Amazing demo gets 1000 colors out of 4-color CGA PC card from 1981

When I got sick of mine just sitting around, I packed it back in its original box, with its original DOS and BASIC manuals (and some more I picked up along the way) and brought it to a recycling event. I had this hope that someone would recognize it for what it was and pluck it out of the tear-down pile.

Don’t tell me otherwise.

sob

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Didn’t the Amiga have a lot of custom silicon? This demo does everything the hard way,on generic hardware.
Presumably, some pretty powerful computers were used to precalculate everything.

I think that’s a burned-in tradition from the good ol’ ASCII-art BBS days. Possibly carried over from graffiti art? Seems to be pretty much inescapable for anything in a certain segment of “old-school” computer artistry.

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One might have had a chance to decipher it, if it wasn’t bouncing up and down.

As for the accomplishment, it’s not bad. But remember that the Amiga, which would be out in just a few more years, could display 32 colors, but had a built-in “hack” called HAM (hold-and-modify) that could allow it to display, for the times, stunning images in thousands of colors.

My first computer had 16-color CGA… on a green-phosphor monitor. This sort of hack would have been completely wasted on it.

Then again, it was also using hardware-based emulation to act like an 808x. Would be interesting to see if it was able to make anything of this demo…

The Apple IIGS had lots of silly graphics modes.

3200 colors per image

but most publishers just seemed to use an EGA style palette,

Most Impressive, No?

Compared to the old Z-100 pretending to be an IBM PC, with “pretend” CGA on a monochrome monitor…

Actually, I’m not sure which was more impressive, now that I think about it. :smiley: But, yes, in capability, definitely.

Here’s that same screen for Amiga.

It’s not just the 32 colors versus 16. It’s that the iigs graphics team didn’t even try.

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I distinctly remember a ][gs demo from back in the day that used scanline rendering to increase the visible colors for displaying static images by swapping out the color palette as the scanline traversed the image. That was contemporary with the ][gs itself. (Not saying these guys aren’t doing something cool, just saying scanline rendering is old as the hills.)

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You say “but” as that shadows their achievement somehow. You don’t even need to go to the Amiga; it points out right in the intro that the C64 (released only a year after the IBM 5150, and vastly cheaper) could outperform the 5150 in almost every way. The point is that they accomplished something that should have been impossible on that hardware.

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I don’t know anything about the IIGS, but I would guess that those high-color, high-resolution, full-screen images required an enormous amount of memory to store and clock cycles to display, and were not practical for regular in-game use.

It’s also possible that most designers weren’t really hacking on the IIGS and just feel back on slightly-improved versions of Apple II techniques. I dunno. Could be a combination of both.

Transcription of some of the frames (for those with bad eyes)
0:37 8088 MPH
0:43 Welcome to 4.77 MHz. Welcome to CGA. What’s a bitplane?
1:19 And now I see with eyes serene, the very heart of the machine
1:31 “intel inside”
1:50. No Copper. No VIC-II. What are we supposed to do?
2:00 CGA has ugly colors
2:05 With hacks, 16 at best.
2:10 Until now!
2:14 1K Colors on an '81 IBM CGA
2:24 Dots are my favours… Except when they’re saviors.
2:48 Sprites? Where we’re going, we don’t need sprites.
3:29 You may want to close your eyes for this.
4:24 Race the beam. On your mark. Get set, go!.
5:11 If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 8088 miles per hour, you’re going to see some serious !?
6:14 And now we must bid you farewell. No Paula… No SID… No Problem.

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Awesome. Or, should I say…

[SIZE=+2] [COLOR=green] || [COLOR=red] [&#931] [/COLOR] !!

You need to be from the 70’s to read them.

oh … wow… that’s a blast from the past. My uncle had that game and loved to play it. It came on a 1.44" disk that did not have a DOS filesystem, so was not able to be viewed under dos or windows.

Of course, I remember the game, but forgot it’s exact name — what was it? is it available online anywehre?

The game’s a classic.

Sid Meier’s Pirates

I’m sure watching this demo was fun for you rich guys with the fancy color monitors, but for me, it just wasn’t that impressive in amber :cry:

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I think the Apple version is the DOS version running in DOSBox.

As a kid who was utterly blown away by the Second Reality demo the first time I say it (94 or so), I absolutely love this. I read the whole breakdown, even though at least half of it was over my head. I have nothing but respect for these guys who work literal magic (to me) on incredibly limited hardware.

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The comments are a little strange…

On Nintendo, this was a fantastic game. However, the port to PC has left it with nearly unusable controls, especially when dueling other ship captains. If you enjoyed dueling on the Nintendo version, you will be completely let down when you are left with the unresponsive numpad controls for this version.

Guys. It’s not a nintendo game. It’s not a sega game. It began as a C64 game, and was ported from there. If Sega or Nintendo introduced new gameplay, that doesn’t mean that the DOS version is less than definitive.

The Sega version looks very different.