The Sony Trinitron KX-45ED1, aka the PVM-4300, is thought to be the largest CRT TV ever sold to consumers. It has a 43-inch visible diagonal on its 45-inch tube and weighs in at almost 440 lbs. The stand alone is over 170lbs. At the time, it cost $40,000 USD in 1989 (or about $100K today, adjusted for inflation)
Long since thought gone, Shank Mods managed to save an extremely rare 43-inch Sony Trinitron KX-45ED1 from an untimely ending. It was being kept on the second floor of an Osaka noodle shop called Chikuma Soba – a building due for demolition in just a few weeks.
It was moved from the soba shop, crated up, and shipped to the US. While it worked well – it did need servicing. The alignment was off, had some tube cataracts, and the dynamic convergence amplifier circuit had failed. They worked on them all and have a very nice display.
The video describes the incredible journey and is definitely worth a watch
Andreas from Insomniac Games made a Amiga 500 demo in 2019 as part of this work with The Black Lotus demo group. He presented not only the Eon Amiga 500 demo, but tons of great technical information about the 4 years it took to develop it.
Old demo scene programmers hold amazing amounts of wisdom. When solving the core pieces of logic, I found this is true (but when doing larger, complete system development, these don’t work)
Work backwards from desired outcome to discover your constraints. Don’t just brute force. Instead, ask, what must be in place for us to get the peak performance from the key component we’re dependent on (render, disk load, etc). Then work from that constraint.
Do everything you can at compile time, not run time. Pre-compute tons of things – even the build-up of the data structures in memory. Just run it and then save and reload that blob automatically.
Over-generalizing early is a trap many devs fall into. Solve the problem in front of you. Trust that you can delete the code and do something else if it sucks. It’s cheaper and faster than trying to anticipate things ahead of time. Do the simplest thing that will work and if it sucks come back and delete it.
If you end up with a small runtime table/code that doesn’t require runtime checks because you can prove it can’t go wrong, you’re doing something right.
When developing, the actual Amiga is super slow and limited. They took an Amiga emulator and hacked it up so they could debug on it instead. Using calltraps to trigger the emulator, they added memory protection, fast forward, trigger debug, loading symbols, cycle accurate profiling, single step, high-resolution timers, etc. Also allows perfect input playback.
Modern threading and consumer/producer components (disk loading, data transfer, decompressors, etc) often just throw things in buffers and YOLO. There’s no clear backpressure to show you where you’re wasting time/space. Running on this kind of hardware/simulator shows you how much time the design is wasting by poorly and inefficiently designed algorithms/constraints.
Japhy Riddle in a hackaday article tries to re-create the look of old CRT sub-pixels – the individual red, green, blue phosphors that make up a single pixel. His approach is to basically fake it with Photoshop, but old systems like the Apple II, debayering, and even modern text anti-aliasing actually use some of these techniques.
The world has gotten very familiar to retro hardware re-creations, game emulation, re-releases, speed runs, creating new games for old platforms, as well as new exploits, tools, and discoveries. The nitty gritty work of doing all of this, however, is a labor of love. For those that dig into the binary, there’s tricky copyright concerns that need to be managed, only scraps of information about old hardware and software, highly optimized/tricky code that is tough to read, and almost no financial gain – except for commercial re-releases.
Made Up of Wires walks us through a live bit of decompiling of the PS1 classic: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to give you a taste of the work involved in this kind of work. Not really that different than any other reverse engineering but surprisingly accessible as these old games were relatively small and simple.
I was recently making my own retro 486 DX 66 PC build and needed to add an ISA sound card that supported both DOS and Windows games. A genuine Sound Blaster card would definitely work, but buying an genuine Sound Blaster Pro will run you well over $150+ (over $200 with it’s box)
In googling around, I found this great thread on Vogons where someone asked the same question: Is there a cheaper alternative than finding a Sound Blaster/Sound Blaster Pro? It turns out there is – the really excellent ESS AudioDrive ES1868.
I had not heard of the ESS AudioDrive ES1868 ISA sound card before, but it is considered one of the best Sound Blaster clone cards. It has tons of features such as Sound Blaster Pro 2 compatibility (something even the Sound Blaster 16 doesn’t have!). It is extremely easy to set up for DOS and Windows, has mixer inputs for line-in, microphone, CD input, wavetable, and is a really quiet card (as opposed to Sound Blaster 16’s that suffered from chronic hum and pop issues to the point it was often called the ‘NoiseBlaster’). The drivers are easy to set up and even support non-PnP configuration. It makes the card work with 99% of DOS games. Even better, the cards are readily available for around $25-$30.
I bought a card for $25 off eBay and installed it without issue. The ESS drivers are available on Phil’s Computer Lab link (below). I download the drivers, ran the installer, and set the parameters during install to the same as a default Sound Blaster card: A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6 Address: 220h IRQ: 7 DMA: 1 Port: 330h Type: 6
I then popped up my copy of Wolfenstein 3D, chose the Sound Blaster output option with default parameters and got all the awesome audio of yesteryear.
Learning everything there is to know about the different Sound Blaster and clone sound cards:
DOS Days has really excellent write-ups on all the various Sound Blaster cards with pros and cons of each. I’m really glad I read up on the different models before buying a generic Sound Blaster 16. There’s a tremendous wealth of information about issues unique to each card. Definitely a site worth reading before buying a card from eBay.
My first video card was the original 8-bit Sound Blaster card. Besides upgrading to VGA graphics, nothing changed my gaming experience back in the day more than this one upgrade.
Enter the Snark Barker. It’s an open source project that gives you a complete bill of materials, circuit diagram, board fab files, and tons of other information you need to make your own. Yes, MAKE your own Soundblaster clone. It looks like a very doable project for those a little handy with a soldering iron.
David Larsson makes a bunch of clone ISA audio boards such as the Gravis Ultrasound, 8-bit ISA Soundblaster, MCA Sound Blaster, Disney Sound Source. He sells them on Tindie for pretty reasonable prices considering the ebay prices for the original boards.
Here’s a good review of his 8-bit Soundblaster card:
These aren’t the only sound card clones. Turns out there are lots of others too:
Remember that 8088 or XT based PC’s ran their ISA bus at 4.77mhz, AT ran at 6mhz, and 386 and beyond ran ISA at 8mhz (though many later ISA systems ran them at 10mhz since ISA is very forgiving and the higher clock speed gave better speeds). This means you may find old 8-bit or AT-based ISA cards won’t work in AT or 386/486 systems since the ISA bus runs too fast.
If your BIOS allows it, you may be able slow down the ISA bus speeds and that might help old cards work.
Microsoft has recently release DOS 4.0 as MIT licensed OpenSource.
Dave’s Garage does a walkthrough of the history, sets up a dev environment (masm and C 5.1 compiler), builds the source, then bonus points for writing it to an actual 5.25″ floppy using a greaseweazle. He then boots it off an actual IBM XT.
