17 Mar
2010
17 Mar
'10
4:35 a.m.
On 3/16/2010 11:03 PM, Randy Dawson wrote:
And Mr. Leonard, WRONG, my title was the first video decompression to run at full frame
rates on the PC, in both DOS and Windows. The CD ROM stuff never worked well, the data
rate was too slow. MPEG2 was just arriving, and you could get a hardware card to support
it. My stuff was bumped up off the hard drive into EMM and decompressed on the fly, no
added hardware, with a task switch that kept the buffer loaded. Fractal compression was
the only way at the time, it took specialized hardware in FPGA days to create the
compression files, but the decompress was lightning fast. As far as hardware
requirements, I supported the latest Cirrus Logic video cards in mode 13, 32k colors.
Well, you needed to be more specific when you said MULTIMEDIA -- that
can mean anything. I still think I can find prior art. What res were
your videos? What framerate? (and just for my own curiosity, what
class hardware was needed to decompress -- 486? Pentium?)
Would I impress you if I said I developed a system that played back
30fps color video with sound -- in CGA -- on a 4.77MHz 8088 -- requiring
only 128K of RAM? In 16 colors with an effective resolution of 320x200?
And wasn't lying? http://www.oldskool.org/pc/8088_Corruption if
you're curious.
In addition to all that engineering, the roller
coaster models were true simulations of the actual rides, with support from the amusement
parks. They were procedurally modeled with the ride geometry derived from the original
blueprints, and I wrote the 3d simulation for the acceleration and quaternion rotation of
the camera along the track. The rendering was done in the commercial system TOPAS on the
PC, with animation and model scripts generated from the track data.
THAT is truly impressive, as well as your use of FPGAs to encode the
video. You do get mad props for that (I'm completely serious).
But you can't claim "first multimedia program on PC". That is just too
wild and vague a statement, especially since you're not defining what
"multimedia" is.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/