I was happy to see this; it brought back a lot of memories. So that you know, the FLAND demo was developed before the EGA graphic card was announced. The purpose of the demo was to help convince IBM to announce and ship the EGA. And, to that end, it was successful. After FLAND, I developed a game (called Robot Miner) that used the same techniques. (I think I still have the code on a floppy disk somewhere.) But, in reality, most of the features highlighted in this demo are mainly curiosities and not widely used. Instead, most developers just used graphics (APA) mode.
you might find it amusing how Dwarf Fortress used this technique two decades after computers even needed it. It just used the DOS character set as graphics tiles, and people quickly realized they could replace the cryptic glyphs (happy faces, etc) with better graphics (dwarves, etc) by altering the character set... with weird results wherever characters had more than one use. bags and fish shared the same character, so either you'd find bags swimming in the stream or fishes filling your storehouse. dwarf fortress has finally gone graphical so that legacy is going away, but it lasted longer than you might think.
This is significantly cooler than I thought it would be. It's basically tile graphics for DOS, something I'm not sure I was fully aware of. I know some CGA games used text mode but I wasn't aware of per-pixel scrolling and an apparently computationally cheap animation method with EGA.
EGA and VGA had tons of rarely used features. I blame memory limits. You can display any 320x200-sized patch you want of this 320x200 sized memory space! ...nevermind. Not to mention with them being rarely used, their implementation in clone video cards could be spotty. I remember a super smoothly scrolling DOS shoot-em-up which did scrolling like this, but needed a specific model of VGA Wonder with the RAM expansion.
@@theALFEST There is a version of Pac Man for CGA called Paku Paku which runs in 80 column mode. It has custom characters. I did go back and watch 8088 demo and you are right, though it has custom fonts, they are not the 80 column fonts. I think the characters are supposed to not be customizable in that 80 column mode.
I was happy to see this; it brought back a lot of memories. So that you know, the FLAND demo was developed before the EGA graphic card was announced. The purpose of the demo was to help convince IBM to announce and ship the EGA. And, to that end, it was successful. After FLAND, I developed a game (called Robot Miner) that used the same techniques. (I think I still have the code on a floppy disk somewhere.) But, in reality, most of the features highlighted in this demo are mainly curiosities and not widely used. Instead, most developers just used graphics (APA) mode.
you might find it amusing how Dwarf Fortress used this technique two decades after computers even needed it. It just used the DOS character set as graphics tiles, and people quickly realized they could replace the cryptic glyphs (happy faces, etc) with better graphics (dwarves, etc) by altering the character set... with weird results wherever characters had more than one use. bags and fish shared the same character, so either you'd find bags swimming in the stream or fishes filling your storehouse.
dwarf fortress has finally gone graphical so that legacy is going away, but it lasted longer than you might think.
for being 1984 the animations were very fluid
This is significantly cooler than I thought it would be. It's basically tile graphics for DOS, something I'm not sure I was fully aware of. I know some CGA games used text mode but I wasn't aware of per-pixel scrolling and an apparently computationally cheap animation method with EGA.
EGA and VGA had tons of rarely used features. I blame memory limits. You can display any 320x200-sized patch you want of this 320x200 sized memory space! ...nevermind.
Not to mention with them being rarely used, their implementation in clone video cards could be spotty. I remember a super smoothly scrolling DOS shoot-em-up which did scrolling like this, but needed a specific model of VGA Wonder with the RAM expansion.
How did you run this? DOSBOX doesn't seem to like it, though I haven't tried customizing the settings yet.
What's the deal with this? It appears to be in 80 column mode. If it is, CGA can do 16 colors at once in 80 column mode.
CGA does not support custom fonts and smooth scrolling.
@@theALFEST True. But it's been done. 8088 mile per hour demo. Check it out.
@@tarstarkusz I saw it, and there's no per pixel scrolling and custom fonts (with instant switching)
@@theALFEST There is a version of Pac Man for CGA called Paku Paku which runs in 80 column mode. It has custom characters.
I did go back and watch 8088 demo and you are right, though it has custom fonts, they are not the 80 column fonts. I think the characters are supposed to not be customizable in that 80 column mode.
@@tarstarkusz paku paku uses not documented 160x100 16cc video mode, it has nothing to do with custom fonts
!!?? What is this?