1:04 I noticed above the EGA port on the ATI card that you're holding, there appears to be an unpopulated VGA header (three rows of five pins locations.) I wonder if this means that this card could function as a VGA card if a VGA connector were be added there? I understand that there was backwards compatibility with EGA in many VGA cards, so could this have just been ATI just cutting costs in offering both EGA and VGA cards?

I enjoyed playing with fire in C++ with some inline assembly in the past. The easiest of course was 256 colors, with a custom palette. Though it was fun to create one in Text Mode as TSR that could run in the background behind the dos interface using the red, yellow and white colors and the blank dithering characters. Your CGA fire would almost port to text mode, since 16 lines is more then half the resolution. Cheers!

One common mistake about PCI cards: the voltage selection changes the signal voltage, not the power supply voltage. The slot provides BOTH 5V and 3.3V no matter what variant.

30:29 I see 2 dead points on your camera ccd ;)

Any PS/2 with a model number less than 50 should have standard ISA slots MCGA has 64kb video ram, where as VGA has at least 256kb, vga uses 4 - 64kb pages so that could quite possibly be one reason MCGA is slower for scrolling

It has been nearly two years! PLS, do a video ;)

you should have removed the coast module and seen what kind of impact it would have had - the paradox thing sometimes can be, that the benchmarks run better without the module installed. but as others pointed out, opti is not that fast of a chipset. thank you for the video, i hope you dont mind my late response!

The trilinear filtering w. mipmapping is clearly the game changer

That made me laugh about you using low-res mode moving at blazing speed only to want to go straight back to hi-res, much like coders from the 80s.😄 Often with such early 3D games being quite sluggish I kind of wish they had more screen resolution options Egs. 1X, 2:1X, 2X, and 1:2X, 1:3X with a scanline offset flicker faux resolution effect. Other than that perhaps the ability to grow or shrink the window like later games like Wolf3D and Doom allowed Ie. no fixed window size. Interesting to see a 3D flying game use the slow draw-in approach even though golf and turn based strategy tends to work better with that kind of rendering system. Probably work better with a car or person on the ground as they can stop and wait for the land to fill in. As you say the struggle is trying to fit everything into limited memory and CPU cycles Eg. no sound. Would suggest a prerendered 2D background like AITD/RE but where would such a bitmap fit heh. The relatively simple vertical gradient background effect does a decent job of rendering an infinite floor or ceiling plane. Also a nice grid pattern tiled background always looks nice.🙂

If there was ever anything I'd want to see from voodoo devs, it would be a wrapper for bump mapping, because voodoo could do it, but it wasn't a standard. So you ended up with a voodoo 5 playing Doom 3 without bump mapping when even a voodoo 2 could run the donut demo. Also, there was that blade of darkness game that ran real time shadows on anything. Doom 3 never required dx8. John Carmack supported GeForce 2. I think to truly get closure on 3dfx, someone needs to get doom 3 running on par with GeForce 2. Until then, voodoo is left incomplete. It's a real disappointment all voodoo development dropped at windows XP 64. We need signed drivers, and somebody needs to compile MesaFX, because there's an update sitting there uncompiled. The existing code can bypass the 256 texture limit and run quake 3 in high detail on a voodoo 2, but not on Windows 10, and we never got bump mapping. Also, Aureal got a worse deal, full driver support stopped at 9x.

Crap compared to Commodore 64 version

3dfx uses the same technology like the sega dreamcast. zbuffer is normaly not needed. its rendering with a span-buffer like quake-engine.

can you share the CGA version ? I do not find it in the web. Only the EGA-VGA but my retrocomputer has a CGA . thanks

Great! there's an exe file to load it in an emulator? i love enjoy these demos! but i don't have the real hardware yet... thanks!

Had one of these, my first pc compatible. Both floppys & a 30 meg card drive.

Zip disks are less reliable than floppy disks.

All these raster based operations... in the end your image is limited to horizontal bands sort of. Nothing beats a fast blitter bitmap system provided you have enough video RAM 😅.

Oddly if you want to see the best CGA graphics, take a look at the Area 5150 demo. It runs 16 colors on CGA, and maybe even more.

Thanks, I have discovered that my Commodore PC-1 has Paradise PVC2 chip as well. And it indeed supports Plantronics mode. PX3 and Sierra PCPLUS driver work! Yay.

Beautiful memories.... CP/M was very fast, stable and efficient. In fact I preferred it to MS-DOS for many years. I fondly remember how it with a Z-80 processor easily outperformed far more recent MS-DOS PC-XT's and even 8086 machines.

I never used CGA or EGA. My first PC in 1990 had a Trident 1MB 16 bit VGA card in it and I used a Philips 14" CRT.

How did you install GEM in 4 colors for CGA? Is it 640x200x?

If I had a time machine, I'd be sorely tempted to take a floppy with this program back to 1981, to the IBM guys who designed the 5150, and see the looks on their faces when they run it.

I'm 24, my first gaming experiences was on the PS2, I have no nostagia for these games, so i don't know why, but I love the look and feel of late 80's/early 90's PC games, especially 3D games, and hope to be able to replicate these graphics in my games, as I learn to make it.

The NEC V-chips have an internal 80186 core. Hence the increased speed and better RAM support. V20 ~ i80188 and V30 ~ i80186

Awesome video. Thx for Sharing 😊

What can these things do? Exactly nothing. Wasted material, money and time.

Cool i remember my friends dad having one of these with a 20 mb hard disk. It ran Monkey island... slowly.

EGA and the 286... the red headed stepchildren of x86 computing.

>Shows something that runs at 60 FPS >Video is only 30 FPS

Those were the RTX5090s of their epoch

Minute 6:40: How can I set the size of a character in CGA?

Every now and then I marvel at how things happen in this field. It’s certain that, during the course of an innovative project, we often abandon ideas halfway for one reason or another (irrelevance, performance, usability issues, etc.). But every so often, we stumble upon hidden gems in the hardware that allow for extraordinary things. I always thought CGA was the absolute worst. A card with slow graphics, garish colors, and low resolution. Then I come across your channel, and my jaw drops a few meters. Your studies, the work you did on Area 5150, and others available on the Internet make me think about how the history of the PC could have been different if this knowledge had been available from the start. There simply wouldn’t have been room for Macintoshes, Amigas, STs, and other machines that seemed so superior to the PC. Steve Jobs once gave an interview comparing the Macintosh to a CGA card, saying the latter had more chips than the entire Macintosh and still didn’t do much that was useful. I can only imagine his frustration if he had seen your demos

Rosalind Rapid

1:04 that piece of information is wrong. Hitachi made the HD46505 first and then licensed it to Motorola. Motorola then produced it as the MC6845. That's why the Hitachi chip didn't use motorola numbers like their other direct clone chips.

This is going to be awesome! I put together a 486 with VLB VGA and controller card recently. I'm curious to see your results and then I should try it with mine.

Gonzalez Paul Allen Betty Williams Steven

I wonder if you could send files with RS-232 to a newer machine for backup.

Amazing! Excellent breakdown and report.

How polygons can the atari st run

I wish to had such cards when using 3D programs... :) This would completely blow out of the water to some VGA standards.

hp still uses those funny screws today

12:35: obviously this is not correct Me: shhhhh!!!!!

Beware that this is told very much from the PC standard, which is in a way lame they just changed a few things for the heck of it (Big Blue arrogance?), as Shugart was perfectly fine, and maybe even better, as it did not need weird twisting cables and allowed 4 drives instead of 2. Shugart was not only for 8 inch floppies, it worked on 3,5 and 5,25 every bit as well. My 1981 home computer runs 4 3,5 floppy drives of Shugart. Most home computers used shugart (MSX, CPC, Tandy, ZX, Beeb) with the 2 weird ones, off course, being Apple and Commodore.

how many polygons can the ibm xt 1560 run

Trumps FURRY SATCHEL

Too bad for the documentation. It’s amazing to find some compatibility between the IBM standard and some that are not implemented or don’t work quite exactly as described. Great job 😮

Do you remember the code for this 6:13 or any of the 3D things you made

I've seen this video, I've only heard of XGA and still this was way forward at the time. Only MS could shift to SVGA to fleed away from the PC creator stuff...

Looks great, but the effort required proves that IBM PC was not a viable platform for entertainment. Also, how much was CGA in 1981?