The 1991 "X-Box" 455
Jim Hall writes "Back in college (1991), I wondered why no one had bothered to make a DOS-based game console.
One day, in the back of a notebook, I made some notes about how you might go about creating a DOS-based game console. (I even called it an "X-Box", but really the "X" was there because I didn't know what else to call it. Microsoft's current "XBox" console is completely different, and I don't claim any rights to the "X-Box" name.)
I've posted some scans of my notes, and a discussion about how you would create a DOS-based game console."
Wow (Score:2, Funny)
SHENANIGANS! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:SHENANIGANS! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardware prices in 1991... (Score:5, Interesting)
CD driver were incredibly expensive, going for $500 to $1500 dollars. Here's an example. [google.com]
VGA card (what they were called back then) to composite video: $600-$1500 Example. [google.com]
-dameron
Re:Hardware prices in 1991... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hardware prices in 1991... (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps this guy had a innovative mind, perhaps not. I hate to do it, but IMO, this story has 'hoax' written all over it.
Date Your Notes! (Score:4, Insightful)
At work, I always date my notes with month, day, year, and also include which project the notes are for.
Not for IP, lawsuit, or policy reasons, just to remove the "WTF" that will come up when I look at the notes after four or five years. Or in case I get hit by a minivan again; I may not be so lucky next time!
I'm not saying that this guy did or didn't do that... I'm just saying that it's not that unusual.
I do NOT generally write any kind of copyright info on any of my notes, though. Whether this is good, bad, or indifferent is an exercise for the reader.
Re:Date Your Notes! (Score:2, Interesting)
Part of the reason is so that years later when looking through old artwork I can look back and say "Wow, I've come very far in 5 years."
In reality, it's been more like "Wow, 5 years ago I kicked ass. Now I really suck!"
Re:SHENANIGANS! (Score:5, Informative)
CD-ROM drives in 1991 were OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive, as were sound cards. Flash ROM? In 1991? Affordable? Please...
An EGA card that can also output NTSC video (whether s-video or composite) would have been unheard of, namely because there wouldn't have been any point: EGA cards could do 640x200, but only in black & white (1-bit color). They could do up to 16 colors (4-bit color) in a different video mode, but only at 320x200. Yeah, that's right, 320x200, not 320x240. Oops, did somebody just get caught?
And the Voodoo 3 3000 was most certainly NOT available in 1995! Perhaps some cards based on the Voodoo 1 chipset, but the Voodoo 3 chipset wouldn't hit the scene until the late '90s.
The 286 had multitasking and protected mode, just like the 386. The real problem with it (as opposed to the "problem" the author states) was that, being a 16-bit machine (although the address space had been increased to 24-bit), it still had to use segments to be able to access all of its address space, and to handle programs with more than 64K of code and data.
As for the 286 being the first Intel processor that was backwardly compatible: no. No no no no no. The 8086 was "backward" compatible with the 8088 (in fact, they were exactly the same, except for the 8088 sacrificed some speed to cut down motherboard costs by only having 8 data lines instead of the 8086's 16, but made up for it (which is where the slowness comes in) by doing two reads in succession), the 80186 (yes, there was a 186, but it sold very poorly) was backwardly compatible with the 8088 and 8086, etc.
As for the SNES, both it and the Genesis probably had about equal market penetration. The SNES had better RPGs IIRC, but the Genesis had better sidescrolling action & platform games thanks to its faster processor. Yeah, the SNES had Mario, but the Genesis had Sonic The Hedgehog, Jurassic Park (the Genesis version of Jurassic Park was light years better than all the other versions and even had better graphics too; not coincidentally, the Genesis version was made by a different company than the one that did all the other versions), Vectorman, etc. "The SNES had the biggest, baddest games of its day." Not quite. When it first came out, most of the games sucked. Even for games where the same company made both a Genesis and an SNES version, the Genesis version was usually better. Take a look at Earthworm Jim if you don't believe me. It wasn't until games like StarFox and Donkey Kong Country came out that the SNES started to reach critical mass, but even then it always carried Nintendo's "kiddie" reputation thanks to the boatloads of games with cutesy characters (Mario, Yoshi, Kirby, etc.) that Nintendo churned out. Genesis remained the hardcore gamer's platform of choice for many years.
I'd like to think that this guy is just badly misinformed or looking at the past through a set of (highly revisionist) rose-colored glasses, but my honest oppinion is that he made this up. I could understand calling it System X, Console X, etc., but X Box? Howww conveeeenient...
Consoles? (Score:2)
But as for your suggestion for using an Atari or Calico -- there was no Bard's Tale [bardstale.com] for the Calicovision, nor Space Quest [sierra.com]. For DOS, however, we had Wing Commander [mobygames.com], and a whole series of Leisure Suit Larry [allowe.com]. By 1991, we had the original BattleTech [mobygames.com] and BattleTech II [mobygames.com], not that wierd MechWarrior similator thing.
Hmm...I wonder what I did with the scratch and sniff card from Leather Goddesses of Phobos [elsewhere.org]?
Hmm...it's times like this when I'm glad there's places like emulation.net [emulation.net] so I can find something interesting to play with.
(yes, this is partly sarcasm...it's up to you to determine what part)
Re:SHENANIGANS! (Score:3, Insightful)
MS-DOS is an operating system. Since no Atari system has ever run it, nor did the Colecovision (correct spelling), those systems aren't DOS systems.
And there were quite a few DOS games that were better than what you'd find on an old Atari: Commander Keen was just one of them.
Atari (and Commodore) DID make PCs (Score:3, Informative)
Pedantic perhaps, but in the interests of accuracy I should point out that Atari did have a line of IBM PC-compatibles that ran DOS. Here's an example [obsoleteco...museum.org] of one.
Commodore, another name know primarily for its proprietary systems also made its share of PC clones.
Geez (Score:2)
Re:Geez (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Geez (Score:2)
Write down this date, we can sue Microsoft in about 10 years.
Re:Geez-Here you go (Score:3, Informative)
The 1991 X-Box
I went to college in the fall of 1990, and by Spring semester 1991, I was enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. I lived in the dorms, and in hanging out with my other friends I began to notice the popularity of game consoles. It seemed like every third dorm room in my building had a Nintendo in it. I'd seen consoles before
But my game interests were with DOS-based games of the time, such as Commander Keen. Even Commander Keen 1 was better than most of the games available for the Nintendo, at least as far as I could see. So I wondered why no one had bothered to make a DOS-based game console.
One day, in the back of a notebook, I made some notes about how you might go about creating a DOS-based game console. (I even called it an "X-Box", but really the "X" was there because I didn't know what else to call it. Microsoft's current "XBox" console is completely different, and I don't claim any rights to the "X-Box" name.)
Page 1 (1299x1712, 136k)
Shows a diagram of a controller, with 4 directional buttons + 4 game buttons (A, B, L, R) + 2 system buttons ("Opt" and "Start").
Sends events to console using keyboard events. (What about using 2 Gravis game pads on the game port?)
Game saves: 1.44MB floppy
System boot: flash memory system (C:) - 2MB?
Games: CD-ROM (also plays music)
2 controllers enter system through keyboard combinator. (Looks like keyboard.)
Always boots from C: (never from A: or D:). After boot, DOS displays some game system logo, then waits for CD-ROM event. At CD-ROM load, checks for certain directory structure to determine if game disk. Then exec's XBOX.EXE (or
SDK defines P1 and P2 input [the controllers], and game exit chains exec back to main system program. SDK's init should determine if this is a game system.
Need program to format floppy.
Page 2 (1299x1712, 268k)
Diagrams of how to assemble and organize the console hardware, including an inventive way to install the peripheral cards at an angle to save vertical space.
Page 3 (1299x1712, 244k)
SDK:
Save game files should always be in the format game ID.001 (iterate).
What can we do to enforce this? API to list, save, and delete save games? Maybe only list/save, and only allow delete from the main program?
init() will check that this is a game system, and chain back via exit() if not.
SDK has #define's for keys: P1_UP, P1_DOWN, P1_LEFT, P1_RIGHT, P1_A, P1_B, P1_L, P1_R, P1_OPT, P1_SEL, and again for P2.
How to keep people from running just any DOS program from the game console?
My friend Larry and I had planned this out. Larry had a huge interest in electronics and had the idea of the keyboard "combinator" device. It solved a lot of problems. In addition to sending one "keystroke" to the output at a time (emulating a keyboard) you were free to use non-keyboard input, and the combinator would be able to translate that into keyboard output. As long as the output was a key from a keyboard, it didn't matter ("A", "$", "9", "Keypad_3",
Shortly after that, I dropped the idea. I was pretty busy in classes at the time, and didn't have a lot of time to devote to thinking about such side projects. But could such a design have actually worked? More to the point, could you build it at a reasonable price? And if you did build it, would people buy it?
CPU
First, you have to start with the microprocessor. In 1982, Intel released the 286 Microprocessor. The 286, also known as the 80286, was the first Intel processor that could run all the software written for its predecessor. This software compatibility remains a hallmark of Intel's family of microprocessors. Within 6 years of it release, there were an estimated 15 million 286-based personal computers installed around the world. What hamstrung the 286, though, was that they messed up multi-tasking. Really, they implemented a nice task-swapping feature, but hardly the same as true multi-tasking.
In 1985, Intel sold the 386 Microprocessor. The Intel386 microprocessor featured 275,000 transistors--more than 100times as many as the original 4004. It was a 32-bit chip and was "multi tasking," meaning it could run multiple programs at the same time. That's what I had in my PC
In 1989, Intel released the 486DX CPU Microprocessor The 486 processor generation really meant you go from a command-level computer into point-and-click computing. The Intel486 processor was the first to offer a built-in math coprocessor, which speeds up computing because it offloads complex math functions from the central processor. That was the fastest-available CPU that you could get in 1991.
If you were going to build a DOS-based game console in 1991, you might try to build a 486 system at a cheap price. Although at the time, a 386 system might have been less expensive, and as a startup game company the 386 is probably more realistic. Let's assume a 386.
DOS
I hadn't created FreeDOS yet, although you can guess that I was pretty "into" DOS. MS-DOS was the flavor to run
By 1990, MS-DOS would have been ROMable, so you could have had MS-DOS boot from a ROM on a console system, the same as MS-DOS booted from ROM on certain laptops. The recent timeline for MS-DOS at the time looked something like this: Version Date Description
3.30 PC-DOS April 1987 For PS/2 series, 1.44 meg support, multiple DOS partition support, code page switching, improved foreign language support, some new function calls, support for the AT's CMOS clock.
3.31 MS-DOS November 1987 Over-32 meg DOS partitions. Different versions from different OEMs (not Micro$oft). Compaq and Wyse are most common.
3.40 PC-DOS - 1988 Internal IBM - not released (4.0 development).
2.11R MS-DOS - 1988 Bootable ROM DOS for Tandy machines.
4.00 PC-DOS August 1988 32mb disk limit officially broken, minor EMS support, more new function calls, enhanced network support for external commands. PCjr support dropped.
4.01 MS-DOS December 1988 Micro$oft version with some bugfixes.
3.21R MS-DOS September 1989 DOS in ROM, Flash File System for laptops.
3.3R MS-DOS - 1990 DOS in ROM, introduced for TI laptops.
5.00 MS-DOS June 1991 High memory support, uses up to 8 hard disks, command line editor and aliasing, 2.88 floppies, ROMable OEM kit available.
So while MS-DOS 5 was on desktops everywhere by Summer 1991, the easiest way to put MS-DOS in a game console was to burn it to ROM. So for this DOS-based game console, we'll have to use MS-DOS 3.3R. But DOS games still run great on MS-DOS 3.3
Video
Any game console is worthless unless you can pipe the output to your television set. Most normal GUI environments of the time (think MS-Windows) would do 640x480, or even 800x600 if you had a good system. Unfortunately, you can't expect your television to show the same quality as a VGA monitor. Your television can do only about 320x240.
Also, you have the problem that your television doesn't do VGA. It uses NTSC. By its nature, NTSC is a single wire transmision system. It minimaly has luminance (brightness) information for black and white. It has a fixed horizontal frequency of about 15.7khz with a vertical of 60hz. VGA cards just cannot do this. VGA controllers seem to have a low limit of arround 30khz for hsync. For color NTSC things get tricky. The RGB is encoded as 2 subcarriers in quadrature to eachother each 3.58mhz above baseband. There is additional 3.58mhz signal that must occur during sync. This is called the "burst". To prevent beat frequency artifacts on the screen you should adjust the vertical to the color standard of 59.94hz.
So, would a DOS-based game console been impossible? Not really. These days, it's pretty easy to find a video card that supports TV-out. But in 1991, such video cards weren't so common. Or were they?
I didn't investigate it at the time, but with the USENET archives on Google I was able to do some research. In 1995, video cards that supported TV-out were high-end cards like: S3 ViRGE, Rage All in Wonder, Rage Fury, Canopus, 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000, and G400 Max.
So one solution is to supply the game console with one of these cards. That might be expensive, though. The cheapest ISA card I was able to find was a "Multi-Mode EGA/CGA/MDA(TTL) / NTSC (RCA/composite)" for $50. And EGA is right about where we want to be, to match the resolution of a television set.
Is there another way to get NTSC video at higher resolutions? Yes, but it would have cost more.
At the time, there was a gadget called "Game Blaster", which you could pick up at places like Egghead for about $150 (???). It seems to convert VGA to NTSC video. That's just what our system needs.
Also available was a device called "PC2TV". It was $189 and well worth the money. It will also output to S-VHS (the Game Blaster will too) which makes a huge difference in picture quality and contrast. It also needs no driver under 640x480 at 60hz. PC2TV is also true color, and the Game Blaster is not. It will also do 800x600 with some ET400 cards.
So I guess the answer is: yes, you could have had a VGA to NTSC converter at low res (acceptable for DOS games) for less than $150. But the DOS games available in 1991 were typically EGA, so a first-generation game console would be better off to stick with EGA, and let the next-generation console extend into VGA.
Sound
Sound is important. Even the Atari 2600 had very basic sound
From Google newsgroups, the earliest mention of the Soundblaster card was Sep 25 1990, and in 1992 the SB was sold for $75. So in 1991, you should have been able to get a sound card for a reasonable price.
Games
No game console can succeed unless it has games to support it. At the time, I don't think I realized the importance to a console maker of having game exclusives. But ah well. Let's at least look at what DOS games we had around 1991.
The first-person shooter titled Wolfenstein 3D was originally released for DOS in 1992 by ID Software. So this would have been a good title to run on a DOS game console, but that's too late for our system.
Let's just look at it for a moment, though. Would Wolfenstein 3D have been a good console title? Oh yeah - There was also a Super Nintendo version of Wolfenstein 3D released; it was a cross between the PC and Mac versions. For example, the flamethrower and rocket launcher from the Mac version are present as is the ability to sneak up on enemies from the PC version. Unfortunately, it was extremely censored through the changing of the guard dogs into rats and removal of the Nazi symbols. But if you had the uncensored game available for a game console, it would have been kick-ass!
So what would have been the killer game to release on a DOS-based game console? I've already mentioned it: Commander Keen. On December 14, 1990, Episode 1 of Commander Keen forever changed PC computing. Commander Keen was id Software's first big game, and along with the original Duke Nukem (released in 1991), Apogee Software was recognized as the place to go to for hot, shareware games.
Even better, all of the 7 Keen games out there are EGA titles, and Keens 4-6 also had a separate additional CGA version produced. Although CGA looked like purple shit.
Price
So, let's take a moment to add up the components that we've assembled so far: Item Price
Intel 386 CPU + motherboard $399
IDE/floppy/serial controller $70
1MB memory $5
1.44MB floppy drive $30
CD-ROM drive ??
Flash ROM C: drive $20
MS-DOS 3.3R runtime license ??
Multi-Mode EGA/CGA/MDA(TTL) / NTSC (RCA/composite) video card $50
Soundblaster card $75
Of course, these are estimates, but they seem to be pretty good ones.
The Competition
Could such a DOS-based system have been competitive with other game consoles of the era. It's kind of late now to think of "might have beens" but this is an interesting one. Let's compare this "X-Box" to the other consoles of the time:
In 1985, Nintendo started to sell the U.S. version of Family Computer Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in America. The system included R.O.B. (Robotic Operating Buddy) and the games Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros. Mario and Luigi became as big a hit as the NES. However, in 1989, Sega stepped in to take their piece of the pie. They released Sega Genesis, a system with a 16bit computer that could produce better graphics than the NES.
So in 1991, Nintendo introduced the 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) along with Super Mario World and released it in the U.S. The SNES was one of the most powerful 16-bit consoles. The SNES used an extremely powerful graphics coprocessor able of generating real-time effects like scaling and transparency. The SNES immediately it raised the bar for video game designers around the globe. Featuring true stereo sound, multiple scrolling backgrounds and almost twice the internal memory as its competition, the SNES was home to the biggest, baddest games of its day. The original SNES set, with two controllers and Super Mario World, sold for $200 when it was first released. In a few months, the price dropped, as all console systems' prices do after initial release, to $150.
To be a player, this "X-Box" game console would have had to retail for $200 or less. The price list above has a total retail price of $650. But that's retail. How much would you have been able to buy all that at wholesale price? I don't really know, but in cases like this the "rule of 2" seems to get me pretty far. So we'll assume wholesale would be roughly half the cost: about $325. And that doesn't even cover the cost of the game controllers and the R&D work to create the combinator circuit and custom "A/V out" cabling.
And you have the MS-DOS license fees. I don't have a price for MS-DOS in 1991, but Digital Research Inc. released DR-DOS 6.0 in 1991 for $100. So you might assume MS-DOS was around the same price, since DR-DOS needed to stay competitive. If you use the "rule of 2" you may have been able to license MS-DOS for an embedded system for $50 or less since this would be sold in high volume, not a few at a time.
But the game console business is pretty cutthroat. Even today, game consoles almost never pay for themselves. You sell the system at a loss, and make up for it from SDK license fees. I even saw that back in 1991. So to sell this X-Box at $200 would mean a loss of at least $125 per box. That's pretty steep. You'd have to become an overnight success to justify that kind of loss. With launch titles such as an "X-Box" exclusive full version of Commander Keen, and some other hot DOS titles, you would have had a fair chance. With id's release of Wolfenstein 3D a year later, a DOS-based game console would have been the killer system. But it's still a huge gamble.
On top of that, PC hardware is very expensive if you need the specs to remain completely static over a long run. Game consoles like the Nintendo and today's PlayStation are able to absorb their R&D costs over a long product lifecycle. Basically, because they control the technology behind the system, the consoles actually become less expensive to produce after a few years. Now let's jump back to this "X-Box". When the Pentium is released, try asking Intel to still produce 386 hardware in quantity. If you don't have the same speed CPU in there, games that work well on the original "X-Box" might become unplayable when the CPU speed doubles. You might offset that, though, by running a TSR that slowed the system down to compare to the 386 CPU. Just don't interfere with the games. In any case, that adds up to extra cost, whether you get Intel to continue producing 386 CPUs or if you use software. This "X-Box" becomes more expensive to produce after a few years.
So it's probably a good thing I never went any further with this "X-Box" idea.
Building it today
(note done yet)
I went to Pricewatch this morning, and vaguely looked at some current prices to build a decent game console today. Comparitive prices have come down quite a lot since 1991. But I didn't really do a full pricing on the thing. Maybe I'll look into it later.
One thing I didn't mention in my page (but maybe I should add it?) was that if you're going to build a game console, the case really can't be any bigger than a VCR. I think Tivo is about the size of a VCR. If it's any bigger than that, people will think it's too much like a PC stuck on top of your TV, and they won't buy it. The Morex Cubid 2699 looks about the right size, but of course it wouldn't have been available in 1991. See also the ATC-600 case.
Microsoft's XBox
(not done yet)
Since putting up this web page, I've been thinking about writing a related article
Microsoft did make a mistake on the XBox controllers, though. They made huge controllers, probably designed by someone with huge hands. Their controllers are about as big as a grizzly bear.
Re:Geez-Here you go (Score:2)
Mirror with images (Score:3, Informative)
Nomenclature (Score:5, Funny)
Whereas in Microsoft's case...um.
Re:Nomenclature (Score:2)
Whereas in Microsoft's case...um."
Microsoft originally called it Xbox as a project name. Then they embraced and expanded the name with a -. So now it's X-BOX.
Sarcasm aside, Microsoft's announcement of the new name reminded me of the 'Brown O of Quality'.
Re:Nomenclature (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nomenclature (Score:2)
'Game Cube' like it says next to the image? Scroll down on the site.
Video games are an imperialist vice (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Video games are an imperialist vice (Score:2)
Troll? No, it's fucking funny as hell. Somebody mod this up.
Already been done (well sort of) (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a machine called the megatouchXL or something close to that, and a few others that use dos as their OS. You mostly find these things on bar countertops, ect.. I found out because the fsckin thing froze up on me in the middle of a strip poker game and when I cycled the power, surpise! Dos 6.22
Which brings to mind the question, Why?
At least with *nix or *dows you have GL 3d support. The only 3d support dos ever had was 3dfx glide. Throw in the lack of a journaling file system and only physical security, dos is a pretty poor choice in this day and age.
Re:Already been done (well sort of) (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't give you any fancy multi-processing, multi-threading etc. But if you want to implement a poker game, and you don't care much for anything else (except for cost), why not use DOS?
Re:Already been done (well sort of) (Score:3, Interesting)
Nah, it was loading mscdex, OAKCD.sys, fully running through a batch file. It was dos, no two ways about it.
Why use *nix or *dows over dos for a simple poker game? Dev tools for dos suck, you pretty much have to write all your screen and sound routines yourself (unless you use midas?) At least *nix and *dows has a pretty sweet IDE.
Just my 2cents.
P.S. to the AC just below this, fuck you, you obviously don't know jack and are too stupid to ask insightful questions like arikb here. I'd answer your question AC but I don't think your brain would be capable of handling it.
Re:Already been done (well sort of) (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Already been done (well sort of) (Score:2, Interesting)
Insightful?
Re:Already been done (well sort of) (Score:5, Interesting)
When I started there in 1996 they had already been selling an older game called the "Touchmaster" that competed with the original Megatouch systems. They were simple touchscreen games, card games, trivia, etc. Mostly put in bars, restaurants and the like.
P.S.: I'm no longer employed by Midway, have no involvement for them at all, and am not in any way representing them here.
P.P.S.: As my
It was a single board system with a 68000 running at something like 4 or 6 MHz(Underclocked because of a long list of problems) and used 8Mbit ROMs, and a very very cheesy FPGA based video system. (2D BitBlt, 8 bit palettes with 8 palettes on the screen at once)
In 1998 my job became taking standard off the shelf PC components and making it somehow work inside a cabinet like that(pretty much an oversized monitor) to replace our old 68000 based system , and somehow cost as little money to develop as possible.
After experimenting with what seemed like hundreds of different CPUs, motherboards, video chips, sound chips and other devices, we ended up choosing an Intel motherboard with a Celeron CPU in the now-forgotten NLX form factor. This is roughly 8.5"x11" with an edge connector along one side. From there you could build your own right-angle backplane with as many PCI and ISA ports as you liked on it.
We settled on using FreeBSD for the OS, mostly because of cost concerns (nobody wanted to add the price of Windows to the system), licensing concerns (part of what we needed to do involved modifying the kernel, based on information we received from hardware companies under NDA so the GPL was out), and development ease.
Was it easy? God no. We couldn't use XFree86 because it's performance was horrible for what we were doing (lots and lots of pretty animations and videos) and since we knew we were locked into a single graphics chip I wrote my own 2D graphics/animation/video system. We couldn't use FreeBSD's built in sound system because the latency was pretty high and didn't support mixing multiple sounds (let alone from multiple processes at once) so again we wrote our own.
We also had to deal with running a *nix based system where it was considered normal to just unplug it at the end of the day. Our solution was to have one giant read-only partition where most things were stored, a tiny read-write area for storing scores that was synced to disk constantly (and had all drive write caching turned off). We still had fsck() throw up errors occasionally after unclean shutdowns, so we had to keep redundant copies of everything, and throw out what didn't make sense.
About your mention of 3D.... To be honest, 3D isn't that important in the counter-top bar game market. We jokingly referred to our jobs as "writing games for 5 year olds" since the games that people seem to enjoy after a few beers are usually very very similar to those that young children enjoy. Towards the end of my involvement in the project, I did hack in there Mesa to do some simple 3D proof of concept testing. It all had to run from the software renderer because the 3D capabilities of our video chip were non-existant. I got GLQuake compiled and running on it as a test... 3fps max, so we scrapped the whole 3D idea.
If I were starting this all over now, it would have been completely different. XFree86 has come along way in both 2D and 3D performance and support for even the most arcane chipsets. FreeBSD's multimedia capabilities have gotten better. More manufacturers are producing tiny motherboards. CPUs and Video chips are much much faster, so I wouldn't have to spend months on tweaking code all over the place to keep things running at near 30fps.
In all, I wish anyone who tries this sort of thing the best of luck.... It was surely a learning experience for me.
Re:Already been done (well sort of) (Score:2)
yes
my megatouch runs dos
hehehehe
MS Can STILL SUE!!! (Score:2, Funny)
One Flaw i think.... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:MS Can STILL SUE!!! (Score:2, Funny)
It'd be more likely for them to send a killer android back in time. Just watch out for big guys with thick Austrian accents and shades.
Now's our opportunity! (Score:3, Funny)
Quick!
Let's reverse engineer the BIOS and mod it to run Linux!
Re:Now's our opportunity! (Score:2)
*sigh*
imagine a beow- i just can't...no, I...no.
Missing feature! (Score:3, Funny)
Did you expect a medal or something? (Score:2, Interesting)
Boo hoo. There are only so many hours in a day. An idea isn't valuable per se. The only thing that's impressive is an idea, plus the willpower and dedication to bring it to reality.
Re:Did you expect a medal or something? (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't wait to post my captured UFO article (Score:2)
Prices are out of whack for 1991 (Score:5, Interesting)
It's always nice to play "woulda-coulda-shoulda" in the computer industry, but we may as well be postulating how the civil war would have gone if the Confederacy had nuclear weapons if you ignore history.
Re:Prices are out of whack for 1991 (Score:2)
Re:Prices are out of whack for 1991 (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, whenever I jot something down, I'm always sure to add "c. 2003" -- just in case.
I'm surprised Slashdot got suckered in by this guy.
Well, no, I'm not surprised.
Hey, I had this idea for an on-line auction house after I read Thomas Pynchons 'Crying of Lot 49'. First I figured 'eLot' but then I though, nah, 'eBay' would be much more appropriate.
Re:cdrom drive? (Score:2)
I mean, WTF? Who came up with that glorious idea?
Tim
Re:cdrom drive? (Score:2)
Re:cdrom drive? (Score:2)
I mean, WTF? Who came up with that glorious idea?
Two reasons:
1) At the time, sound cards and CD-Rom drives weren't popular, and didn't usually come with the computer. So they were typically sold together as a "Multimedia Kit", or just "Sound Blaster Kit", usually along with cheap speakers.
2a) A lot of machines didn't have extra IDE connectors (most certainly didn't have a "secondary" controller), and so it was easier to integrate it on the sound card and avoid the support hassle;
2b) Some CD-Rom drives (Matsumi, Yamaha, IIRC) had proprietary interfaces that were *not* IDE. Some used the same cable, some a 32-pin cable, but all required a separate card (or, as was common, the included Sound Card/Interface Controller).
Anyway, for 2a it made sense. Nothing like coming home with a new CD-Rom drive to run Encarta, only to find out you have no where to connect it. Was nice to get a Multimedia Kit, with your drive, sound card/controller and speakers, not to mention a bunch of crapware bundled with it (the sound blasters used to come with a CD-ROM full of sound effect WAV files).
Ah, the memories...
Re:Prices are out of whack for 1991 (Score:4, Interesting)
So if pricing is corrected, it's a hugely expensive console, as opposed to very expense console it was previously. All this and a lie too!
Re:Prices are out of whack for 1991 (Score:3)
All the paper has been kept away from light and acid and stuff over the years, and it's ALL turned yellowish, and that is bright white, the ink hasn't even slightly seeped into the paper or faded, etc.
It's very difficult to age stuff like that. Investigators of financial fraud can use a gas chromatograph to determine the chemical makeup of the ink, and have lists of what was used when and by who.. Companies rarely keep the same mix of ingrediants over a period of 12 years.
Attention seeking hoax (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Attention seeking hoax (Score:3, Funny)
This sig is currently under construction. Copyright © 2003, Enzo, all rights reserved.
What you don't know, however, is that I wrote that sig ten years ago -- I have the dated notes to prove it!
I don't mean to doubt... (Score:2)
What can I say, I'm a skeptic
Strange... (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone know if DOS supported booting from CD-ROM in 1991?
Re:Strange... (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing strange to see here, move along...
Re:Strange... (Score:2)
What about form factor and cooling? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe no one bothered with a DOS-based console at the time, because of the cooling and power requirements (big fans and power suppies) as well as the form factor? If something were to be competitive with Nintendo, it would not only have to be as cheap, but also as small and quiet...
It's been thought I'm sure. (Score:2, Funny)
Didn't anyone notice the striking similarity to an SNES controller? Most of the games I remember playing back in pre-VGA standard days didn't require 2 buttons, none-the-less six. Methinks this is a poor hoax.
Correct me if I'm wrong (like there is any doubt about that HERE), but wasn't EGA the cream of the crop (except for a few high-end boards like TARGA and whatnot) in 1991? With most of us still suffering through on Hercules mono, or god-forbid the brave souls who had CGA. (I swear it has more than just brown, blue and white colors. It has 16 man, you're just blind).
And... Were ball-point pens invented yet in 1991? I remember having to write everything down with pencils, only after chewing the end to a point... Case closed :)
Re:It's been thought I'm sure. (Score:4, Insightful)
Bingo. Not only was EGA about as cool as it got back then (i remember VGA becoming more popular on high-end home computers in 92-93ish, around when Wolf3D took off) but Commander Keen? Come on. In 1991 i'm talking Battletech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception on a monochrome screen... An early, very crappy, Test Drive under CGA. Lode Runner. Mines of Moria (like Nethack). Space Quest 1. PCs were worse than Amigas and even the 8-bit systems back then. The people who could afford VGA systems (with CD-ROM drives!) were like the people today who have Radeon 9700s with 1 gig of RAM and God knows what other overclocked monstrosities in their system. Contrary to what we read on Slashdot, that is by far not the majority of PC users :-)
Re:It's been thought I'm sure. (Score:2)
But Amiga in 1991? You had full-color Monkey Island, Lemmings, Eye of the Beholder, Prince of Persia, Sim City... I don't recall the PC ever getting those games in a decent color till at least a few years later. What about Gods? "THE Amiga game" if i remember the magazines spiel back then. I think you just wanted better sims - the Amiga was always an excellent arcade machine, but i don't remember sims coming into their own until the PC. A lot of people bought PCs just to play MS Flight Sim
The X-box of 1991 was the Amiga (Score:2, Interesting)
IIRC the CD32 came out that year, which was like a PS2. It had the AGA chipset, and had quite a few games releaced for it. I had a A3000, and later the A4000. I remember the huge difference in lemmings on it vs. my 486/dos computer.
Re:The X-box of 1991 was the Amiga (Score:3, Interesting)
The PC simply could not compete with the Amiga until until later - bang for buck, for games, the PC simply wasn't a starter.
The amiga also had a more TV friendly output - 320x200 or 320x256(PAL) with 64/4096 colours in extra half-bright mode, with an appropriate refresh rate, and even came with a modulator (brick) for connecting to a TV.
The sound was much more capable - 4 channel, 8 bit 29khz (compared to the SoundBlaster's 22hz 1 channel 8 bit mono). Sure you can do software mixing on the soundblaster, but that took more CPU power than was usually feasible on a 386.
My only gripe with the Amiga, and the reason I ended up selling mine, is that they took far too long to put a quicker CPU in it at a decent price. If they'd put a 68020 in the A500 from the start, and a 68030 in the A1200, I'd probably not have moved to the PC in 1992 :-\
smash.
Sorry to post again but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Worst episode -er- article ever!
Not a hoax (Score:3, Interesting)
CD-ROM drives in 1991 (Score:3, Interesting)
So in 1991, the inclusion of a CD-ROM on this device was intended as either: 1) A very expensive cup holder. 2) A device a waaay ahead of its time. Or 3) A hoax.
While in 1991(ish) there were the failed initiatives of Commodore (CDTV) and Philips (CDI) to make CD-ROM based "Edutainment" consoles, the huge advantage of using a PC as the innards of the device would be lost because of the relative obscurity of CD-ROM media on the PC platform.
-JE
Computer, destruct sequence one, code one, one A.
Re:CD-ROM drives in 1991 (Score:2)
So if they were looking at the gaming magazines they might have seen these units and decided to make something similar to them.
Using CDs might have also exsited as a way to do minor copy protection of some source, because the burners weren't consumer items yet.
Re:CD-ROM drives in 1991 (Score:2)
Just for reference, in early 1994 a "multimedia kit" (SB16 and 2x internal Panasonic CDROM drive) cost me about $500.
[That SB16 is still in use. In 2001 the CDROM finally died of a broken drive belt (but easy to replace if there were any motivation to do so).]
Re:CD-ROM drives in 1991 (Score:2)
The cheapest CD writers in 1993 were about $3K. $4K was more typical, and a few models up around $6K. Blank CD-R disks were $15 to $20 each. They were easy enough to find from mail-order houses, but you definitely wouldn't find them at Wal-Mart, and probably wouldn't even find them at 90% of computer stores. Again, I don't know what the situation was in 1991, but "rarer" and "costlier" are very good bets. And there was more cost than just the burner. You also had to have enough HD space for all your source material, plus an image of the CD. And these couldn't be low-end drives either. Low-end models would occasionaly "recalibrate", causing a momentary pause in the data stream, and CD writers at the time didn't have enough cache to tolerate this. So, in 1993 a typical CD writing setup, computer and all, was about a $10K investment. 1991 would certainly have been much worse.
Gald I'm not the only one... (Score:2)
What's wrong with the Nintendo? (Score:3, Insightful)
To give an opinion from the other side of the gaming spectrum, I don't think Commander Keen I could be better than Super Mario Bros, Excitebike, Double Dragon, Ninja Gaiden, Rivercity Ransom, Dragon Quest[Warrior], Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, et cetera...could anybody who did both PC and console gaming during this time give an opinion on the matter?
Guys... Guys... Take it easy... (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like a hoax (Score:2)
But that controller on the first scanned page? That's an SNES controller. The NES did not have L and R buttons, nor did any system before it. The combination of these two things makes this smell like a hoax. I might be wrong - I haven't had the change to read much of it - but I have my doubts as to his claim that he wrote this in 1991.
Re:Sounds like a hoax (Score:2, Insightful)
Usenet post [google.com]
Bull! (Score:2)
Re:Bull! (Score:2)
Loose DIP chips and SIPPs may have been somewhat less, but weren't relevant to anything newer than an early 386.
1993 XBox was actually an Amiga (CD32). (Score:5, Interesting)
Over 200,000 CD32 units were sold worldwide (100,000 in UK alone) - as compared to 3DO, which only sold a bit over 100,000 worldwide. It took some balls for Amiga to move on that, but unfortunately Commodore went under not too long afterwards. It sold for $399 in the US when it was released.
http://www.cd32.com/ [cd32.com]
Commodore Amiga CD32 Press Release Follows:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Commodore Business Machines, Inc.
Marketing and PR Department
(610) 431-9478
--== Amiga CD32® Launched in U.S. at Intermedia ==--
(San Jose, CA - March 1, 1994) Commodore Business Machines, Inc. today
announced at Intermedia the availability of the Amiga CD32 game machine
in the United States
"The CD32 will be available this spring at mall-based software stores,
regional electronics stores, and Amiga dealers throughout the US," says
John DiLullo, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Commordore
Business Machines, Inc. "We are bundling three excellant games with
the CD32: Pinball Fantasies by 21st Century, Wing Commander by Electronic
Arts, and Oscar from Microvalue Flair," DiLullo added," and offering a
special price on Psygnosis' Microcosm."
First launched in Europe this past fall, Commodore reports to have sold
over 100,000 units in Europe in just three months prior to Christmas. By
outselling Sega four to one and claiming 38 market share of all CD ROM
drives sold in the UK (according to the Gallup Weekly Report), the Amiga
CD32 has established itself as the undisputed leader of the 32 bit
machines.
Electronic Gaming Monthly agrees by rating the CD32 higher than Sega CD,
3DO or Jaguar. At a suggested retail price of just $399, the Amiga CD32
features an unbeatable combination of power and affordability.
"We challenge anyone to show us a better multimedia player at a better
price," says Lew Eggebrecht, Vice President of Engineering for Commodore
International.
"With 50 titles available today and 100 expected by first ship in the
U.S., the Amiga CD32 has wide support among the software development
community," says John Campbell, Director of Applications and Technical
Support for Commodore International. "The success we have had in Europe
has convinced publishers to invest in creating revolutionary new titles
for the Amiga CD32," Campbell added.
The Amiga CD32 features a 32 bit Motorola 68EC020 Microprocessor with
2MB of memory, 16.7 million colors, and a double speed CD ROM drive built
in. The CD32 will play audio CDs, most CDTV discs, and CD32 discs. With
the addition of an optional MPEG-1 full motion video module, the CD32 can
play MPEG VideoCDs, MovieCDs and Karaoke CDs with up to 74 minytes of
better-than-VHS quality video and CD quality audio on a single disc.
The suggested retail price of the MPEG module is $249.
"The CD ROM drive in the CD32 is a fully multisession compatible Mode 1,
Mode 2 Form 1, and Mode 2 Form 2 drive," says Jeffrey Porter, Director,
Advanced Technology for Commodore International. "With optional
software, the CD32 can read Kodak® PhotoCD discs," Porter added.
Commodore Business Machines, Inc. based in West Chester, PA is the U.S.
subsidary of Commodore Internatrinal Limited. The company manufactures
and markets a complete line of Amiga computers and peripherals for the
business, consumer, educational, and vertical markets. The company's
worldwide installed user base of Amiga computers is approximately 5
million units.
Video Game Archeology (Score:2, Interesting)
I think it actually is. For example, the ATARI 2600 console has chip schematics here [atariage.com]. And I would love to find designs for the early Space Invaders, or Galaga systems. Why ? Because the average multimedia PC today is maybe a 1000X more powerful than those older systems, yet playability of all those new games has not increased by the same amount. Video Game Archeology can teach me.
By the way - even if those scans are fake, the
Sound Cards (Score:5, Interesting)
Come now, surely a true DOS gamer from back in the day would know that the SoundBlaster was not the first PC sound card!
No, the original SoundBlaster boards were cheap knock-offs of the AdLib, one of which a friend of mine had in his 286 box back around 1988. Back then, all consumer-level cards were "AdLib compatible", and the SB was one of these.
IIRC, there were also higher-end cards already on the market as well, like those from Turtle Beach and (I believe) the GUS, which was a favorite of the tracker/demo crowd.
So by 1991, you should have been able to get an older AdLib card for cheap (and, again, AdLib was the gold standard at the time and SB was cheap crap.)
Re:Sound Cards (Score:2)
Somewhere (unless I gave it away) I had a sound device that worked by hooking it up to the parallel port - it would let you play wav's or whatever to an audio connector on this little passthrough dongle device. Came with Dungeon Master - used a ton of CPU time though.
Re:Sound Cards (Score:2)
And, actually, that parallel port rig was pretty common. If you wanted to do it portably, you just hooked up an 8 bit DAC to it, but cheaper ones just used a R^2 resistor network and leeched off the parallel port -- moderately risky depending on whether or not you ran it to an amplifier or directly to a headset. (Sink/source capabilities have never been standardized for parallel ports; you can still find some boxes in use today that are rated for 5 mA source.)
Dungeon Master was such an awesome game
Sigh. Does anyone know if the emu10k module can be used from inside UMSDOS? It'd be a lot easier to run my old games in Linux than trying to find an old version of the old BLASTER= emulator software for the SBLive. I've been craving some old Wing Commander: Privateer...
Re:Sound Cards (Score:3, Interesting)
I used to think... (Score:2)
And as everyone else has pointed out, most people don't usually stamp the year on notes they scrible. Also, I think the "aged" effect on the scans looks fake somehow. Most notebooks I've seen will yellow at least a little with age, where as this looks perfectly white.
Something the MS people told us.. (Score:3, Interesting)
The internet almost crumbles ... (Score:3, Funny)
Slashdot
News for Nerds
I guess 1 out of 2 isn't bad...
Notes (Score:2)
Look at the page edges (Score:2)
Give the guy a LITTLE slack... created FreeDOS (Score:3, Interesting)
For the people tearing this apart and nitpicking, this isn't just some random slashdot reader. I think guy does know his stuff. Besides, what would he have to gain for making a hoax like this? He already said he definately does not claim any rights to the name.
Sheeeesh...
Re:Slight error in your notes (Score:2)
Re:Slight error in your notes (Score:5, Informative)
386SX = 386 with 16-bit FSB
486DX = 486 with math coprocessor
486SX = 486 with math coprocessor disabled
487SX = 486 with math coprocessor and slightly different pinout so it wouldn't work in the 486SX/DX socket, and which disabled the 486SX at startup
Re:Slight error in your notes (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, the 486SX was the 486 with the math co-processor disabled. Motherboards at the time often had an extra socket for a math co-processor in case you wanted to get one but didn't want to pay for a whole new CPU that had one on-chip.
Intel's math co-processors for the 386 (all of them on a separate chip) were called 387s. Since Intel made two versions of the 386 (the DX and the cheaper but slower SX), they decided to make the 486 have two versions too, and again used the DX/SX suffixes.
The 486DX had an on-chip math co-processor, whereas the 486SX did not (or so Intel told everyone). They decided to make a separate math co-processor for the 486SX, and called it the 487SX.
What Intel didn't tell anybody was that, IIRC, the 486SX actually did have an on-chip math co-processor, but it was merely disabled. Additionally, they didn't bother to tell anybody that the 487SX was actually a 486DX (the one with the math co-processor enabled) that just had a different pin layout than either the 486DX or 486SX.
What's more, when installed as a math co-processor (which was the only option, the different pin layout meant it wouldn't fit in either a 486SX or 486DX slot), it merely disabled the 486SX, taking over its job, and acted like the 486DX that it actually was (CPU + math co-processor).
Later we would see the 486DX2, 486DX4, etc.
Re:Slight error in your notes (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Slight error in your notes (Score:5, Informative)
as you know, the SX and DX designations on the 486 line signified the presense of an onboard coprocessor.
Re:Slight error in your notes (Score:2)
Also, one important difference between 486SX and 386 was that the 486s have 8KB of internal cache. For further confusion, the 486SL is a low-power version of 486DX.
Re:Slight error in your notes (Score:3, Informative)
So, the DX-50 was 50MHz internal and 50MHz external; the DX2-66 was 33MHz external and 66 MHz internal. In certain applications, the DX2-50 would outperform DX2-66 based systems, because of the difference in I/O throughput. The DX-50 was problematic with VESA Local Bus systems, however -- VLB was never meant to run faster than 33 MHz, so you would wind up overclocking the I/O and video cards.
A good compromise was the AMD DX2-80 chip; with a 40 MHz external bus I/O boards tended to be more reliable (esp QD6580 chipset based boards). In almost all circumstances, DX2-80 systems would outperform DX-50 systems.
Oh, it was fun building and upgrading systems back in those days. You really had to know your parts, since the VLB and CPU clock speeds were tied together. For that matter, upgrading the CPUs often meant having to get faster cache chips (many 486SX-25s shipped with 25ns cache -- too slow for 40+ MHz FSB!). Hell, Packard Smell systems from those days shipped without *any* L2 cache, and some of them had a really hard to dig up dirty tag chip; you'd need 8x 61256 chips, a 6164, and something else that was tough to source in small quantities..
Re:Despite previous claims ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Although his hand-drawn SNES controller was quite nice.
So now we have a 3rd source for
2) Read back issues of Wired- post anything.
3) Find your old PeeChee folders and scan any goofy drawings you may have scrawled 15 years ago.
This is not off-topic, troll, or flame-bait. If a story submission sucks then it sucks. Don't hide from it.
Re:Despite previous claims ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't agree. This article was interesting to me, but in more in a nostalgiic way than in a news kind of way. I remember playing games back then. It was a total bitch until Windows 95 came around. Every game had it's own drivers, and getting a game to work with sound was often painful. Then.. damn.. the CD-ROM came around and made things even worse!
I would say a lot of us gamers back then ACHED for a common PC platform to play games on. Fortunately, modern OS's and architecture have mostly allieviated those problems today.
Re:Voodoo 3 in 95? (Score:3, Insightful)
There was NO 3D in 1995 unless you wanted an insanely expensive Silicon Graphics box. Back then a 2MB S3 board - a Diamond Stealth 64, for instance - was damn nice. I think the first Voodoo was in '97, and the Voodoo 2 in '98. UltraHLE came out in late '98 or early '99, and managed high-speed N64 emulation using SLI'd Voodoo 2s. Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo 3 started making 3D popular because you could have it all on one card; about this time people like nVidia and ATi started getting serious marketshare as well, since 3dfx didn't go in for 32-bit colour, preferring speed over quality.
Voodoo 4 and 5 were too late to save 3dfx, but wonderfully cheap after the wreck :-)
Re:MS-DOS? (Score:2)
DOS is an OS, my friend, not a shell :-)
Re:Voodoo 3 In 1995? (Score:3, Informative)
I was wondering about that myself. I just recently retired my two Voodoo3 3000s, and when I got them in 1998 they were top-of-the-line.
And, the Voodoo with TV-Out was the 3500, not the 3000 that he mentions.
Hell, in 1995 I believe 3D cards were of the "pass-thru cable" variety -- I don't think any 2D/3D combo cards were even out yet. The original Voodoo might have been out, but certainly not the Voodoo3...
And I don't believe TV-Out was easily available except through an expensive "scan converter"...
Anyway, much of what he says is conflicting even with the other things he says, and then there are a few technical and chronological problems.
I won't say it's bullshit, but I am pretty skeptical (not to mention X-Box -- I don't think people called a PC a "box" back then, and he has no real reasoning for having come up with the name...)
Re:Voodoo 3 In 1995? (Score:2)
Re:The X in XBox (Score:2)
I think this is the result of a bad anti-aliasing. It seems to be averaging a large range of pixels, so as you go further from the center of the X, the pixels fade.
For reference, also take a look at the 'R' on number 6, Matthew R Powell, in the same image -- you'll see the same effect. Likely anything at a 45 degree angle would have similar artifacts under this anti-aliasing...
Interesting nonetheless...
You're wrong (Score:2)
As we all know, Microsoft didn't develop DOS on its own. It bought DOS from the original developer. Therefore, the need for CTRL-ALT-DEL on a regular basis wouldn't be present in DOS. This feature didn't come along until much later, in Windows.
Scoring:
+1 Slashdot-esque attempt at humor, ala Microsoft
-1 Lack of fact checking