Wouldn't it be cool to have a 3D card in an eight bit machine? Something like the old Monster 3D. Could that be built with fpga? I want one for my Tandy 1000TL with a 286 chip but 8 bit bus.
There would be nothing to run on it.
There already exists a 3D accellerator for the 8088. It's called an 8087.
(* Yes, I KNOW most 3D back then was written with integer code. It was a wisecrack - settle down, pedants!)
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Vector monitors allowed the limited hardware of those days to produce 3D-ish graphics. It was a cool effect, though limited to wireframes.
Weitek was used heavily for CAD applications.
All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder
The 8 bit bandwidth and supporting clock couldn't handle the load.
In water flow terms... this would be like saying shall we run the Mississippi river through a small creek.
Can i use my IBM CGA card with my Core I7, i really want that retro feel, and composite colors, but still fast operations 😁
I am aroused about any X86 motherboard that has full functional ISA slot. I think i have problem. Not really into that original (Turbo) XT,286,386 and CGA/EGA stuff. So just a DOS nut.
PS. If I upload RAR, it is a 16-bit DOS RAR Version 2.50.
wrote:Can i use my IBM CGA card with my Core I7, i really want that retro feel, and composite colors, but still fast operations 😁
Yes you can if you have an ISA slot. 😀
I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O
is there any LGA 1150 mobo with ISA hidden out there... like in the industrial market or something?
wrote:wrote:Can i use my IBM CGA card with my Core I7, i really want that retro feel, and composite colors, but still fast operations 😁
Yes you can if you have an ISA slot. 😀
UEFI doesnt have any support for mono/hgc/cga video output
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In the late 1980s SGI made a 3D board for PCs with 16 bit ISA slots, I will have to see if I can dig up the info on it.
I am not sure how fast it would be, but I imagine for it to even be worthwhile you'd need a 386 minimum.
I don't think an XT class machine has either the bus bandwidth or the CPU power to make use of a 3D graphics board (as others have already mentioned).
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The last platform with a motherboard that had an ISA slot I know of was Pentium 4.
Modern enough? 😀
wrote:is there any LGA 1150 mobo with ISA hidden out there... like in the industrial market or something?
LGA1150, no. None of the chipsets used for it have an ISA subsytem. Nor do they have a PCI subsystem. All you get on LGA1150 is PCIe. More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_chipsets
I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O
Except they do have a LPC bus, which is basically serial ISA. (You usually can't do DMA over modern LPC implementations, so SoundBlasters don't work, and nor do old floppy controllers, but...)
And, here's an example of an H81 ISA board: http://www.dfi.com.tw/news/display.html?id=3764
In any case, there actually is a 3D accelerator for 8-bit ISA, and IBM even sold it: http://www.seasip.info/VintagePC/pgc.html
The GPU on it is another 8088.
wrote:8086s/8088s typically already struggle with 2D. 😀
Right. The point of an accelerator is to offload the cpu. Modern games run on the gpu with pixel and vertex shaders offering fully programmable pipelines. I'd settle for a fixed function pipeline such as found in old versions of direct X when hardware T&L first came out. The idea is that you feed the card with vertex buffers and textures and then tell the card how to transform them and it does the texture mapping and z buffering for you. There is no reason why the transfer of that data couldn't happen on a 8 bit bus.
wrote:In the late 1980s SGI made a 3D board for PCs with 16 bit ISA slots, I will have to see if I can dig up the info on it.
I am not sure how fast it would be, but I imagine for it to even be worthwhile you'd need a 386 minimum.
I don't think an XT class machine has either the bus bandwidth or the CPU power to make use of a 3D graphics board (as others have already mentioned).
That is the beauty of a 3d card. You upload the data and the card does the work for the cpu.
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wrote:That is the beauty of a 3d card. You upload the data and the card does the work for the cpu.
Only for actual 'GPUs' though, as in, video chips that also perform the T&L steps.
Early accelerators could only draw triangles, and still required the CPU to transform and light all triangles before sending the raw coordinates in screen-space to the 3d accelerator.
An 8088 system wouldn't be able to process a lot of geometry in realtime.
However, take a proper T&L-accelerated GPU, such as the GeForce256, then you upload your geometry once, and only have to send new matrices and other parameters to the card. Then the 8088 may have a fighting chance.
Downside is that they want their input in floating point coordinates, so you'd need to use the 8087, which won't exactly break any speed records.
