5 ms·

Impressive speed. Having that in the 80's would be having much faster load times and much better graphics.

ido 9y ago
I had an XT clone in the 80s (bought in '87 if I'm not mistaken) & I don't really recall these being a factor on the PC at the time...PC drives were actually relatively fast and CGA/Hercules-era graphics were primitive enough to have put a pretty harsh upper bound on the kind of graphics you could do anyway. This was very different to the c64 or atari 8 bitters for example (both of which had decent graphics and abysmal floppy performance).
- faragon 9y ago
  PC/XT hard disks read at 125KB/s, and floppy disks from 15 to 50KB/s. And it was slower to decompress than to read. 8086 @8MHz RAM bandwidth was about 1200KB/s, so data compression algorithms based on dictionary (LZ77, LZW) were crazy slow. So the LZ4 decompression time achieved is impressive.
  - ido 9y ago
    Sure, but you wouldn't have played graphically impressive games on an xt either way cause CGA was the bottleneck rather than how much data you could fit on a floppy. Anecdotally speaking I don't recall loading times were much of an issue on pc games at the time, unlike on some 8 bit platforms.
    - faragon 9y ago
      E.g. MS-DOS 3.20 is slower to boot on a 8086 CPU + floppy disk than e.g. booting Ubuntu or Windows 10 on modern hardware.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > I had an XT clone in the 80s (bought in '87 if I'm not mistaken) & I don't really recall these being a factor on the PC at the time...PC drives were actually relatively fast and CGA/Hercules-era graphics were primitive enough to have put a pretty harsh upper bound on the kind of graphics you could do anyway. PCjr CGA+ (adopted also and popularized by Tandy, often known as TGA) graphics were introduced in 1983, EGA graphics were introduced in 1984, VGA in 1987, and there were a number of less-standard higher-resolution and/or higher color modes available and supported in software in addition to those.
  - ido 9y ago
    Yeah but VGA wasn't popular until at least '90 and EGA probably not much earlier, around '88 maybe (before that you'd probably be more likely to have a c64 than a better-than-CGA PC compatible). Most people didn't have state of the art computers, a PC AT with EGA & color monitor costed close to $10k in 1984 (1980s dollars!). Going to the mall to play on a color monitor was a thing kids were doing back then. Can't speak much about Tandy as I think these were mostly only popular in America. In Europe you'd still be playing mostly in CGA well into the 2nd half of the 80s, and the only popular PCs until close to the end of the decade were cheap XT clones with CGA at most, or monochrome Hercules more commonly. Anyway I'd concede that it would have probably made a big difference to graphics fidelity in the very late 80s or early 90s. But I think a lot of people forget that warp-speed improvement of PC hardware and plummeting prices were more a 90s than an 80s phenomenon - in most of the latter we were still in the flat stage of the S curve!
    - bonzini 9y ago
      I remember most people switched directly from CGA to SVGA in the early 90s. I only remember a couple computers with EGA at friend's homes, and offices were mostly CGA and Hercules too (if they had PCs at all, and not 3270).
      - ido 9y ago
        This was definitely my personal experience, when my brother in law bought a 286 in '91 it already had svga despite only being 4 years newer than our xt.
djmips 9y ago
Some studios had their own in house compression that was quite impressive at the time. I remember the amount of time our engine coders put into compression routines, it was a significant effort. That being said, I have no idea how it would stack up...

ido 9y ago

I had an XT clone in the 80s (bought in '87 if I'm not mistaken) & I don't really recall these being a factor on the PC at the time...PC drives were actually relatively fast and CGA/Hercules-era graphics were primitive enough to have put a pretty harsh upper bound on the kind of graphics you could do anyway. This was very different to the c64 or atari 8 bitters for example (both of which had decent graphics and abysmal floppy performance).

faragon 9y ago
PC/XT hard disks read at 125KB/s, and floppy disks from 15 to 50KB/s. And it was slower to decompress than to read. 8086 @8MHz RAM bandwidth was about 1200KB/s, so data compression algorithms based on dictionary (LZ77, LZW) were crazy slow. So the LZ4 decompression time achieved is impressive.
- ido 9y ago
  Sure, but you wouldn't have played graphically impressive games on an xt either way cause CGA was the bottleneck rather than how much data you could fit on a floppy. Anecdotally speaking I don't recall loading times were much of an issue on pc games at the time, unlike on some 8 bit platforms.
  - faragon 9y ago
    E.g. MS-DOS 3.20 is slower to boot on a 8086 CPU + floppy disk than e.g. booting Ubuntu or Windows 10 on modern hardware.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
dragonwriter 9y ago
> I had an XT clone in the 80s (bought in '87 if I'm not mistaken) & I don't really recall these being a factor on the PC at the time...PC drives were actually relatively fast and CGA/Hercules-era graphics were primitive enough to have put a pretty harsh upper bound on the kind of graphics you could do anyway. PCjr CGA+ (adopted also and popularized by Tandy, often known as TGA) graphics were introduced in 1983, EGA graphics were introduced in 1984, VGA in 1987, and there were a number of less-standard higher-resolution and/or higher color modes available and supported in software in addition to those.
- ido 9y ago
  Yeah but VGA wasn't popular until at least '90 and EGA probably not much earlier, around '88 maybe (before that you'd probably be more likely to have a c64 than a better-than-CGA PC compatible). Most people didn't have state of the art computers, a PC AT with EGA & color monitor costed close to $10k in 1984 (1980s dollars!). Going to the mall to play on a color monitor was a thing kids were doing back then. Can't speak much about Tandy as I think these were mostly only popular in America. In Europe you'd still be playing mostly in CGA well into the 2nd half of the 80s, and the only popular PCs until close to the end of the decade were cheap XT clones with CGA at most, or monochrome Hercules more commonly. Anyway I'd concede that it would have probably made a big difference to graphics fidelity in the very late 80s or early 90s. But I think a lot of people forget that warp-speed improvement of PC hardware and plummeting prices were more a 90s than an 80s phenomenon - in most of the latter we were still in the flat stage of the S curve!
  - bonzini 9y ago
    I remember most people switched directly from CGA to SVGA in the early 90s. I only remember a couple computers with EGA at friend's homes, and offices were mostly CGA and Hercules too (if they had PCs at all, and not 3270).
    - ido 9y ago
      This was definitely my personal experience, when my brother in law bought a 286 in '91 it already had svga despite only being 4 years newer than our xt.

djmips 9y ago

Some studios had their own in house compression that was quite impressive at the time. I remember the amount of time our engine coders put into compression routines, it was a significant effort. That being said, I have no idea how it would stack up...