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: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 :-)

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.