6 ms·

Hmm, maybe my memory is failing me, but VLB went from 0 to 100% on 486 motherboards pretty much overnight. The ISA bus limits (and hence EISA) were well known,

Hmm, maybe my memory is failing me, but VLB went from 0 to 100% on 486 motherboards pretty much overnight. The ISA bus limits (and hence EISA) were well known, and most of the SVGA cards being sold in the early 1990's (like those cirrus logic's) were "accelerated" to compensate for the lack of ISA bandwidth. AKA, they had blit engines, hw cursors, line drawing, etc, and windows drivers to utilize that functionality. I'm fairly certain, although to lazy to dig up the tech manual for them that the blit functionality included alpha channels. Given that 486's themselves were considered high end, I frankly never remember seeing one with an 8 bit EGA card, even 386's usually in the late 80's early 1990's were shipping with 16-bit (S)VGA cards because the 3rd party cards were fairly inexpensive. While EGA lived on in lots of games because it had some convenient modes, actual EGA cards were also fairly short lived in that little window before VGA was released so by the late 1980's weren't being sold with new machines. It was also fairly common to overclock the 8-MHz ISA bus to 10MHz on boards that didn't have VLB. Anyway, my point is that in 1992, low end machines were coming with Hercules graphics and monochrome monitors. Anyone who could afford a color RGB monitor wasn't getting it with VGA/EGA because the monitor was 80% of the price (few hundred dollars) and a 512K SVGA card was well under a hundred. Anyway, I guess the benchmarks in there were to show how slow plain VGA was, but really by the time frame of duke nukem, 486SX's and VLB were radically changing the PC's performance characteristics, even on fairly low end machines. PS: I still have the cirrus technical manuals because back in the 1990's you could call up these companies, tell them you were a software developer and they would send you a 400+ page technical manual that details registers and operational/functional characteristics of the boards.

tomxor 4y ago
> VLB went from 0 to 100% on 486 motherboards pretty much overnight. [...] actual EGA cards were also fairly short lived in that little window before VGA was released so by the late 1980's weren't being sold with new machines I know the market moved fast back then, but "sales" != "ownership". Sales may have switched to VGA overnight, but if a game wants to maximise it's audience it needs to target what people already own. So unless people buy computers like they buy milk, that would have included EGA cards.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Also upgrades were very very common back then - and you’d often sell back your current card to the store when buying the upgrade. So people would be upgrading to EGA cards as those came back in.
- syntheweave 4y ago
  Also taking place in this time frame was the move towards "multimedia PC" standards. At its onset, MPC Level 1 helped consolidate the standards around VGA spec and Soundblaster audio, when before that, the expectations for PC games were that it was primarily an office computer and didn't "do" graphics or sound, so you just had to try to support everything, especially if you were doing shareware and wanted high install rates. So around 1991, when that spec was released, you start to see VGA as a requirement, but shareware did stay behind the curve to support "granny PCs". Doom really changed this. Lots of people ran out and got new systems for the sake of Doom, when before there was an association between high end machines and complicated simulator games. And while there were still casual games that remained focused on the "granny PC" well into the 2000's, the market really redefined itself in a big way around this new wave of enthusiasts playing shooter games.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    Yah, PC games have been known to drive hardware sales, doom, quake and then unreal all drove me to upgrade various components (486, Pentium and then voodoo2). I guess it still happens but the closest I can remember to buying a new piece of HW for a game was a GTX-1080 to play Witcher 3 a few years back. The CPU/GPU HW vendors could probably boost their sales by buying rights for some of those games and selling them very discounted to drive HW upgrades. Thats basically what happened to me with Witcher 3, I bought it on some super sale for $10-15 discovered it didn't play very well on my older graphics card, and ended up spending $500 (or something) as a result. For the most part I think people mostly ignored the MPC spec's though. Outside of maybe 7th guest which drove CDROM sales, most people I knew who were interested in gaming already had purchased or scrounged up a soundblaster and a 10base2 nic (for lan parties).
    - 4y ago
danachow 4y ago
> included alpha channels I would be very surprised by this. Raster ops, yes. Alpha channel image compositing operations, no way - that's an entirely whole nother level of complexity.
- StillBored 4y ago
  Not sure why you are down voted, its a somewhat fair point. So I looked it up, the 542x series in this article do support "transparency" blt operations, but it might be fair to call them raster ops rather than full blending. They would be be sufficient for the parallax scrolling Duke Nukem here was implementing, which was sorta my original point. OTOH, full 32-bit ARGB support shows up in the Cirrus line of adapters with the next revision 543x, mostly for video overlay though, although the way its wired seems to leave a lot of open doors for interesting effects too. And full blown alpha blending shows up one generation later in the 546x series. So there is full hardware support by the mid 1990's in fairly low end HW/PCs at that point. I've said before on this board that alpha blending was going on all through the 1990's and there are various ways to "cheat" and speed up what is presented in '84 (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/964965.808606 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/964965.808606). Pulling my Copy of CGPnP off the shelf it says under compositing "since it is fairly easy to do". I give you a demo from '92 with real time apparent blended transparency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLJhtefcoPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLJhtefcoPE see about 4 mins in. I sorta doubt this is the first case, but was one I vaguely remembered, since I was myself hacking these kinds of things with my schoolmates around that time as we tried to emulate what we saw others doing/etc. And none of us went into computer graphics or gaming oriented parts of the technology fields. BTW: That demo notes it needs a 386+VGA, so we are talking late 1980's PC hardware.
  - rasz 4y ago
    Binary transparency :). 1992 Cirrus Logic GD5402 aka AVGA2 supported Masking. http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/cpu/item/130-cirrus-logic-cl-gd5402-acumos-avga2 http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/cpu/item/130-cirrus-logi... "D3 Selects the memory read data latches to be eight bytes wide, instead of the normal four bytes. This bit can be used in Write Mode 1, in order to rewrite 8 latched pixels (64 bits) back into display memory. This bit should be used in X8 addressing mode only." = Set/Reset and Compare registers extended to full 8 bits and read/write mode 1 extended to 8 bytes at a time with extra foreground/background masks. If Im calculating correctly this means you can perform internal copies at 12-20MB/s and lines/pattern fills at 24-40MB/s
touisteur 4y ago
Somewhere in there was MCGA too. I still remember very cool stuff on the 8086 Amstrad PC 1640 that had an EGA card. You had to do palette magic and it was hard to do any animation, but I think games like Xenon 2 and Prince of Persia did a good job of it.
- jasomill 4y ago
  IIRC — I worked in a computer lab full of PS/2 Model 25 at the time — MCGA was just CGA with a couple VGA modes (640x480x2 and 320x200x256) bolted on. In particular, it was not compatible with EGA.
  - touisteur 4y ago
    Indeed you're right. I just remembered seeing it in all the configuration menus. Didn't know it had so little diffusion.

tomxor 4y ago

> VLB went from 0 to 100% on 486 motherboards pretty much overnight. [...] actual EGA cards were also fairly short lived in that little window before VGA was released so by the late 1980's weren't being sold with new machines I know the market moved fast back then, but "sales" != "ownership". Sales may have switched to VGA overnight, but if a game wants to maximise it's audience it needs to target what people already own. So unless people buy computers like they buy milk, that would have included EGA cards.

bombcar 4y ago
Also upgrades were very very common back then - and you’d often sell back your current card to the store when buying the upgrade. So people would be upgrading to EGA cards as those came back in.
syntheweave 4y ago
Also taking place in this time frame was the move towards "multimedia PC" standards. At its onset, MPC Level 1 helped consolidate the standards around VGA spec and Soundblaster audio, when before that, the expectations for PC games were that it was primarily an office computer and didn't "do" graphics or sound, so you just had to try to support everything, especially if you were doing shareware and wanted high install rates. So around 1991, when that spec was released, you start to see VGA as a requirement, but shareware did stay behind the curve to support "granny PCs". Doom really changed this. Lots of people ran out and got new systems for the sake of Doom, when before there was an association between high end machines and complicated simulator games. And while there were still casual games that remained focused on the "granny PC" well into the 2000's, the market really redefined itself in a big way around this new wave of enthusiasts playing shooter games.
- StillBored 4y ago
  Yah, PC games have been known to drive hardware sales, doom, quake and then unreal all drove me to upgrade various components (486, Pentium and then voodoo2). I guess it still happens but the closest I can remember to buying a new piece of HW for a game was a GTX-1080 to play Witcher 3 a few years back. The CPU/GPU HW vendors could probably boost their sales by buying rights for some of those games and selling them very discounted to drive HW upgrades. Thats basically what happened to me with Witcher 3, I bought it on some super sale for $10-15 discovered it didn't play very well on my older graphics card, and ended up spending $500 (or something) as a result. For the most part I think people mostly ignored the MPC spec's though. Outside of maybe 7th guest which drove CDROM sales, most people I knew who were interested in gaming already had purchased or scrounged up a soundblaster and a 10base2 nic (for lan parties).
  - 4y ago

danachow 4y ago

> included alpha channels I would be very surprised by this. Raster ops, yes. Alpha channel image compositing operations, no way - that's an entirely whole nother level of complexity.

StillBored 4y ago
Not sure why you are down voted, its a somewhat fair point. So I looked it up, the 542x series in this article do support "transparency" blt operations, but it might be fair to call them raster ops rather than full blending. They would be be sufficient for the parallax scrolling Duke Nukem here was implementing, which was sorta my original point. OTOH, full 32-bit ARGB support shows up in the Cirrus line of adapters with the next revision 543x, mostly for video overlay though, although the way its wired seems to leave a lot of open doors for interesting effects too. And full blown alpha blending shows up one generation later in the 546x series. So there is full hardware support by the mid 1990's in fairly low end HW/PCs at that point. I've said before on this board that alpha blending was going on all through the 1990's and there are various ways to "cheat" and speed up what is presented in '84 (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/964965.808606 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/964965.808606). Pulling my Copy of CGPnP off the shelf it says under compositing "since it is fairly easy to do". I give you a demo from '92 with real time apparent blended transparency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLJhtefcoPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLJhtefcoPE see about 4 mins in. I sorta doubt this is the first case, but was one I vaguely remembered, since I was myself hacking these kinds of things with my schoolmates around that time as we tried to emulate what we saw others doing/etc. And none of us went into computer graphics or gaming oriented parts of the technology fields. BTW: That demo notes it needs a 386+VGA, so we are talking late 1980's PC hardware.
- rasz 4y ago
  Binary transparency :). 1992 Cirrus Logic GD5402 aka AVGA2 supported Masking. http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/cpu/item/130-cirrus-logic-cl-gd5402-acumos-avga2 http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/cpu/item/130-cirrus-logi... "D3 Selects the memory read data latches to be eight bytes wide, instead of the normal four bytes. This bit can be used in Write Mode 1, in order to rewrite 8 latched pixels (64 bits) back into display memory. This bit should be used in X8 addressing mode only." = Set/Reset and Compare registers extended to full 8 bits and read/write mode 1 extended to 8 bytes at a time with extra foreground/background masks. If Im calculating correctly this means you can perform internal copies at 12-20MB/s and lines/pattern fills at 24-40MB/s

touisteur 4y ago

Somewhere in there was MCGA too. I still remember very cool stuff on the 8086 Amstrad PC 1640 that had an EGA card. You had to do palette magic and it was hard to do any animation, but I think games like Xenon 2 and Prince of Persia did a good job of it.

jasomill 4y ago
IIRC — I worked in a computer lab full of PS/2 Model 25 at the time — MCGA was just CGA with a couple VGA modes (640x480x2 and 320x200x256) bolted on. In particular, it was not compatible with EGA.
- touisteur 4y ago
  Indeed you're right. I just remembered seeing it in all the configuration menus. Didn't know it had so little diffusion.