Tag Archives: IBM

Some thoughts on emulators

Posted on May 15, 2020 by Scali

Recently I watched Trixter’s latest Q&A video on YouTube, and at 26:15 there was a question regarding PC emulators: That got me thinking, I have some things I’d like to share on that subject as well. First of all, I … Continue reading →

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The IBM Music Feature Card and Yamaha FB-01

Posted on March 26, 2019 by Scali

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 Scali

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 Scali

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 Scali

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 Scali

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 Scali

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 Scali

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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8088 MPH: Sprites? Where we’re going, we don’t need… sprites!

Posted on April 19, 2015 by Scali

I would like to give some technical background information on the sprite part in 8088 MPH, but before I do that, I want to discuss the music and the musicians, as they did not seem to have gotten very much … Continue reading →

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Just keeping it real at Revision 2015

Posted on April 6, 2015 by Scali

The demo I have made together with Trixter, reenigne, VileR, coda, virt and Phoenix has won the oldskool compo at Revision 2015: I will discuss some of it in more detail at a later time. Trixter has already done a … Continue reading →

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