pouët.net

would be VERY nice to see a 286/VGA-Oldskoll-Demo Combo in the near Future ;-)

I'm in!

@Marq: de facto standard were ET4000/W32 or ET6000 cards with descent vesa bios from hercules etc.

I've been trying to find one, but they seem to be awfully expensive on eBay. Ordered a bunch of different cards again, one of them Cirrus Logic, which was very common at least.

I would like to see a retro combo too (the oldest PC I have is 386)

Didn't know et4000 was so rare. I have one in my 386. I should check my old junk to see if I have a second one.

"but they seem to be awfully expensive on eBay."
go to your local recycling center instead. those carts are anything but rare (however, they dont like to give them away, they are easy to disassemble and contain a good bunch of useable material)

How about a Demo for the unexpanded IBM PC with 16K RAM and MDA graphics? ;-)

VGA-Cards like: ET4000,Diamond Speedstar 24x,Spea Mirage would be very nice for y new Demo. 286+ would be nice, if this is not possible then 386+

I would like a retro dos competition, be it 286/386 or whatever. In worst case that I don't have the hardware I'll try to code something in an emu.

Those where the dos days when my gfx card was not compatible with vesa 2.0 standard. Many demos needed it, so it was easy to get them compatible with TSR called univbe. Even so, Tran made a couple of intros that needs hardware AND vga register compatible cards, like Tseng or S3.
Buy a Paradise PVGA ISA card. Its VGA copy routine is way fasten than Tseng ET400 :D

And that Paradise model uses register compatible Cirrus Logic video chip.

any news here ?

We failed to ressurect the 286/386/486 scene.

After dicking with the P166 BIOS settings, expansion cards, IRQs, DMA channels, MS-DOS installation etc. I remembered again why it's not among the most fun retro platforms. A TFT is useless for a lot of stuff and a video monitor that works with almost all retro hw, likewise.

One does not simply run a dos demo.
Half of the fun is to get it running! :)

bugo, we'll see about that!!

Jumpered irq/dma/port assignment worked flawless, Plug&Play still fails frequently today.

The only ugly thing are all that incompatible (S-)VGA cards used in the 386/486 age before VESA got common standard =P

And maybe also figuring out which EMM/HIMEM config is the right one ;)

Multi-Config DOS boot menus
QEMM386/EMM386
VLB like from SciTech Display Doctor
SET commands
Free conventional memory.

Oh, the old days! :O

seriously? retro demo? i never really did that old things. but i still have a working rig. p90 48mb ram. some ati graphics. all in a 10 Kg steel tower. but no dos or a scsi driver for the cdrom. sux huh? :D

Eventually, I managed to install DOS 7 with a VirtualBox kludge involving a cheap USB-to-IDE converter. GUS Max is a bit of a dog with its multiple IRQs and all, especially because there's a built-in SB clone in the machine.

@Branch: Yes, let's do it! Gonna fire up that OpenWatcom compiler again. And get a new cheapo PC from ebay soon.

i have to following pc set up and running:
486SX 33 Mhz(yes I should upgrade this sucker)
8Mb (I should double the memory?)
SB16
VGA 512kb(I should double the RAM in this too?)

the*


i wouldn't mind having a TMDC type of webcompo, but I'd prefer a real sceneparty with a proper ms-dos demo compo or wild compo with lots of ms-dos demos(3+ prods).

i think targeting 386 or higher would be a lot easier and smarter thing to do than for example a 286, since a 286 doesn't have that much proper developing tools as a +386 has, atleast not yet.


but that's just me.

What tools would you want? There's Turbo C and Turbo Pascal that will generate 16-bit code for 286 and lower. And you can still get Visual C++ 1.52 from MSDN, which can also generate 16-bit MS-DOS code still.
I believe OpenWatcom also has a 16-bit compiler.
And then there's TASM and MASM of course.

I personally think 286 and lower are the most interesting platforms to develop for. There have already been tons of good productions for 386 and especially 486. But 286 and lower has mostly been neglected by the scene, which was still focusing on C64 and Amiga mainly.

I think 286 in the range of 16-25 MHz with Adlib or SB and EGA or VGA would be a very interesting platform for demos, which has not been explored much yet.

Hi guys.

This August will be the 32nd (2^5) birthday of the IBM PC !!!

Celebratory demos are in order! And it's about time to start working on them.

I've been playing around with 8088/CGA and there's two things I've noticed:
-The real systems are fucking expensive nowadays. Collectors have apparently become interested in them. (Your demo will have an audience!)
-If emulators (PCE, DosBox) are accurate, 8088/CGA is SLOW. You really have to think about what your doing, kinda fun even if you're in the right mindset.


I tried to download these but you needed some kind of Borland/M$ customer account to get the "free downloads".


Yes! Just make sure to select the DOS/16bit target when you install it. This has worked well for me. A very easy to set up, legally free, crossdev environment...

The inline ASM syntax is a bit weird though; here's an example of switching to CGA mode 4:


Then you just write bytes to 0xB8000000L for even lines and 0xB8002000L for odd lines. Every byte consists of four 2-bit pixels, 320x200 resolution... Start coding, everyone. ;)


Hey if that's the platform you're interested in, go for it! But a top of the line 286 like that doesn't really seem all that different from lower end 386's to me.

4.77-12mhz, CGA, PC speaker... these are the technologies I want to work with. :D