pouët.net

Not bad, drzeissler! Lets make XT/CGA amaizing prods?

I was trying to make qbasic demo on 286 just for the challenge of it. Most effects are based on palette cycling except the plasma.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzcYXzvQqXo

Anyway, I installed a C compiler with inline assembler for more serious stuff.

Optimus: Cool. Nice plasma and raycasted ball table effect.

Optimus: Very nice! Reminded me that in 2013, right before i started again with x86 asm, i played a bit with qbasic myself : video1 video2 video3

@Hellmood: Those are nice

@Optimus: really cool ! Hard to believe it's qbasic on 286 - thumb up ! As I said - a i286 is cool target ;-) .. I'll keep an eye on you, really hard competitor ;-) ..

Would be nice if you release the basic-code so that we could learn how it's done.
From my gwbasic experience 1990 on my schneider euro-pc (nec v20/9,54Mhz) with cga
graphics I am lightyears away from doing so cool things I have watched above.
My graphics were way slower and flickering. Thx! Doc

Yeah, if you try to write to the screen (even with poke and only ints) something like a simple xor pattern you don't get more than 2-3fps. That's with compiled qb45 btw. Most of the effects are based really on color cycling, the stars, sphere map. I also attach the modex plasma with unroll code as fast as I could (it can be faster in C or asm with 16bit regs and some more ideas). Interesting thing, I was also testing TurboC and QuickC, they same to not be faster than qb45. Anyway, I am using now QuickC as a framework to inline assembly and do the inits and boring stuff in C. Maybe I'll try to build some stuff in OpenWatcom with target 286 but I don't know if I can compile directly on 286.

https://bitbucket.org/Optimus6128/qbdemo1

Another tech is keeping a points list, deleting the oldest, drawing the newest. This way, drawing fractals can be fast and smooth on slow systems (see noise julia video above, other two are colorcycling) Sizecoded example : leaf 64b

hoho, since original vintage low end PCs are rare, this is a nice idea for testing on "real hardware" .. maybe, a little bit too fast ..

https://opencores.org/project,next186_soc_pc

Would love to own an i286/i386/i486 single board computer like raspi ...

@TheMechanist that project looks amazing, would be great to have something like that for testing..

okay, a new release http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=71257, again tried to target i286, now with adlib sound .. unfortunately video caputure with ffsplit on my old Celeron G540 wasn't that accurate .. quite okay in PCem, better with DOSBox 3000 cycles ..

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=72657 okay... so only really got a chance to run this on a p100 at the compo.... if anyone has anything slower, would love to know if it runs well? (if at all.. on a 486 at least)

Cool, I missed a new DOS demo was released. I can give it a try maybe. I have a fast 486DX and then a 386DX (but doubt it will run fast if at all here).

you could try PCem, good support for different systems from 8086 up to pentium systems ...

Yeah few issues compiling PCem for OSX at the moment. Will have to dig up a Windows box. Do have more hardware in boxes, should get around to putting it all together!

On 386dx, after music setup, freeze.
On 486dx, after music setup, throws back to DOS with message "Goodbye!"

Optimus, thanks for that... will look at spinning up PCem and seeing if the same thing happens, looks like a potential sound driver issue.

Still trying to reanimate the old school pc scene with another prod for i286, and still looking for gfx artists and adlib musicians, to create some bigger releases ..

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=73994

Great intro! Love the visual style & the way it builds up to it rather than throwing everything on-screen at once. BTW thx for greeting my group!


I can do both these things, but I have a LOT on my plate at the moment. Still, hit me up. :)

unfortunately I don't have one of the old school rigs that I try to target, so accurate emulation is essential .. as earlier mentioned here, PCem quite accurately emulates these machines .. when optimizing the settings for the virtual machine it's quite useful to have comparable benchmarks from real machines (Topbench is quite nice, but I discovered that it often doesn't match comparable machines, so it's one benchmark among others)

I found these pages with values from Landmark, Checkit and sysinfo

http://mastodonpc.tripod.com/bench/checkit.html

Would be nice if some of you, who own vintage rigs in real would add here some benchmarks .. or other sites if known ..

A mid standard 286 setting for PCem I tested with 286/10, Slow 16bit ISA gfx and wait states 1 gave me quite comparable results to the real machines, but especially when it comes to graphics some more benches would be nice ...

The following settings for PCem seem to give realistic results (compared the the previously mentioned list of real benchmarks):

* Slow 286 *
AMI 286 clone, CPU 286/10, Waitstates 1
Gfx: OAK OTI-067, Slow 16 Bit ISA

Benchmark results:
Sysinfo CPU Speed: 6,2
Landmark 6.0: 11 Mhz AT, 1031 chrs/ms
Superscape 3DBench 1.0: 3 FPS
Checkit 3.0: 1939 Dhrystones, 37,2K Whetstones, 4454 chrs/s BIOS, 24353 chrs/s directly

* Standard 286 *
AMI 286 clone, CPU 286/16, Waitstates 1
ATI-28800, Fast 16 Bit ISA
Sysinfo CPU Speed: 9,9
Landmark 6.0: 18 Mhz, 1844 chr/ms
Superscape 3DBench 1.0: 5 FPS
Checkit 3.0: 3084 Dhrystones, 58,4K Whetstones, 7325 chrs/s BIOS, 38452 chrs/s directly

... these are pretty vanilla results, good 286/16 system perform with more than 4000 Dhrystones ..

Hi folks,

would be nice if someone could benchmark a real Schneider Euro PC (@Doc, I guess you got one?), the machine like it was sold -the the masses back in time - 512 kB RAM, internal CGA .. I'm playing a little bit around with that machine (PCem), but I'm not sure if it performs like the real hardware (tested with Landmark 6) ..

So long

TheMechanist

I've got an EuroPC, so could probably run some benchmarks if needed. It's currently fitted with a V20 CPU, but I can of course swap it for the original 8088 :)