The overhead isn't as bad as it sounds since the endpoints simply create neverending HTTP GET and PUT (or GET and POST) requests. Proxies have to let these through due to all the bad web servers that don't report Content-Length.

Got a 8088 machine? Run the demo! & Pout.net..

[antdude]

You can download (from various mirrors), read comments, read information, vote (need an account), comment (need an account), etc. from Pout.net.

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[account_deleted]

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[account_deleted]

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I remember...

[NeuroManson]

Being awed by a PC, either AT&T or Texas Instruments, it was a long time back, around 1982. Anyway, it had a cool realtime animated face with a fully digitized voice introducing the system. It had a color display with (for me) was new, since at the time the best I could find was monochrome systems.

It was in computer stores about the same time as the Apple Lisa, before we had exclusive Apple VS. PC departments.

And of course, there were videogames that had those features as early as 1978.

Was Bill Gates right?

[geekwithsoul]

Maybe 640K and a 10MB hard drive is enough for everyone :)

Re:What to do about it.

[TheRealDamion]

The DDoS from people who hate Slashdot only lasts a day or two

Huh? The "slashdot effect" is caused by people who like slashdot and read the articles then go to the links. /. is so popular that this takes down small sites. It doesn't have an impact on larger sites like bbc.co.uk as they have a beefy setup.

Re:We forget how fast those old computers realy we

[joeljkp]

There's nothing preventing you from still using your old 80s computers. There must be some reason you want the new capabilities.

Re:DOS 3.31

[DarkDust]

There exists DOS 3.31 which has all the smallness of DOS 3.3 with the benefit of FAT32 support. I used it for a while, along with QEMM for memory management.

I'm pretty sure you're mixing something up :-) FAT32 got introduced in Win95B. You probably mean FAT16 with large cluster support.

Re:What to do about it.

[xouumalperxe]

It's a joke. laugh.