Tag Archives: IBM

The IBM Music Feature Card and Yamaha FB-01

Posted on March 26, 2019 by

This has got to be one of the most obscure pieces of hardware I have covered so far. A sound card for the IBM PC, released in 1987. And by none other than Big Blue themselves! I am talking about … Continue reading →

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The DreamBlaster S2P: General MIDI from a parallel port

Posted on March 9, 2019 by

In the interest of catching up, here is the second blog that is long overdue. I want to talk about the DreamBlaster S2P from Serdaco. I received mine over a year ago, and it actually was an early prototype. The … Continue reading →

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Putting the things together, part 2: MIDI and other problems

Posted on February 9, 2018 by

Remember a few months ago, when I explained my approach to playing VGM files? Well, VGM files are remarkably similar to Standard MIDI files. In a way, MIDI files are also just time-stamped captures of data sent to a sound … Continue reading →

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More PC(jr) incompatibilities!

Posted on January 6, 2018 by

The race for PC-compatibility Since the mid-80s, there have been many clones of the original IBM PC. IBM themselves also made new-and-improved versions of the PC, aiming for backward-compatibility. DOS itself was more or less a clone of CP/M, and … Continue reading →

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Putting the things together

Posted on February 24, 2017 by

So, over time I have discussed various isolated things related to 8088-based PCs. Specifically: Using the latched property of the 8253 programmable interval timer to be able to adjust the interval without any jitter/skew, so you can use it as … Continue reading →

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Commander Keen 4: now in 16-colour composite CGA!

Posted on May 29, 2016 by

Perhaps you have already heard it through the grapevine, but just to be sure, I’d like to mention that VileR (of 8088 MPH fame)has patched the Keen 4 code and redid all the graphics to make the most of the … Continue reading →

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8088 MPH: The polygons

Posted on April 23, 2015 by

The last effect in 8088 MPH to be discussed is the polygon renderer. As already mentioned earlier, it is not a regular polygon renderer, but actually a ‘delta-renderer’: it does not rasterize pixels directly, but for each scanline, it uses … Continue reading →

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