9 ms·

286 was a very shitty system: it had only a beeper, practically no DMA, no graphics hardware acceleration of any kind (not even hardware scrolling; sprites were

286 was a very shitty system: it had only a beeper, practically no DMA, no graphics hardware acceleration of any kind (not even hardware scrolling; sprites were science fiction). Almost everything in that shitty PC bucket was driven by the processor, and that processor was dog slow.

NL807 4y ago
Then 386 came out, and pretty much killed everything out there in the consumer market.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Killed the workstations too. New Mexico Tech had Sun workstations based on SPARC and in 1993 the talk was of Linux because a 386 machine would beat a Sun workstation easily. Other 32 bit machines like the high-end Amigas and the Atari Falcon 030 could not keep up. Macs were expensive but sold well because of the refined GUI but when Windows 95 came out with an adequate GUI, Apple went into crisis.
PaulHoule 4y ago
Not dog slow compared to the 8-bitters. There was that time I used my 12 MHz 286 to develop software for a Z-80 based CP/M machine and I could emulate the Z-80 faster than a real Z-80. Graphics and sound really did suck compared to machines specialized for that. The best you could do for games at the time were tile systems like the Nintendo NES and the TI-99/4A which were not that different from text mode except the ‘font’ was customizable and the tiles were square. The Atari 400/800 normalized changing your video mode on every scan line but the C-64 had the best system balance in terms of quality output on an NTSC television. The EGA introduced tricks that would let you make the video card copy multiple planes of data at the same time, also you could do some pretty neat tricks with the palette to make layers that blended like sprites. I see Commander Keen as a watershed because it had scrolling as good as Super Mario Brothers and ran on the EGA. Of course they figured out Mode X for the VGA and we got Doom a few years later.
hakfoo 4y ago
It's interesting that there really wasn't much of a "game video" option for early PCs. CGA was a disaster, and the PC platform never really got sprites or smooth scrolling until it wasn't relevant anymore. The PCjr/Tandy graphics system offered a few more colour options, but that's about it. Obviously, you couldn't buy a hundred thousand GTIA or VIC-II chips and solder them into ISA cards, but there were some non-exclusive options-- the graphics chips used on MSX hardware, for example. There were definitely low-end PCs that would have been able to tread into the "home computer" space occupied by the C64 and Atari 800, by price and design (there were a few 8088-class "PC in the keyboard" designs-- some Tandy 1000s, and a Vtech/Laser one come to mind), but they were hardly the ones kids were gonna beg their parents for with those mediocre graphics.

NL807 4y ago

Then 386 came out, and pretty much killed everything out there in the consumer market.

PaulHoule 4y ago
Killed the workstations too. New Mexico Tech had Sun workstations based on SPARC and in 1993 the talk was of Linux because a 386 machine would beat a Sun workstation easily. Other 32 bit machines like the high-end Amigas and the Atari Falcon 030 could not keep up. Macs were expensive but sold well because of the refined GUI but when Windows 95 came out with an adequate GUI, Apple went into crisis.

PaulHoule 4y ago

Not dog slow compared to the 8-bitters. There was that time I used my 12 MHz 286 to develop software for a Z-80 based CP/M machine and I could emulate the Z-80 faster than a real Z-80. Graphics and sound really did suck compared to machines specialized for that. The best you could do for games at the time were tile systems like the Nintendo NES and the TI-99/4A which were not that different from text mode except the ‘font’ was customizable and the tiles were square. The Atari 400/800 normalized changing your video mode on every scan line but the C-64 had the best system balance in terms of quality output on an NTSC television. The EGA introduced tricks that would let you make the video card copy multiple planes of data at the same time, also you could do some pretty neat tricks with the palette to make layers that blended like sprites. I see Commander Keen as a watershed because it had scrolling as good as Super Mario Brothers and ran on the EGA. Of course they figured out Mode X for the VGA and we got Doom a few years later.

hakfoo 4y ago

It's interesting that there really wasn't much of a "game video" option for early PCs. CGA was a disaster, and the PC platform never really got sprites or smooth scrolling until it wasn't relevant anymore. The PCjr/Tandy graphics system offered a few more colour options, but that's about it. Obviously, you couldn't buy a hundred thousand GTIA or VIC-II chips and solder them into ISA cards, but there were some non-exclusive options-- the graphics chips used on MSX hardware, for example. There were definitely low-end PCs that would have been able to tread into the "home computer" space occupied by the C64 and Atari 800, by price and design (there were a few 8088-class "PC in the keyboard" designs-- some Tandy 1000s, and a Vtech/Laser one come to mind), but they were hardly the ones kids were gonna beg their parents for with those mediocre graphics.