Re: EGA/VGA card simulation on Hercules mono graphic card?

Posted on 2023-02-02, 21:35

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

The only somewhat efficient pseudo emulation of EGA on Hercules that I can think of would patch the binary and then use a LUT for address lookups. However, this approach would only be feasible with a 640x350 2-color EGA mode and most such software has native Hercules support, already. With driver- …

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Re: Planet X3 Open Source Edition

Posted on 2023-01-31, 20:38

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by Benedikt

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

The back story is that all previous releases relied on a fork of the engine for every video memory model. Within every single one of them, all positions on screen were hard-coded as magic numbers. With the growing number of engine forks this created an absolute maintenance hell and the archaic …

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Planet X3 Open Source Edition

Posted on 2023-01-31, 19:17

by

by Benedikt

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

Hi there! In short: The refactored and expanded source code of Planet X3 is now available under GPL! See https://github.com/planet-x3/px3_ose Changelog since the last update release: Changes under the hood Port of the entire code base from A86 to YASM syntax New build system mostly based on GNU …

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Re: Newly written driver(s) for Sierra's Creative Interpreter – Starting with Plantronics ColorPlus

Posted on 2022-12-27, 23:07

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I wonder what an updated engine could do. Interlaced graphics at a higher resolution might be nice. EDIT: I did some searching. It looks like picture resources are vector based. So drawing the pictures at a higher resolution might work. After some searching I found a lot of SCI related stuff but no …

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Re: Newly written driver(s) for Sierra's Creative Interpreter – Starting with Plantronics ColorPlus

Posted on 2022-12-24, 17:39

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

The dithering happens in the game's rendering routines. You would have to try to undo the dithering by examining the pattern. Alternatively, you could try to patch the game engine itself.

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Re: Which Sierra games can use the PC1512.DRV so they have 16colors with an Amstrad 1512 system? (SOLVED!)

Posted on 2022-12-24, 17:06

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

snappy|nuts wrote on 2022-12-24, 04:21: Anyway, I finally got Thexder working and am just curious if there was a 640x200 16 color port for it as well...... There is none for the PC1512 nor would it make sense: Due to the way the PC1512's 640x200 16-color mode is implemented, the game would run at a …

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Re: Newly written driver(s) for Sierra's Creative Interpreter – Starting with Plantronics ColorPlus

Posted on 2022-12-24, 16:51

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

There would be the possibility to use a 16-color palette that is somewhat optimized for a particular game, but the game's internal rendering routines will still only produce 16 colors. A VGA card's ability to display 256 colors will not change that.

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Re: MF-001 Adlib Clone jumper settings, thoughts has anyone

Posted on 2022-11-24, 17:53

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Thanks. And which which? And need some init, like soundblaster cards? If you look at the PCB layout, you can see that only the outer pins are connected. To figure out which connector is for input and which for output without analyzing the layout, you can simply connect the speaker to one of them. …

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Re: A small black resist0r fell of my Voodoo 3 3500

Posted on 2022-10-12, 17:27

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

GodModule wrote on 2022-10-11, 18:57: A small black rectangle (SMD?) resistor marked with 150k fell of the back of my Voodoo 3 3500, is it screwed? Nah, it's typically soldered. 😜

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Re: Did VGA (EGA?) standard lose support for CGA Mode 5h color palette with light red color?

Posted on 2022-09-24, 14:39

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

AFAIK, the early CGA cards only had a very limited number of different shades of gray on the composite output. Maybe cyan and magenta would have resulted in the same shade? Incidentally, both effects can be restored on an EGA card using a TSR driver, because EGA conveniently supports four shades of …

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Re: SAA1099 as 4-bit DAC and CMS/GameBlaster digital sound output

Posted on 2022-07-06, 17:18

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

And for the eventual log table lookup use the ever popular xlatb.

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Re: CGA intensity

Posted on 2022-05-16, 17:19

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Technically, an RGBI monitor is free to interpret the meaning of “high intensity red” whichever way it wants. You could therefore try to find an RGBI monitor that only boosts the brightness of active primary colors. Aside from that, modding appears to be your only option.

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Re: Displaying CGA/EGA graphics on an MDA monitor - comparison of ATI Small Wonder and EGA Wonder 800+

Posted on 2022-04-30, 14:25

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

The oscilloscope view in the thread that MMaximus linked to looks a lot like low-pass filtered PWM. (Low-pass filtered by the oscilloscope, in this case.)

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Re: Displaying CGA/EGA graphics on an MDA monitor - comparison of ATI Small Wonder and EGA Wonder 800+

Posted on 2022-04-29, 19:30

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I do have access to both cards, but not to a monochrome monitor and unfortunately, the only logic analyzer I have is a cheap 24MHz dongle. Does any kind of horizontal pattern show up on a closeup of the monochrome screen in areas that should technically show a solid color?

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Re: Displaying CGA/EGA graphics on an MDA monitor - comparison of ATI Small Wonder and EGA Wonder 800+

Posted on 2022-04-28, 20:49

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

The thing is that the “Wonder” cards are supposed to be able to display 16 different shades on an MDA monitor. That, however, is clearly not possible with just two bits and a constant signal. I therefore suspect that we are looking at a combination of traditional 2BPP graphics and some primitive …

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Re: Displaying CGA/EGA graphics on an MDA monitor - comparison of ATI Small Wonder and EGA Wonder 800+

Posted on 2022-04-28, 18:42

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

One thing that I am curious about is what the signal looks like. My informed guess is that some sort of PWM is involved, but the exact parameters would be interesting.

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Re: Mod Master XT 1.0 Released : Play .MOD, .XM and .VGM on a 8088 4MHz

Posted on 2022-04-18, 13:42

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Cannot VGM files be played on a Soundblaster? Mod Master outputs an error when I tried it. Can you put the .vgm files here so that I check ? What is the error message ? It's the VGM you put in the zip file. GB_MONI1.VGM Audio card is a Soundblaster 16PnP, my PC is an Amstrad PC2086 XT 8MHz. The …

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Re: Newly written driver(s) for Sierra's Creative Interpreter – Starting with Plantronics ColorPlus

Posted on 2022-04-06, 17:17

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

RetroBard wrote on 2022-04-06, 15:17: I was wondering if Thexder would be able to use the Plantronics driver? Thexder (never heard of it until today) is not an SCI game. The simple answer is therefore: “no”. Even if it did work, it would still only run at half the speed of the CGA version.

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Re: The 3 voice sound PCjr/Tandy 1000 games patching thread!

Posted on 2022-03-27, 11:48

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

alextpp7 wrote on 2022-03-25, 12:10: Hi, Why is the FTP site not working ? Is there anywhere else to access the patches ? BTW, thank you for the hard work ! Are you sure that you actually tried to access it? Many web browsers have abandoned FTP support in recent years.

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Re: Replicas of Covox Speech Thing, FTL Sound Adapter and SiliconSoft SoundJr

Posted on 2022-02-26, 21:44

by

by Benedikt

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

If combined with an OPL3 FM chip, perhaps the STM32 would even be powerful enough to emulate both OPL3LPT and Digispeech DS3xx, allowing the Sound Blaster emulator and Windows 3.x drivers for the Digispeech parallel port products to be used with this hypothetical universal LPT sound device. It …

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