8088 Domination by Trixter/Hornet

If you’re into retro-demoscening, you have probably already seen this demo, but just to be safe, I’ll just do a quick blog on it anyway, because it’s just that cool.

It started with 8088 Corruption back in 2004:

Basically it is a full-motion video player for the original 4.77 MHz 8088 PC, with CGA, a harddisk and a Sound Blaster card. Due to the limitations of the platform, Trixter decided to use textmode rather than graphics mode, since framerate tends to be more important than overall resolution/detail in terms of reproducing realistic video. Trixter did an interesting talk on that, explaining it in more detail.

Anyway, fast-forward to 2014, and Trixter had some new ideas on how to encode video in a way that it can be replayed fast enough even in graphics mode, on the exact same platform, which became 8088 Domination:

Trixter has also put in a lot of work on explaining the inner-workings, so I will just link you to that:

8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1

8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Conclusion

A website documenting the video codec used in the demo, with full source code

Hope you enjoy it!