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8088 MPH by Hornet + CRTC + DESiRE (final version)

8088 MPH by Hornet + CRTC + DESiRE (final version) on HackerTube: recommended by 1 Hacker News commenter across 1 month, 2016–2021.

andrewmjenner

demo · evergreen

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The winning demo from Revision 2015's oldskool competition, running on a real 1981 IBM PC with CGA at 4.77MHz. It uses extreme tricks to produce effects, graphics and sound far beyond what the hardware was thought capable of.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Held up as the peak of demoscene hardware hacking, especially for its finale and for how good the PC speaker sound gets.

people recommended it
1
separate months
1
strong recommendations
1
discussed on HN
2016–2021
“The 8088MPH demo also sounds surprisingly good.”
— amiga-workbench, Mar 2021, in “The Sound of 1-bit: Musical Creativity on the 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum (2017)”

What HN commenters said

4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.

i336_Nov 2016Strongly recommends

You've probably seen these but I thought I'd mention them anyway. [link] [link] Piece de resistance: [link] (live cheering FTW) / ▶ this video (capture card copy) The credits in the 3rd video are an excellent example of using modern tooling. (How this was done has been documented online and is easy to find; it did take some cheating to do it but it's still awesome.) Hrm, the SID music in [link] is also amazing (this demo was on two floppies, I particularly like the music in the 2nd part which uses a distinctly different theme) and very obviously produced by modern tools too. (Note, that video is a 50fps capture and uses a real SID.)

in “The BASIC Issue with Retro Computers” · View on HN

amiga-workbenchMar 2021Cites it

I don't remember it being widely used for music, but some games did a pretty good job with it. [link] The 8088MPH demo also sounds surprisingly good. ▶ this video

in “The Sound of 1-bit: Musical Creativity on the 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum (2017)” · View on HN

PavlovsCatMar 2019Cites it

> It's like a forum full of carpenters that are using Black and Decker tools to build houses. In that analogy the end result is the same, but the process to get there more complicated. In reality, the difference is between a house that has stuff like insulation and faucets that don't leak, versus than something slapped together in 5 minutes for $50 that costs 50 times more to live in, for as long as you live in it. It's less effort for the programmer, more effort for every machine it gets run on, every time it gets run . And that stuff compounds in non-linear ways, too: The more data has to be read from disks, the more useless the disk cache becomes, the more data has to be shuffled around in RAM, the more useless the CPU cache becomes. Using gigantic frameworks for programs that use 0.1% of them, which still set up and maybe even poll for all sorts of stuff, not knowing it's not needed, is not "wrong" (certainly not ever when it's open source), but it's more wasteful for what it achieves . I just checked, and my Directory Opus with 3 windows open, one of them having 2 panes, and all the custom buttons etc. is taking up 100 MB of memory. The list of features is huge. Another thing I have to think of is audio software. Sure, there's also VST that come with gigantic bitmaps or whatever, but generally, efficiency is king. They know their code doesn't run in a vacuum and they are dealing with customers (even when talking about free software) who pay keen attention to such things,

in “Daydreaming about the future instead of doing work today” · View on HN

jammiMay 2018Cites it

A PC beeper can sound just as good, when used on a fast enough PC and the beeper output is connected to something better than the built-in piezo speaker. Even on the original IBM PC, you could make it sound almost as good by very careful optimization and close to 100% of allocation of CPU cycles, like shown at the end of the 8088 MPH demo: ▶ this video

in “C64 Keyboard Prototype” · View on HN

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