3 ms·
The PC has always been such a mess of incompatible peripherals, it made for a terrible demo platform in the DOS days when the OS didn't abstract any of the grap
by pengaru 3y ago
The PC has always been such a mess of incompatible peripherals, it made for a terrible demo platform in the DOS days when the OS didn't abstract any of the graphics and sound stuff in a normalized form.
Amiga and C64 included capable multimedia hardware so demo coders could target a known quantity and ship something that Just Worked for the masses.
- epcoa 3y agoEarly DOS days. By the early 90s the raw processing power of a 486 with VGA and a Soundblaster pretty easily trounced the Amiga in raw capability, inelegant as it may have been. A bunch of demos of the period document this conflict.
- jcadam 3y agoI didn't have to fight with (or even know about) things like IRQ jumpers and Expanded memory management on the Amiga. That was kinda nice :/ Sure, the PC had superior graphics and sound by the 486 era, but it was not a pleasant user experience.
- layer8 3y agoSmooth 60 Hz scrolling was still a challenge on VGA.
- Narishma 3y agoThat might be because VGA ran at 70Hz rather than 60 in its 256 color mode.
- vardump 3y agoSmooth 60 Hz 320x240 256 color "mode-x" scrolling was for free on VGA. Just had to update the start address and panning registers. You could also have a hardware supported stationary portion. 70 Hz 320x200 mode 13 was a different matter. Had to use CPU to update it.