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8088 MPH by Hornet + CRTC + DESiRE

Jim Leonard · 326.8K views · 2015-04-05 · 8:26

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Overview

8088 MPH is a demoscene production for the original 1981 IBM PC with CGA graphics and a 4.77MHz 8088, shown with real composite output. It competed at Revision 2015 and pushes the hardware well past what it was thought capable of, breaking emulators.

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HN points to it as the standard example of what cycle-exact, hardware-level programming can achieve on ancient machines, from the colors it produces to its PC speaker audio.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2017–2024

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What people said

userbinator · 2019-02 · Strong recommendation

The most amazing thing I've heard done with a PC speaker is in the last part of this equally amazing demo (starts at 6:37 --- the parts before have more "normal" beeper music): [VIDEO] Explanation here: [LINK]

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bazza97 · 2024-01 · Recommendation

Love how people are still pushing old hardware. These are also two excellent demo's on the XT: Area 5150 [LINK] 8088 MPH [VIDEO]

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anyfoo · 2018-09 · Recommendation

Good summary. A bit more generally, demos are often written to run under constrained conditions. They are also often written for competitions that set those conditions. Sometimes, like in this case, the constraints are entirely dictated by the hardware, and the objective is just to make the most impressive demo given the particular device’s limitations, very often pushing the hardware way past what was commonly thought to be possible. Modifying the hardware is usually not allowed, but playing “dirty” in software by using undocumented and maybe even unintended, obscure implementation details of the platform is highly encouraged. No stone is left unturned. 8088MPH (by the same makers as 8088 Domination) is a very good example. For decades, nobody knew it would be possible to display 1024 colors, at the same time, on the original PC (which most nominally supports only 4 colors at the same time, which could be stretched to 8 with a trick). You can watch the demo here: [VIDEO] And read about the methods used and invented here: [LINK] Sometimes, there are also additional constraints like size limits, which is especially popular on more advanced hardware like modern PCs. For example, the objective could be to make the most impressive demo in 1024 bytes.

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Sources

Video by Jim Leonard, played through YouTube.

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