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

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.

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 :)

[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 :)

[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 :)

[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 :)

[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.

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.

Was Bill Gates right?

[geekwithsoul]

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

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.