Oldskooler Ramblings

the unlikely child born of the home computer wars

Archive for June 17th, 2014

8088 Domination

Posted by Trixter on June 17, 2014

A few days ago, I debuted 8088 Domination at @party 2014, which is an official sequel to 8088 Corruption that I made 10 years earlier. Like the former, 8088 Domination displays full-motion color video with audio on a 1981 IBM PC with CGA, a Sound Blaster, and any hard drive — but, unlike the former, Domination uses full graphics mode whereas Corruption used only text mode. This is significant because graphics mode requires 8x more memory and processing, and I had to combine a lot of creative and technical disciplines in order to pull it off.

Here is a capture of 8088 Domination running directly off of my IBM PC 5160; video is the composite CGA output signal, and audio is from a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0.

I am working on a postmortem write-up so you can all learn how I did it, but until then, download the party version at https://www.scene.org/file.php?file=%2Fparties%2F2014%2Fatparty14%2Fdemo_oldschool%2F8088_domination_party_version.zip&fileinfo if you’d like to run it on your own vintage hardware.

PS: A second round of thanks to Great Hierophant, for without whom I wouldn’t have been able to show off my production. He provided the hardware locally that I was unwilling to ship across the country.

Posted in Demoscene, Digital Video, Programming, Vintage Computing | 15 Comments »