Help needed with OS/2

[Ampera]

I feel like a confused gorilla looking at a strange flashy box at this point.

I am experimenting with the OS/2 operating system. It's one that I love for it's amazing features, but I can't even figure out how to create a folder without using a DOS prompt, or to copy files over without using one.

My issue at the moment is one of installing a Windows program. Mine comes with an installer on a floppy, and when I install it says I need around 5-6MB of drive space. I have around 2400MB of drive space available for all of what the program may need, yet whenever I choose a directory to install it (any directory, in C, or in the weird space where it keeps all the Windows stuff) it claims I have no space left on the disk.

This is (at least to me) obviously some sort of write access thing, but no matter how hard I slam my head into the keyboard trying to use google, I can't come up with anything.

So maybe someone can help a lowly plebian like myself, and tell me what I am doing wrong.

Basic info about my config:

OS/2 Warp 4
120Mhz 486
32MB of RAM
2.5GB hard drive on EIDE (VESA controller)
Installing off the A drive.

The one thing I have not tried is copying the files off the A drive. Would that in any way help. It would help me to know how to do that using OS/2's strange file manager instead of resorting to Windows or DOS.

[Ian.M]

Something I've seen before with old software from the sub 528MB HDD limit era is installers that wont accept the extremely large amounts of free space potentially available under a newer OS + BIOS that eliminates that limit, because of a maths overflow when testing the free space against the known disk space required.   You may be able to get the install to proceed by creating large dummy files to reduce the free space to under 32MB (Pre MSDOS 4.0 partition limit) then deleting them afterwards.

[Ampera]

That barely occurred to me.

Gonna try to install it on PC-DOS first and then copy it over to OS/2

[MosherIV]

Hi

Try re-partitioning the drive into 1 that is around 600-700MB and the rest of the disk for the other partition.
OS2 Warp should cope with large 2GB partitions, it was around just when HDD were around that kind of size.

[stj]

had to click the "respect" button, for anybody still using Warp.

it was 32bit while windows wasnt. 
very popular btw, most people dont know this, but a lot of banks used it uptill only a few years ago because of stability.

[3db]

I think it was also the OS that banks used in ATM's

[tooki]

I think it was also the OS that banks used in ATM's

It was common in ATMs, but sadly not universal - lots use Windows.

I guess some modern ATMs probably use Linux now? Does anyone know?


I never got to use OS/2, but I always wanted to try it. Some interesting design decisions in it (including a garish default color scheme designed to be usable by color-blind users, a nice nod to accessibility).

[stj]

i would hope they use Linux or BSD,
but unfortunatly enough BSOD's have been foto'd to prove otherwise!

what asshole wants a cashpoint "phoning home" with "telemetry"? 

[Howardlong]

i would hope they use Linux or BSD,
but unfortunatly enough BSOD's have been foto'd to prove otherwise!

what asshole wants a cashpoint "phoning home" with "telemetry"? 

You can be sure that a retail bank won't deploy anything that is going to need to phone home, a typical infrastructure will be full of different security domains in many different segregated networks with several tiers of security. The Enterprise versions of Windows work differently in this respect and have different licensing models, although I wouldn't be surprised if some of them still run Windows XP.

What the security is around the mini ATMs that you see in hotel lobbies and convenience stores consists of nowadays I don't know, but they'd be nuts to connect it to anything without multiple tiers of security. They may still connect over ISDN or analogue POTS, and nowadays quIte possibly GSM for all I know.

[Howardlong]

I go back to 1990/91 with OS/2 when it was still 16 bit! I worked with it in the banking world until about 1996 or so when the finance world was rapidly switching to NT 3.51, particularly server side.

The worst thing was having both OS/2 and NT in the same server room. Presing Ctrl-Alt-Del on an OS/2 server is rather more catastrophic than doing it on NT (I speak as the voice of experience here!).

The programming API for OS/2 is far more logical and uniform than Windows' mess. To this day it's unclear to me why Microsoft dropped OS/2 other than for private political reasons. Technically it made little sense.

It was still possible to run 16 bit OS/2 programs on Windows NT 4.0 which provided a bunch of API shims and translations, although ISTR it was limited to console only apps, no Presentation Manager.

We ran OS/2 on clients longer than we ran it on servers due to application support.

[Halcyon]

Something I've seen before with old software from the sub 528MB HDD limit era is installers that wont accept the extremely large amounts of free space potentially available under a newer OS + BIOS that eliminates that limit, because of a maths overflow when testing the free space against the known disk space required.   You may be able to get the install to proceed by creating large dummy files to reduce the free space to under 32MB (Pre MSDOS 4.0 partition limit) then deleting them afterwards.

Yep, I've come across similar issues where very old installers fail to detect disk size correctly. Usually they report that the disk is full (even when it's not) but I've never had one simply fail to install before.

Try creating a small partition <500MB and try installing to that, if it works, that's your problem.

What program are you trying to install?

[Ampera]

WinCiv. I ended up reinstalling OS/2 because I couldn't figure out how to run fdisk on OS/2

I made another partition sub 500MB, gonna try that out.

[Ampera]

I'm good now. Thanks.

[Halcyon]

Awesome!

[NivagSwerdna]

...but a lot of banks used it uptill only a few years ago because of stability.

In a previous life I wrote some of the networking layer of CICS OS/2.  At one point it used to drive all the point of sales terminals in the Sears department stores amongst others.  You may have used some of my other software at some time too... 

[ivaylo]

Wow, 25 year old memories... Thanks for bringing them back!

[borjam]

Or because they had equipment contracts or supply deals with IBM who were keen to use an inhouse product wherever possible. The mainframe computers and larger disk and network controller devices that populated the datacenter generally came with a configuration console running OS/2.

I used it in the 90s for a quite complicated develpment (multi channel audio recorder for call centers).

We didn't choose it because of any contract with IBM or anything like that, but because the alternative was Windows.

I didn't quite like it (at some times I hated it actually) because of so many absolutely insane design decisions by IBM. It even had stupid bugs due to the coexistance of 16 and 32 bit code. I remember one particularly well, passing a buffer that crossed a 16 bit memory boundary to the send() or recv() functions in the socket library caused memory corruption even in 32 bit programs.

Memory management was pure crap, there was absolutely no serious performance monitoring software, the design had such horrible flaws that removing the diskette controller and driver made shell pipes (using "|" in the shell) stopped working... I could write pages and pages.

But at the time (and even adding a small hardware supervisor that hit the reset line in case OS/2 hung because of some UI event queue idiocy, which managed to block even some background operations) we achieved uptimes in excess of a year. We usually only stopped
the recorders when the DDS tape drives needed a replacement. Also I must admit that the API wasn't bad for concurrent programming. We ran hundreds of threads and the toolset was fine.

You can like or dislike IBM (actually I have banned IBM hardware at work recently thanks to their great support with a defective SAS controller) but it was really shocking that people who are supposed to know how to design operating systems produced that piece of crap.

But again, Windows was remarkably worse. If I remember well, the Windows versions from the 90's even had some serious uptime limitations because of some counter overflowing. And of course at the time doing silly stuff like changing an IP address required a Windows reboot, even on NT.

[Halcyon]

But again, Windows was remarkably worse. If I remember well, the Windows versions from the 90's even had some serious uptime limitations because of some counter overflowing. And of course at the time doing silly stuff like changing an IP address required a Windows reboot, even on NT.

My experiences with Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 differ. At my old workplace, we actually discovered a "lost" machine which had been running for several years. The room it was in used to be a server room, but as the company grew, infrastructure was moved out of there into larger off-site premises. In the end, all the room was used for was storage, patching (for a floor which was vacant) and a small corner which was leased to Hutchinson/Vodafone to house repeater equipment for a pager base station.

Anyway this machine running NT4 Server remained running, doing whatever it did and was just forgotten about.

[NivagSwerdna]

OS/2 predated Windows NT.  In OS/2 heyday the Windows alternatives used segmented memory and were highly crashy, the first Windows that really worked was Windows 3.1.  Windows NT was an evolution (I believe there was a joint development with Microsoft/IBM at the time). WinNT (and the Win32 API) arrived in Windows NT 3.1 but it was highly buggy, it wasn't until later with Windows NT 3.5 (and 3.51) that Win32 hit the mainstream.  The huge step change in stability came from processor support for virtual memory/protection levels (kernel mode et al.)  Wow... that was a LONG time ago.   

[Zero999]

But again, Windows was remarkably worse. If I remember well, the Windows versions from the 90's even had some serious uptime limitations because of some counter overflowing. And of course at the time doing silly stuff like changing an IP address required a Windows reboot, even on NT.

My experiences with Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 differ. At my old workplace, we actually discovered a "lost" machine which had been running for several years. The room it was in used to be a server room, but as the company grew, infrastructure was moved out of there into larger off-site premises. In the end, all the room was used for was storage, patching (for a floor which was vacant) and a small corner which was leased to Hutchinson/Vodafone to house repeater equipment for a pager base station.

Anyway this machine running NT4 Server remained running, doing whatever it did and was just forgotten about.

Don't confuse NT with Windows 3.x & 9x. It's a totally different beast. The non-NT based versions of Windows were a nasty mess of DOS code and protected mode code. NT was 32-bit from the ground up and much more stable.

[Ampera]

NT was also useless to anybody who cared anything about DOS. To Microsoft's credit, it wasn't meant for those people either.

I am having a hard time liking OS/2. To start off with, it is the most confusing thing I have ever used. Instead of cloning what every single reasonable operating system did, the file manager in OS/2 is completely ass backwards. This makes me use Windows or DOS to move or do anything with files.

The better DOS than DOS and better Windows than Windows is a neat concept, but it seems to be a bit under cooked on my end. A game I tried to run (WinCiv) doesn't have any audio, seemed to have palette issues (Although I can say I forgot to change the screen mode to 800x600x16, so my fault there). My sound card is working (It likes to bleat annoying noises at me whenever I do anything) yet it doesn't want to play the simple audio out of the Windows game.

On a 486, Windows, or even OS/2 is not that great of an idea. Of course it can run it, but I legitimately had trouble running Sim Tower, which is by no means a demanding game. I do want to like OS/2, it's just to convoluted, and too broken for me to use.

I do like IBM in a way, more for the cool points over anything. It's a strange concept to anybody uninitiated in the now present retro computing scene. I unfortunately have to go with what works and has worked for a long time, and that is PC-DOS 2000 with Windows 3.1

[Halcyon]

I think OS/2 was the operating system of choice for those who "hated" Microsoft... justifiable or not. The alternatives were much more painful than Windows of the time, although MacOS wasn't too bad... it was in the 90's when Apple was good, since then it's just dumbed down rubbish.

I remember a family friend ran OS/2 on a 386. Not sure how successful he was. It was almost as if he was a Windows hater "just because".

That said, I think Windows 7 is the last version of Windows I'll be running at home.

[NivagSwerdna]

I think OS/2 was the operating system of choice for those who "hated" Microsoft... justifiable or not.

OS/2 was primarily popular with people that had IBM big-iron.  It was a logical progression from a 3270 to something smarter on the desktop.  OS/2 and Windows had a lot in common.  Presentation Manager (the windowing part of OS/2) was developed in the UK 



IBM Hursley, Such a tough place to work.... it had a pub and tennis courts in the grounds. 

[stj]

My experiences with Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 differ. At my old workplace, we actually discovered a "lost" machine which had been running for several years. The room it was in used to be a server room, but as the company grew, infrastructure was moved out of there into larger off-site premises. In the end, all the room was used for was storage, patching (for a floor which was vacant) and a small corner which was leased to Hutchinson/Vodafone to house repeater equipment for a pager base station.

Anyway this machine running NT4 Server remained running, doing whatever it did and was just forgotten about.

that will be my Torrent server - i wondered where i left it! 

[medical-nerd]

I ran OS/2 very successfully on a 386sx/25 with 4 meg of memory in 1993. It was much more stable than windows and more responsive. I particularly liked the integrated multimedia features and easy purchase of updated drivers from CompuServe. When it became warp I was disillusioned and moved to Linux using the slackware floppy distribution.
8 virtual screens with multiple instances of netscape, editors and sound playing in the background on a 486-dx/66 and 8meg memory. I only had a dual boot system since the CompuServe program would not work within wine.
Demon Internet dialup at 56K, 1 pence a minute. It took me 3 months to download Tom Baker's Doctor Who episodes. (about 8gig).
Who remembers a.out, looking for programs using archie, usenet electronics newsgroups, updating things like binutils and libc with interaction and answers from Linux/GNU developers to us mortals  and mounting sunsite.unc.edu as a network drive?

Good times.

Cheers

[VK3DRB]

OS/2 was basically written my Microsoft. IBM kept that secret from their own employees. Employees were banned from using Windows at work, so the biggest users of OS/2 in the world by far were the 300,000 IBM employees. Almost no-one else bothered with it.

I worked with OS/2 up until 1999. The reasons OS/2 failed:

OS/2 was very poorly marketed.
OS/2 was too expensive.
OS/2 was sold by IBM which had no vision, poor leadership and lacked innovation.
OS/2 could not run 32-bit Windows applications in its Windows shell. It could only run 16-bit Windows applications. (Microsoft much have ROFL .)
OS/2 suffered badly from the dreaded BSOD.
OS/2 had an illogical and non-intuitive Presentation Manager (eg: System->Settings->System->etc). It was bad, but admittedly not near as bad as Windows 10 and Microsoft Office is today.

Gates won. IBM lost.

I actually suggested in 1988 in their employee suggestion plan to add in a thumb wheel volume control in their PC speaker. It was knocked back with the reply "There is no foreseeable marketing value in having a volume control for the audio in a PC."  No vision. No future. Hence the main reason why OS/2 was dead in the water.

[Ampera]

I don't disagree. I think I am gonna swap back in my PC-DOS drive. OS/2 is a neat experiment for me, but one with no decent outcome. I like to experiment with older operating systems with my machines. I am in the early days of my retro PC collecting. I have years to go an a lot more things to add, but it has become a really enjoyable hobby.

[NivagSwerdna]

I don't disagree. I think I am gonna swap back in my PC-DOS drive.

[Howardlong]

OS/2 was basically written my Microsoft. IBM kept that secret from their own employees. Employees were banned from using Windows at work, so the biggest users of OS/2 in the world by far were the 300,000 IBM employees. Almost no-one else bothered with it.

I worked with OS/2 up until 1999. The reasons OS/2 failed:

OS/2 was very poorly marketed.
OS/2 was too expensive.
OS/2 was sold by IBM which had no vision, poor leadership and lacked innovation.
OS/2 could not run 32-bit Windows applications in its Windows shell. It could only run 16-bit Windows applications. (Microsoft much have ROFL .)
OS/2 suffered badly from the dreaded BSOD.
OS/2 had an illogical and non-intuitive Presentation Manager (eg: System->Settings->System->etc). It was bad, but admittedly not near as bad as Windows 10 and Microsoft Office is today.

Remember that on the desktop, you had two choices in the early/mid 90s in the corporate office, and that was Windows for Workgroups or OS/2. WFW was incredibly flakey compared to OS/2, trying to squeeze the OS and all those network drivers into the bottom of RAM. A dodgy token ring connection from a WFW client would often bring down an entire LAN segment, and tracing the source of such a problem took a long time. I don't remember seeing Windows 95 or Windows 98 in any large corp offices, but that might just've been my limited exposure at that time. We moved to NT4 on the desktop directly from OS/2.

You're right about the PM GUI, it did end up being a mess, which is a shame because the original PM wasn't bad, it was pretty much a protected mode version of the Windows 3 GUI.

I actually suggested in 1988 in their employee suggestion plan to add in a thumb wheel volume control in their PC speaker. It was knocked back with the reply "There is no foreseeable marketing value in having a volume control for the audio in a PC."  No vision. No future. Hence the main reason why OS/2 was dead in the water.

I wish they'd put proper hardware volume controls especially on laptops, being dependent on soft controls and their lack of responsiveness when you accidentally click an NSFW link is rather irritating!

[vodka]

I think OS/2 was the operating system of choice for those who "hated" Microsoft... justifiable or not.

OS/2 was primarily popular with people that had IBM big-iron.  It was a logical progression from a 3270 to something smarter on the desktop.  OS/2 and Windows had a lot in common.  Presentation Manager (the windowing part of OS/2) was developed in the UK 



IBM Hursley, Such a tough place to work.... it had a pub and tennis courts in the grounds. 

How many people could buy a mainframe for home on 80s?   Answer 0. Only the great corporation could pay it. Furthermore , the old mainframes ocupped many spaces. To my father his corporation tried to give away a "SPERRY-UNIVAC" and he refused the gift because we hadn't space on the flat. Finally, the mainframe terminated on a Catalonia museum.

Now ,you  were comparing the 3270 Terminal with a Personal Computer, it is two things  very different . On mainly , the terminal is a simple monitor, it hasn't CPU neither hardisk.

[Ampera]

I wish they'd put proper hardware volume controls especially on laptops, being dependent on soft controls and their lack of responsiveness when you accidentally click an NSFW link is rather irritating!

I prefer the throw the laptop at the wall method.

You want to talk about shit controls? I have a Logitech G930. It's a daily struggle to not kill the stupid thing, and when I get new Sennheisers at some point, I am going to literally, and actually send this thing to hell. Maybe I'll make a forum post here for suggestions on how. It has a volume wheel on it that's supposed to control volume. Sounds cool, right?

Did I mention that it works when it wants to? Yes for your around 150USD it was when it came out, you get a headset made of Bakelite, shitty connection, shitty charging, shitty battery life, and broken buttons.

[NivagSwerdna]

Now ,you  were comparing the 3270 Terminal with a Personal Computer, it is two things  very different . On mainly , the terminal is a simple monitor, it hasn't CPU neither hardisk.

It was an evolution... first there was no mainframe access.... then there was dumb terminal access... (with time sharing sneaking in)... and then the terminals became a bit smarter so could draw fields etc.. e.g 3270 and then the 'terminals' started doing some of the processing... and then they did lots of the processing.... operating systems, networking hardware and communications protocols were all evolving rapidly in this period... hardwired serial, token ring, ethernet, netbios,...

[Howardlong]

i would hope they use Linux or BSD,
but unfortunatly enough BSOD's have been foto'd to prove otherwise!

what asshole wants a cashpoint "phoning home" with "telemetry"? 

You can be sure that a retail bank won't deploy anything that is going to need to phone home, a typical infrastructure will be full of different security domains in many different segregated networks with several tiers of security. The Enterprise versions of Windows work differently in this respect and have different licensing models, although I wouldn't be surprised if some of them still run Windows XP.

What the security is around the mini ATMs that you see in hotel lobbies and convenience stores consists of nowadays I don't know, but they'd be nuts to connect it to anything without multiple tiers of security. They may still connect over ISDN or analogue POTS, and nowadays quIte possibly GSM for all I know.

Oh dear! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-40655653/cash-machine-b hacked-in-five-minutes

[borjam]

Don't confuse NT with Windows 3.x & 9x. It's a totally different beast. The non-NT based versions of Windows were a nasty mess of DOS code and protected mode code. NT was 32-bit from the ground up and much more stable.

I know it was different. That said, NT wasn't even available when we begun the development. And what I said about requiring a reboot for a stupid configuration change was true for NT and some subsequent versions. And anyway Windows whatever is a piece of crap. I will never understand how one of the very best operating system architects in history was capable of perpetrating such a turd. But well, shit happens.

[Zero999]

Don't confuse NT with Windows 3.x & 9x. It's a totally different beast. The non-NT based versions of Windows were a nasty mess of DOS code and protected mode code. NT was 32-bit from the ground up and much more stable.

I know it was different. That said, NT wasn't even available when we begun the development. And what I said about requiring a reboot for a stupid configuration change was true for NT and some subsequent versions. And anyway Windows whatever is a piece of crap. I will never understand how one of the very best operating system architects in history was capable of perpetrating such a turd. But well, shit happens.

I found NT to be fairly stable, compared to WinDOS, but never used the earlier versions, only 4.5 onwards. I suppose it's not Cutler's fault but his bosses. You can have good programmers but if they're set unrealistic targets and a shitty specification, then you'll get crap. Blame M$.

NT was also useless to anybody who cared anything about DOS. To Microsoft's credit, it wasn't meant for those people either.

I suppose that's why it took so long for them to use NT for their main consumer OS.

The better DOS than DOS and better Windows than Windows is a neat concept, but it seems to be a bit under cooked on my end. A game I tried to run (WinCiv) doesn't have any audio, seemed to have palette issues (Although I can say I forgot to change the screen mode to 800x600x16, so my fault there). My sound card is working (It likes to bleat annoying noises at me whenever I do anything) yet it doesn't want to play the simple audio out of the Windows game.

I don't see why that should have been a problem. If the game was designed for 16 colours, then it should run in higher colour depth modes with no issues. If it doesn't, then it's shitty programming, on the side of the game, OS or video card driver developers. The only legitimate issue should be speed: the video card & CPU may be too slow for the higher colour depth.

On a 486, Windows, or even OS/2 is not that great of an idea. Of course it can run it, but I legitimately had trouble running Sim Tower, which is by no means a demanding game.

Have you looked at the minimum requirements for that game? They were quite high for a PC that age: 8-bit colours would have meant a resolution of at least 640x480 (Windows didn't support 320x200 8-bit until 95) which was quite high for a PC of 1994 vintage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower#Development

[Halcyon]

Windows didn't support 320x200 8-bit until 95

Not true at all. Windows 3.1 supported at least XGA (1024x768). I have a 486 machine right next to me now which is running in that resolution @ 256 colours. It was dependant of video hardware and drivers but even out of the box it supported "high" resolutions:



Edit: Misread and mis-quoted. My bad!

[Zero999]

Windows didn't support 320x200 8-bit until 95

Not true at all. Windows 3.1 supported at least XGA (1024x768). I have a 486 machine right next to me now which is running in that resolution @ 256 colours. It was dependant of video hardware and drivers but even out of the box it supported "high" resolutions:

I know. That's not what I said. It was the lower resolutions which were the problem. There simply wasn't the processing power to do anything with 640x480 8-bit colour, except for static images, even moving objects around in Paint Brush was a pain on a 486. This is one of the reasons why DOS remained popular for games, until Windows 95 became widespread and CPU power increased enough: DOS supported 320x200 8-bit mode.

[Halcyon]

I know. That's not what I said. It was the lower resolutions which were the problem. There simply wasn't the processing power to do anything with 640x480 8-bit colour, except for static images, even moving objects around in Paint Brush was a pain on a 486. This is one of the reasons why DOS remained popular for games, until Windows 95 became widespread and CPU power increased enough: DOS supported 320x200 8-bit mode.

My mistake. I misread. Apologies.

[VK3DRB]

NT was stable - except those using it professionally would need to do a clean install every year else it would slow down the PC. I do not recall having to reinstall OS/2 each year.

Incidentally, I was the first person in Australia to install OS/2. I got a copy from Diskette Replication at the IBM Plant the very day they started replicating the diskettes. Then I installed it on my AT with a whopping 2MB or RAM. No Presentation Manager in those days, I could run a couple of "DOS" sessions at once, allowing me to print whilst I was doing other work. I could also run more than one application at the same time. It blew me away. It worked a lot better than DOS with Sidekick. The BSOD only appeared in the versions that had Presentation Manager.

One of the best text editors ever was the EPM editor which came out with OS/2 Warp. Very powerful, with its brilliant design, use of macros and ease of use. EPM left VI, VIM and all that Unix rubbish for dead. EPM was way ahead of its time. The precursor to EPM was the E3 editor, another powerful editor, which came with some versions of IBM DOS, but for some reason didn't come with MD DOS.

I seem to recall OS/2 peaked out at about 17 diskettes for installation. Painful install, especially if you got a diskette error part way through.

[Ampera]

Alright there must be some confusion with what I said.

Speed is by no means an issue. This is one of the fastest bog standard 486 you can get. At 120mhz, it can almost run Quake (In fact if you do some finagling with the settings, it's playable)

For the hell of it, I installed WinCiv onto my Windows 3.1 installation (Which is pointless because I have the DOS one installed too).

Before I go onto how it went, I want to say my graphics card is pretty fast. It's a VLB card and can handle rapid changes of frames.

The resolution is set to 1152x864 which is the highest resolution that outputs at 60hz. For no good reason 1024x768 won't work at 60hz, even though it's a supported mode all the way up to 75hz. The card can do 1280x1024, but I do not have a CRT to test that with since the refresh rate is so weird.

Anyways, 1152x864x8, I test WinCiv, and because of the 8bpp mode, it's run out of colours and doesn't look right. I'm not really surprised by this though, and it was a similar issue I had in OS/2. The PCM sound works however.

I do want to say for applications that DO support 256 colours on screen, Windows 3.1 works FINE. The 486 has no problem pushing basic OS functions.

My Trio32 only supports 800x600 with 64k colours on screen, not the 16.7m of an 8bpp colour mode. However, Civilization now works fine on this mode with 0 slowdown. The colours are nice, and the audio works.

So, 800x600x(idk is it 17?) works fine. 0 slowdown for 2D applications. SimTower works fine on these modes, it only slows down on higher resolutions because of the massive sprite and animation count.

I don't know what 486 you were using, maybe an SX-25, but this is a more powerful 486.

[timb]

Alright there must be some confusion with what I said.

Yes, however that was very non-standard for that timeframe. (If they were even available.)

In '94 a 486-DX2 66MHz with 4-8MB of RAM and maybe 1MB of video RAM on your non-3D accelerated ISA video card would have been your standard upper tier system. You would have run Windows 3.1 at 640x480@256 Colors (*maybe* 800x600 if you had a VESA card and better monitor).

Most Windows games weren't designed to run at higher resolutions at the time. Some flat out won't run and those that can may do so poorly.

[Ampera]

Alright there must be some confusion with what I said.

Yes, however that was very non-standard for that timeframe. (If they were even available.)

In '94 a 486-DX2 66MHz with 4-8MB of RAM and maybe 1MB of video RAM on your non-3D accelerated ISA video card would have been your standard upper tier system. You would have run Windows 3.1 at 640x480@256 Colors (*maybe* 800x600 if you had a VESA card and better monitor).

Most Windows games weren't designed to run at higher resolutions at the time. Some flat out won't run and those that can may do so poorly.

Yeah my system is far superior. I have an Am486-DX4-100-SV8B (8 kilobytes of write back L1 cache) running at 120mhz (40mhz FSB overclock) on a VESA Local Bus Socket 3 board. I have 32MB of FPM RAM and a 32-bit Local Bus VESA compatible card by Diamond/S3 (Probably some of the fastest cards of the time were by them)

It's by no means an out of the ordinary 486 as far as retro collecting goes, but it is still a very powerful machine for a 486. It's almost as powerful as a Socket 4 pentium.

[tooki]

On a 486, Windows, or even OS/2 is not that great of an idea. Of course it can run it, but I legitimately had trouble running Sim Tower, which is by no means a demanding game.

Have you looked at the minimum requirements for that game? They were quite high for a PC that age: 8-bit colours would have meant a resolution of at least 640x480 (Windows didn't support 320x200 8-bit until 95) which was quite high for a PC of 1994 vintage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower#Development

Alright there must be some confusion with what I said.

Yes, however that was very non-standard for that timeframe. (If they were even available.)

In '94 a 486-DX2 66MHz with 4-8MB of RAM and maybe 1MB of video RAM on your non-3D accelerated ISA video card would have been your standard upper tier system. You would have run Windows 3.1 at 640x480@256 Colors (*maybe* 800x600 if you had a VESA card and better monitor).

I think you guys need to revise your timelines a tiny bit, your memory is a bit hazy, I reckon -- by 1994, 640x480@8 bit was not unusual at the low end, and the very high end was actually SXGA (1280x1024).  Remember, Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) was most commonly used with 640x480@4-bit, but 8-bit was common during its lifespan. By 1995, when Windows 95 came out, 800x600@8-bit was the recommended configuration, and 1024x768 was not unusual on beefier systems.

Looking at the ads in the Sept. 1994 issue of BYTE, I see that even ordinary laptops had 640x480 and 800x600 displays at 8-bit. The high end for Windows PCs (not even counting high-end workstations like Intergraph and Sun) was 24-bit color at SXGA, 3D acceleration was just beginning to hit the scene. It looks like the mainstream was unaccelerated 1MB SVGA, which allowed for 800x600@16-bit, with the CPU being the real bottleneck in that mode.

(For reference on the Mac side, the 1987 Mac II was the first to support external displays, and it supported 640x480 at 4-bit by default, 8-bit with VRAM upgrade. By 1991, high end Macs, namely the Quadra line, supported 1152x870@4-bit, and 8-bit with a VRAM upgrade. By late 1993, even some consumer Macs like the Performa 475 supported 1152x870@4-bit out of the box and 8-bit with added VRAM. Of course, such a display cost many times more than the consumer computer itself!)

In '94 a 486-DX2 66MHz with 4-8MB of RAM and maybe 1MB of video RAM on your non-3D accelerated ISA video card would have been your standard upper tier system. You would have run Windows 3.1 at 640x480@256 Colors (*maybe* 800x600 if you had a VESA card and better monitor).

Most Windows games weren't designed to run at higher resolutions at the time. Some flat out won't run and those that can may do so poorly.

Yep, with the caveat that most graphics-intensive PC games of the time (think 1993's Doom) ran on straight DOS for performance reasons, usually in EGA and other low-res color modes. It wasn't until Windows 95 that most games became "native" Windows applications.

[Zero999]

Alright there must be some confusion with what I said.

What confused me was this sentence:

A game I tried to run (WinCiv) doesn't have any audio, seemed to have palette issues (Although I can say I forgot to change the screen mode to 800x600x16, so my fault there).

I thought you meant 800x600 16 colours. Now I realised you probably meant 800x600 16-bit, i.e. 2¹⁶ colours.

Anyways, 1152x864x8, I test WinCiv, and because of the 8bpp mode, it's run out of colours and doesn't look right. I'm not really surprised by this though, and it was a similar issue I had in OS/2. The PCM sound works however.

I'm interested why a game of that era would require such a high colour depth, when 8-bit colour was normally as high as it went, unless you paid silly money for a graphics card.

I can't comment on OS/2 but in 8-bit graphics modes, Windows used an adjustable colour palette with 20 of those colours were fixed (Windows 9x changed four of the normally fixed colours according to the colour scheme, earlier versions didn't), so the colours of GUI didn't change. The current active window, always set the palette, which meant that other windows behind it, often went odd colours. There was also often a delay between changing palettes so it would take a second or so for the correct colours to be displayed. Windows versions prior to 95 were the worst. Windows 95, onwards used the fixed colours for inactive windows, so it didn't look as bad.

Speed is by no means an issue. This is one of the fastest bog standard 486 you can get. At 120mhz, it can almost run Quake (In fact if you do some finagling with the settings, it's playable)

For the hell of it, I installed WinCiv onto my Windows 3.1 installation (Which is pointless because I have the DOS one installed too).

Before I go onto how it went, I want to say my graphics card is pretty fast. It's a VLB card and can handle rapid changes of frames.

The resolution is set to 1152x864 which is the highest resolution that outputs at 60hz. For no good reason 1024x768 won't work at 60hz, even though it's a supported mode all the way up to 75hz. The card can do 1280x1024, but I do not have a CRT to test that with since the refresh rate is so weird.

I do want to say for applications that DO support 256 colours on screen, Windows 3.1 works FINE. The 486 has no problem pushing basic OS functions.

My Trio32 only supports 800x600 with 64k colours on screen, not the 16.7m of an 8bpp colour mode. However, Civilization now works fine on this mode with 0 slowdown. The colours are nice, and the audio works.

So, 800x600x(idk is it 17?) works fine. 0 slowdown for 2D applications. SimTower works fine on these modes, it only slows down on higher resolutions because of the massive sprite and animation count.

I don't know what 486 you were using, maybe an SX-25, but this is a more powerful 486.

This reminds me of when in the late 90s, I upgraded my crapping 386 SX to a 486 66MHz, with a video card with 1MB of RAM. I already has a Pentium 200 MMX machine by then, but I did it for the hell of it. The video card supported 24-bpp but only up to 640x480 and was slow at that colour depth. 16-bit 800x600 was the perfect compromise between speed and quality. 8-bit colour was very crappy and could sometimes be slower, with all the palette changes.

[Ampera]

My only idea as to why the palette issues suck so much are because it's an early Windows game. The thing itself doesn't seem to be programmed with any real care in the world.

I'm running the DOS version now, which uses mode 13H.

[timb]

I think you guys need to revise your timelines a tiny bit, your memory is a bit hazy, I reckon -- by 1994, 640x480@8 bit was not unusual at the low end, and the very high end was actually SXGA (1280x1024).  Remember, Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) was most commonly used with 640x480@4-bit, but 8-bit was common during its lifespan. By 1995, when Windows 95 came out, 800x600@8-bit was the recommended configuration, and 1024x768 was not unusual on beefier systems.

Looking at the ads in the Sept. 1994 issue of BYTE, I see that even ordinary laptops had 640x480 and 800x600 displays at 8-bit. The high end for Windows PCs (not even counting high-end workstations like Intergraph and Sun) was 24-bit color at SXGA, 3D acceleration was just beginning to hit the scene. It looks like the mainstream was unaccelerated 1MB SVGA, which allowed for 800x600@16-bit, with the CPU being the real bottleneck in that mode.

(For reference on the Mac side, the 1987 Mac II was the first to support external displays, and it supported 640x480 at 4-bit by default, 8-bit with VRAM upgrade. By 1991, high end Macs, namely the Quadra line, supported 1152x870@4-bit, and 8-bit with a VRAM upgrade. By late 1993, even some consumer Macs like the Performa 475 supported 1152x870@4-bit out of the box and 8-bit with added VRAM. Of course, such a display cost many times more than the consumer computer itself!)

What was cutting edge and what was common are two entirely different things. You have to remember, in the early 90's PCs were still not quite affordable for everyone. If you were a regular user on a budget you basically had two options: Buy a used name brand PC from someone upgrading (usually through classified ads) *or* buy a new mid-range no-name system from a local shop or computer show.

Anyway, in early 1994 the most common configuration by far (that the majority of people would have been capable running) would have been 640x480. I saw some statistics on this recently (common screen resolution from 1982 to 2016) but can't find it at the moment. One interesting thing about it was how VGA was by far the most popular resolution from shortly after its introduction up until just after Windows 95 came out; since, as you said, it recommended at least SVGA resolution. (It was that plus RAM prices falling that finally pushed people to upgrade I think.)

I mean, with the way Windows 3.1 ran programs there was little need for large screen resolutions for most home users.

[VK3DRB]

I don't disagree. I think I am gonna swap back in my PC-DOS drive. OS/2 is a neat experiment for me, but one with no decent outcome. I like to experiment with older operating systems with my machines. I am in the early days of my retro PC collecting. I have years to go an a lot more things to add, but it has become a really enjoyable hobby.

Try DRDOS, which was Digital Research DOS. Some dingbat hobbyists and workers in the clone computer stores called it "Doctor DOS". I used it for a few years and it was very good. IBM DOS was somewhat better than MSDOS due to the addons like the E3 editor. Plus the IBM DOS included a much better hard disk data compression tool called Superstor, than Microsoft's crappy Doublespace if I recall.

[Ampera]

I don't disagree. I think I am gonna swap back in my PC-DOS drive. OS/2 is a neat experiment for me, but one with no decent outcome. I like to experiment with older operating systems with my machines. I am in the early days of my retro PC collecting. I have years to go an a lot more things to add, but it has become a really enjoyable hobby.

Try DRDOS, which was Digital Research DOS. Some dingbat hobbyists and workers in the clone computer stores called it "Doctor DOS". I used it for a few years and it was very good. IBM DOS was somewhat better than MSDOS due to the addons like the E3 editor. Plus the IBM DOS included a much better hard disk data compression tool called Superstor, than Microsoft's crappy Doublespace if I recall.

I know about DR-DOS. One neat thing about the later versions (Caldera and Novell) is that they have FAT-32 support, which is almost entirely useless for most DOS applications, as anything that needs more hard drive space would be either using Linux or Windows (NT or 9x), this is not mentioning the numerous issues with it.

I use PC-DOS because it's just the dos with the highest cool factor. It may seem strange to base an operating system off that, but in the retro computing sector, it's part of the reason we build the machines.

[helius]

Yep, with the caveat that most graphics-intensive PC games of the time (think 1993's Doom) ran on straight DOS for performance reasons, usually in EGA and other low-res color modes.

This is not quite right: EGA was going obsolete by 1990. The color palettes are also much less flexible than VGA.
The predecessor to Wolfenstein 3D, called Catacomb 3D, used EGA and the visual difference is very noticeable.
Wolf3D and DOOM used an undocumented VGA mode called "Mode X" that was faster and looked better than any of the standard modes.

[tooki]

I think you guys need to revise your timelines a tiny bit, your memory is a bit hazy, I reckon -- by 1994, 640x480@8 bit was not unusual at the low end, and the very high end was actually SXGA (1280x1024).  Remember, Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) was most commonly used with 640x480@4-bit, but 8-bit was common during its lifespan. By 1995, when Windows 95 came out, 800x600@8-bit was the recommended configuration, and 1024x768 was not unusual on beefier systems.

Looking at the ads in the Sept. 1994 issue of BYTE, I see that even ordinary laptops had 640x480 and 800x600 displays at 8-bit. The high end for Windows PCs (not even counting high-end workstations like Intergraph and Sun) was 24-bit color at SXGA, 3D acceleration was just beginning to hit the scene. It looks like the mainstream was unaccelerated 1MB SVGA, which allowed for 800x600@16-bit, with the CPU being the real bottleneck in that mode.

(For reference on the Mac side, the 1987 Mac II was the first to support external displays, and it supported 640x480 at 4-bit by default, 8-bit with VRAM upgrade. By 1991, high end Macs, namely the Quadra line, supported 1152x870@4-bit, and 8-bit with a VRAM upgrade. By late 1993, even some consumer Macs like the Performa 475 supported 1152x870@4-bit out of the box and 8-bit with added VRAM. Of course, such a display cost many times more than the consumer computer itself!)

What was cutting edge and what was common are two entirely different things. You have to remember, in the early 90's PCs were still not quite affordable for everyone. If you were a regular user on a budget you basically had two options: Buy a used name brand PC from someone upgrading (usually through classified ads) *or* buy a new mid-range no-name system from a local shop or computer show.

Anyway, in early 1994 the most common configuration by far (that the majority of people would have been capable running) would have been 640x480. I saw some statistics on this recently (common screen resolution from 1982 to 2016) but can't find it at the moment. One interesting thing about it was how VGA was by far the most popular resolution from shortly after its introduction up until just after Windows 95 came out; since, as you said, it recommended at least SVGA resolution. (It was that plus RAM prices falling that finally pushed people to upgrade I think.)

I mean, with the way Windows 3.1 ran programs there was little need for large screen resolutions for most home users.

I addressed what was cutting edge in my comment. The whole point was that hero999 originally said 640x480@8bit was a "quite high" resolution for 1994, which is utter nonsense: it was the entry level by then.

[X]

OS/2 has actually been reincarnated twice. First as eComStation (Serenity Systems) then as ArcaOS, which was released in May, still 32-bit only though.

There was also "OS/2 Warp Server 4" which was actually OS/2 Warp 3.0, but for some reason they put "4" on the packaging. No wonder OS/2 lost to Windows, thanks to rubbish marketing. Also, Windows NT allows multiple users on the system at the same time (obviously not all using the same screen at once) while OS/2 was still single user.

Still, this, as well as Windows 1.x/2.x/3.x/9x/ME are better than Windows 8 and above.

[Zero999]

I think you guys need to revise your timelines a tiny bit, your memory is a bit hazy, I reckon -- by 1994, 640x480@8 bit was not unusual at the low end, and the very high end was actually SXGA (1280x1024).  Remember, Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) was most commonly used with 640x480@4-bit, but 8-bit was common during its lifespan. By 1995, when Windows 95 came out, 800x600@8-bit was the recommended configuration, and 1024x768 was not unusual on beefier systems.

Looking at the ads in the Sept. 1994 issue of BYTE, I see that even ordinary laptops had 640x480 and 800x600 displays at 8-bit. The high end for Windows PCs (not even counting high-end workstations like Intergraph and Sun) was 24-bit color at SXGA, 3D acceleration was just beginning to hit the scene. It looks like the mainstream was unaccelerated 1MB SVGA, which allowed for 800x600@16-bit, with the CPU being the real bottleneck in that mode.

(For reference on the Mac side, the 1987 Mac II was the first to support external displays, and it supported 640x480 at 4-bit by default, 8-bit with VRAM upgrade. By 1991, high end Macs, namely the Quadra line, supported 1152x870@4-bit, and 8-bit with a VRAM upgrade. By late 1993, even some consumer Macs like the Performa 475 supported 1152x870@4-bit out of the box and 8-bit with added VRAM. Of course, such a display cost many times more than the consumer computer itself!)

What was cutting edge and what was common are two entirely different things. You have to remember, in the early 90's PCs were still not quite affordable for everyone. If you were a regular user on a budget you basically had two options: Buy a used name brand PC from someone upgrading (usually through classified ads) *or* buy a new mid-range no-name system from a local shop or computer show.

Anyway, in early 1994 the most common configuration by far (that the majority of people would have been capable running) would have been 640x480. I saw some statistics on this recently (common screen resolution from 1982 to 2016) but can't find it at the moment. One interesting thing about it was how VGA was by far the most popular resolution from shortly after its introduction up until just after Windows 95 came out; since, as you said, it recommended at least SVGA resolution. (It was that plus RAM prices falling that finally pushed people to upgrade I think.)

I mean, with the way Windows 3.1 ran programs there was little need for large screen resolutions for most home users.

I addressed what was cutting edge in my comment. The whole point was that hero999 originally said 640x480@8bit was a "quite high" resolution for 1994, which is utter nonsense: it was the entry level by then.

Obviously you lot must have had more money than my family had, back when I got my first PC at the age of 12: a 386 with a VGA card. I suppose a lot of you were working. There's a different to what the average family could afford and what you would have used at work. I believe my dad used a Pentium which did have a 640x480 display (or more) at work. I remember going into his office at the school holidays and been blown away at the graphics: it could show proper colour photographs at a decent resolution and could play real sound, rather than the beeps and squawks of the PC speaker.

Perhaps you're right about what was mainstream at work and for those with money but my family could only afford a low end machine, so I thought it was the norm.

[stj]

i use freedos sometimes.

http://www.freedos.org/

because it's 32bit and uses fat32 and runs on modern hardware.
in case anybody is wondering, i use it for repair work on dos based embeded systems.
i extract the custommer software, then rebuild a new drive with freedos and restore the applications.
it boots faster afterwards and i can use things like 4gig CF-cards without having to split partitions.

[Zero999]

i use freedos sometimes.

http://www.freedos.org/

because it's 32bit and uses fat32 and runs on modern hardware.
in case anybody is wondering, i use it for repair work on dos based embeded systems.
i extract the custommer software, then rebuild a new drive with freedos and restore the applications.
it boots faster afterwards and i can use things like 4gig CF-cards without having to split partitions.

It may have a DOS extender and FAT32 support, but I'm pretty sure FreeDOS is mostly 16-bit, at least command.com still is.

FreeDOS-32 is 32-bit but it doesn't seem to be anywhere near finished and appears to no longer be in development. Could it be vapourware?
http://freedos-32.sourceforge.net/

[stj]

check the link i gave.
they may have dumped sourceforge after the adware/malware installers episode.
that drove a lot of people from sourceforge to places like github & savanna
 

[Ampera]

I dislike FreeDOS and the CDU MS-DOS 7.1 because of all the stupid 32-bit stuff and FAT32 support. It's just not needed for DOS. If you need more than 2GB of hard disk space per partition, then you should use Windows.

[Zero999]

check the link i gave.
they may have dumped sourceforge after the adware/malware installers episode.
that drove a lot of people from sourceforge to places like github & savanna

I did and there's nothing on their site to suggest FreeDOS is a 32-bit OS. I ran it fairly recently, under DOSEmu and am pretty sure it has a 16-bit kernel.

[stj]

I dislike FreeDOS and the CDU MS-DOS 7.1 because of all the stupid 32-bit stuff and FAT32 support. It's just not needed for DOS. If you need more than 2GB of hard disk space per partition, then you should use Windows.

pretty dumb atitude.

if your in the repair industry and you have a 4gig storage and a 32bit board then using multiple partitions and 16bit code is just stupid.
so is bloating the system with windows filth.
and yes, that's what i think of windows.

btw, you cant have an o.s. that does stuff in the background (windows) because the equipment is shutdown by cutting the power - not pressing a button and waiting for the crap o.s. to flush it's caches and finish what it probably shouldnt have been doing in the first place!!!

[tooki]

I think you guys need to revise your timelines a tiny bit, your memory is a bit hazy, I reckon -- by 1994, 640x480@8 bit was not unusual at the low end, and the very high end was actually SXGA (1280x1024).  Remember, Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) was most commonly used with 640x480@4-bit, but 8-bit was common during its lifespan. By 1995, when Windows 95 came out, 800x600@8-bit was the recommended configuration, and 1024x768 was not unusual on beefier systems.

Looking at the ads in the Sept. 1994 issue of BYTE, I see that even ordinary laptops had 640x480 and 800x600 displays at 8-bit. The high end for Windows PCs (not even counting high-end workstations like Intergraph and Sun) was 24-bit color at SXGA, 3D acceleration was just beginning to hit the scene. It looks like the mainstream was unaccelerated 1MB SVGA, which allowed for 800x600@16-bit, with the CPU being the real bottleneck in that mode.

(For reference on the Mac side, the 1987 Mac II was the first to support external displays, and it supported 640x480 at 4-bit by default, 8-bit with VRAM upgrade. By 1991, high end Macs, namely the Quadra line, supported 1152x870@4-bit, and 8-bit with a VRAM upgrade. By late 1993, even some consumer Macs like the Performa 475 supported 1152x870@4-bit out of the box and 8-bit with added VRAM. Of course, such a display cost many times more than the consumer computer itself!)

What was cutting edge and what was common are two entirely different things. You have to remember, in the early 90's PCs were still not quite affordable for everyone. If you were a regular user on a budget you basically had two options: Buy a used name brand PC from someone upgrading (usually through classified ads) *or* buy a new mid-range no-name system from a local shop or computer show.

Anyway, in early 1994 the most common configuration by far (that the majority of people would have been capable running) would have been 640x480. I saw some statistics on this recently (common screen resolution from 1982 to 2016) but can't find it at the moment. One interesting thing about it was how VGA was by far the most popular resolution from shortly after its introduction up until just after Windows 95 came out; since, as you said, it recommended at least SVGA resolution. (It was that plus RAM prices falling that finally pushed people to upgrade I think.)

I mean, with the way Windows 3.1 ran programs there was little need for large screen resolutions for most home users.

I addressed what was cutting edge in my comment. The whole point was that hero999 originally said 640x480@8bit was a "quite high" resolution for 1994, which is utter nonsense: it was the entry level by then.

Obviously you lot must have had more money than my family had, back when I got my first PC at the age of 12: a 386 with a VGA card. I suppose a lot of you were working. There's a different to what the average family could afford and what you would have used at work. I believe my dad used a Pentium which did have a 640x480 display (or more) at work. I remember going into his office at the school holidays and been blown away at the graphics: it could show proper colour photographs at a decent resolution and could play real sound, rather than the beeps and squawks of the PC speaker.

Perhaps you're right about what was mainstream at work and for those with money but my family could only afford a low end machine, so I thought it was the norm.

We didn't get a computer till I was 12, either!

But you are saying simultaneously that a) 640x480 was a high-end resolution, and b) that your modest first PC had a VGA card: that's 640x480.

 

[Zero999]

I think you guys need to revise your timelines a tiny bit, your memory is a bit hazy, I reckon -- by 1994, 640x480@8 bit was not unusual at the low end, and the very high end was actually SXGA (1280x1024).  Remember, Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) was most commonly used with 640x480@4-bit, but 8-bit was common during its lifespan. By 1995, when Windows 95 came out, 800x600@8-bit was the recommended configuration, and 1024x768 was not unusual on beefier systems.

Looking at the ads in the Sept. 1994 issue of BYTE, I see that even ordinary laptops had 640x480 and 800x600 displays at 8-bit. The high end for Windows PCs (not even counting high-end workstations like Intergraph and Sun) was 24-bit color at SXGA, 3D acceleration was just beginning to hit the scene. It looks like the mainstream was unaccelerated 1MB SVGA, which allowed for 800x600@16-bit, with the CPU being the real bottleneck in that mode.

(For reference on the Mac side, the 1987 Mac II was the first to support external displays, and it supported 640x480 at 4-bit by default, 8-bit with VRAM upgrade. By 1991, high end Macs, namely the Quadra line, supported 1152x870@4-bit, and 8-bit with a VRAM upgrade. By late 1993, even some consumer Macs like the Performa 475 supported 1152x870@4-bit out of the box and 8-bit with added VRAM. Of course, such a display cost many times more than the consumer computer itself!)

What was cutting edge and what was common are two entirely different things. You have to remember, in the early 90's PCs were still not quite affordable for everyone. If you were a regular user on a budget you basically had two options: Buy a used name brand PC from someone upgrading (usually through classified ads) *or* buy a new mid-range no-name system from a local shop or computer show.

Anyway, in early 1994 the most common configuration by far (that the majority of people would have been capable running) would have been 640x480. I saw some statistics on this recently (common screen resolution from 1982 to 2016) but can't find it at the moment. One interesting thing about it was how VGA was by far the most popular resolution from shortly after its introduction up until just after Windows 95 came out; since, as you said, it recommended at least SVGA resolution. (It was that plus RAM prices falling that finally pushed people to upgrade I think.)

I mean, with the way Windows 3.1 ran programs there was little need for large screen resolutions for most home users.

I addressed what was cutting edge in my comment. The whole point was that hero999 originally said 640x480@8bit was a "quite high" resolution for 1994, which is utter nonsense: it was the entry level by then.

Obviously you lot must have had more money than my family had, back when I got my first PC at the age of 12: a 386 with a VGA card. I suppose a lot of you were working. There's a different to what the average family could afford and what you would have used at work. I believe my dad used a Pentium which did have a 640x480 display (or more) at work. I remember going into his office at the school holidays and been blown away at the graphics: it could show proper colour photographs at a decent resolution and could play real sound, rather than the beeps and squawks of the PC speaker.

Perhaps you're right about what was mainstream at work and for those with money but my family could only afford a low end machine, so I thought it was the norm.

We didn't get a computer till I was 12, either!

But you are saying simultaneously that a) 640x480 was a high-end resolution, and b) that your modest first PC had a VGA card: that's 640x480.

 

Yes.

a) 640x480 8-bit 256 colours was high end compared to what my family could afford.

b) 640x480 4-bit 16 colours was all my family could afford.

[timb]

I think you guys need to revise your timelines a tiny bit, your memory is a bit hazy, I reckon -- by 1994, 640x480@8 bit was not unusual at the low end, and the very high end was actually SXGA (1280x1024).  Remember, Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) was most commonly used with 640x480@4-bit, but 8-bit was common during its lifespan. By 1995, when Windows 95 came out, 800x600@8-bit was the recommended configuration, and 1024x768 was not unusual on beefier systems.

Looking at the ads in the Sept. 1994 issue of BYTE, I see that even ordinary laptops had 640x480 and 800x600 displays at 8-bit. The high end for Windows PCs (not even counting high-end workstations like Intergraph and Sun) was 24-bit color at SXGA, 3D acceleration was just beginning to hit the scene. It looks like the mainstream was unaccelerated 1MB SVGA, which allowed for 800x600@16-bit, with the CPU being the real bottleneck in that mode.

(For reference on the Mac side, the 1987 Mac II was the first to support external displays, and it supported 640x480 at 4-bit by default, 8-bit with VRAM upgrade. By 1991, high end Macs, namely the Quadra line, supported 1152x870@4-bit, and 8-bit with a VRAM upgrade. By late 1993, even some consumer Macs like the Performa 475 supported 1152x870@4-bit out of the box and 8-bit with added VRAM. Of course, such a display cost many times more than the consumer computer itself!)

What was cutting edge and what was common are two entirely different things. You have to remember, in the early 90's PCs were still not quite affordable for everyone. If you were a regular user on a budget you basically had two options: Buy a used name brand PC from someone upgrading (usually through classified ads) *or* buy a new mid-range no-name system from a local shop or computer show.

Anyway, in early 1994 the most common configuration by far (that the majority of people would have been capable running) would have been 640x480. I saw some statistics on this recently (common screen resolution from 1982 to 2016) but can't find it at the moment. One interesting thing about it was how VGA was by far the most popular resolution from shortly after its introduction up until just after Windows 95 came out; since, as you said, it recommended at least SVGA resolution. (It was that plus RAM prices falling that finally pushed people to upgrade I think.)

I mean, with the way Windows 3.1 ran programs there was little need for large screen resolutions for most home users.

I addressed what was cutting edge in my comment. The whole point was that hero999 originally said 640x480@8bit was a "quite high" resolution for 1994, which is utter nonsense: it was the entry level by then.

Obviously you lot must have had more money than my family had, back when I got my first PC at the age of 12: a 386 with a VGA card. I suppose a lot of you were working. There's a different to what the average family could afford and what you would have used at work. I believe my dad used a Pentium which did have a 640x480 display (or more) at work. I remember going into his office at the school holidays and been blown away at the graphics: it could show proper colour photographs at a decent resolution and could play real sound, rather than the beeps and squawks of the PC speaker.

Perhaps you're right about what was mainstream at work and for those with money but my family could only afford a low end machine, so I thought it was the norm.

We didn't get a computer till I was 12, either!

But you are saying simultaneously that a) 640x480 was a high-end resolution, and b) that your modest first PC had a VGA card: that's 640x480.

 

I don't think anyone is saying 640x480 was a high end resolution in 1994 (I'm certainly not saying that), however it was by far the most *common* resolution at that time. As I said before, PCs were expensive back then, so most first time home users either bought older used systems *or* a no-name mid to low tier system from a local shop.

Remember, this was a time when 8MB of RAM cost $400!

I was 10 (late-93) when we got our first system: A used Packard Bell 386SX. I still remember going out with my dad to get it, then the next day going to Costco and picking up a Gravis Joystick and a copy of Flight Simulator 4.0! He also got a 387 co-processor not long after, which helped speed up Flight Sim. I remember saving for several months to buy a sound card (which I got from Radio Shack; it was a RS branded Sound Blaster clone, with speakers and a bunch of shareware, including Wolf 3D).

Good times, good times. :}

[tooki]

I think you guys need to revise your timelines a tiny bit, your memory is a bit hazy, I reckon -- by 1994, 640x480@8 bit was not unusual at the low end, and the very high end was actually SXGA (1280x1024).  Remember, Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) was most commonly used with 640x480@4-bit, but 8-bit was common during its lifespan. By 1995, when Windows 95 came out, 800x600@8-bit was the recommended configuration, and 1024x768 was not unusual on beefier systems.

Looking at the ads in the Sept. 1994 issue of BYTE, I see that even ordinary laptops had 640x480 and 800x600 displays at 8-bit. The high end for Windows PCs (not even counting high-end workstations like Intergraph and Sun) was 24-bit color at SXGA, 3D acceleration was just beginning to hit the scene. It looks like the mainstream was unaccelerated 1MB SVGA, which allowed for 800x600@16-bit, with the CPU being the real bottleneck in that mode.

(For reference on the Mac side, the 1987 Mac II was the first to support external displays, and it supported 640x480 at 4-bit by default, 8-bit with VRAM upgrade. By 1991, high end Macs, namely the Quadra line, supported 1152x870@4-bit, and 8-bit with a VRAM upgrade. By late 1993, even some consumer Macs like the Performa 475 supported 1152x870@4-bit out of the box and 8-bit with added VRAM. Of course, such a display cost many times more than the consumer computer itself!)

What was cutting edge and what was common are two entirely different things. You have to remember, in the early 90's PCs were still not quite affordable for everyone. If you were a regular user on a budget you basically had two options: Buy a used name brand PC from someone upgrading (usually through classified ads) *or* buy a new mid-range no-name system from a local shop or computer show.

Anyway, in early 1994 the most common configuration by far (that the majority of people would have been capable running) would have been 640x480. I saw some statistics on this recently (common screen resolution from 1982 to 2016) but can't find it at the moment. One interesting thing about it was how VGA was by far the most popular resolution from shortly after its introduction up until just after Windows 95 came out; since, as you said, it recommended at least SVGA resolution. (It was that plus RAM prices falling that finally pushed people to upgrade I think.)

I mean, with the way Windows 3.1 ran programs there was little need for large screen resolutions for most home users.

I addressed what was cutting edge in my comment. The whole point was that hero999 originally said 640x480@8bit was a "quite high" resolution for 1994, which is utter nonsense: it was the entry level by then.

Obviously you lot must have had more money than my family had, back when I got my first PC at the age of 12: a 386 with a VGA card. I suppose a lot of you were working. There's a different to what the average family could afford and what you would have used at work. I believe my dad used a Pentium which did have a 640x480 display (or more) at work. I remember going into his office at the school holidays and been blown away at the graphics: it could show proper colour photographs at a decent resolution and could play real sound, rather than the beeps and squawks of the PC speaker.

Perhaps you're right about what was mainstream at work and for those with money but my family could only afford a low end machine, so I thought it was the norm.

We didn't get a computer till I was 12, either!

But you are saying simultaneously that a) 640x480 was a high-end resolution, and b) that your modest first PC had a VGA card: that's 640x480.

 

I don't think anyone is saying 640x480 was a high end resolution in 1994 (I'm certainly not saying that), however it was by far the most *common* resolution at that time. As I said before, PCs were expensive back then, so most first time home users either bought older used systems *or* a no-name mid to low tier system from a local shop.

Remember, this was a time when 8MB of RAM cost $400!

It's precisely what hero999 said:

On a 486, Windows, or even OS/2 is not that great of an idea. Of course it can run it, but I legitimately had trouble running Sim Tower, which is by no means a demanding game.

Have you looked at the minimum requirements for that game? They were quite high for a PC that age: 8-bit colours would have meant a resolution of at least 640x480 (Windows didn't support 320x200 8-bit until 95) which was quite high for a PC of 1994 vintage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower#Development

That says, paraphrased: "640x480, which was quite high for 1994."

To which I say: no, it wasn't, 640x480 was absolutely standard back then, even at the low end. High end was higher: 800x600 and 1024x768 (with truly high-end systems going beyond that, even), and I already provided evidence to support that my recollection is correct. An already-outdated-then system might have not supported 8-bit color at 640x480 resolution, but the claim here was that the resolution was high end, but it demonstrably was not.

I don't need to be reminded of what stuff cost then: we've already established that my memory of that era is more accurate than you guys', plus I literally just reviewed a magazine of the era to refresh my memory and make sure I wasn't remembering wrong. (Link is still in my post.)

[Zero999]

I think you guys need to revise your timelines a tiny bit, your memory is a bit hazy, I reckon -- by 1994, 640x480@8 bit was not unusual at the low end, and the very high end was actually SXGA (1280x1024).  Remember, Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) was most commonly used with 640x480@4-bit, but 8-bit was common during its lifespan. By 1995, when Windows 95 came out, 800x600@8-bit was the recommended configuration, and 1024x768 was not unusual on beefier systems.

Looking at the ads in the Sept. 1994 issue of BYTE, I see that even ordinary laptops had 640x480 and 800x600 displays at 8-bit. The high end for Windows PCs (not even counting high-end workstations like Intergraph and Sun) was 24-bit color at SXGA, 3D acceleration was just beginning to hit the scene. It looks like the mainstream was unaccelerated 1MB SVGA, which allowed for 800x600@16-bit, with the CPU being the real bottleneck in that mode.

(For reference on the Mac side, the 1987 Mac II was the first to support external displays, and it supported 640x480 at 4-bit by default, 8-bit with VRAM upgrade. By 1991, high end Macs, namely the Quadra line, supported 1152x870@4-bit, and 8-bit with a VRAM upgrade. By late 1993, even some consumer Macs like the Performa 475 supported 1152x870@4-bit out of the box and 8-bit with added VRAM. Of course, such a display cost many times more than the consumer computer itself!)

What was cutting edge and what was common are two entirely different things. You have to remember, in the early 90's PCs were still not quite affordable for everyone. If you were a regular user on a budget you basically had two options: Buy a used name brand PC from someone upgrading (usually through classified ads) *or* buy a new mid-range no-name system from a local shop or computer show.

Anyway, in early 1994 the most common configuration by far (that the majority of people would have been capable running) would have been 640x480. I saw some statistics on this recently (common screen resolution from 1982 to 2016) but can't find it at the moment. One interesting thing about it was how VGA was by far the most popular resolution from shortly after its introduction up until just after Windows 95 came out; since, as you said, it recommended at least SVGA resolution. (It was that plus RAM prices falling that finally pushed people to upgrade I think.)

I mean, with the way Windows 3.1 ran programs there was little need for large screen resolutions for most home users.

I addressed what was cutting edge in my comment. The whole point was that hero999 originally said 640x480@8bit was a "quite high" resolution for 1994, which is utter nonsense: it was the entry level by then.

Obviously you lot must have had more money than my family had, back when I got my first PC at the age of 12: a 386 with a VGA card. I suppose a lot of you were working. There's a different to what the average family could afford and what you would have used at work. I believe my dad used a Pentium which did have a 640x480 display (or more) at work. I remember going into his office at the school holidays and been blown away at the graphics: it could show proper colour photographs at a decent resolution and could play real sound, rather than the beeps and squawks of the PC speaker.

Perhaps you're right about what was mainstream at work and for those with money but my family could only afford a low end machine, so I thought it was the norm.

We didn't get a computer till I was 12, either!

But you are saying simultaneously that a) 640x480 was a high-end resolution, and b) that your modest first PC had a VGA card: that's 640x480.

 

I don't think anyone is saying 640x480 was a high end resolution in 1994 (I'm certainly not saying that), however it was by far the most *common* resolution at that time. As I said before, PCs were expensive back then, so most first time home users either bought older used systems *or* a no-name mid to low tier system from a local shop.

Remember, this was a time when 8MB of RAM cost $400!

It's precisely what hero999 said:

On a 486, Windows, or even OS/2 is not that great of an idea. Of course it can run it, but I legitimately had trouble running Sim Tower, which is by no means a demanding game.

Have you looked at the minimum requirements for that game? They were quite high for a PC that age: 8-bit colours would have meant a resolution of at least 640x480 (Windows didn't support 320x200 8-bit until 95) which was quite high for a PC of 1994 vintage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower#Development

That says, paraphrased: "640x480, which was quite high for 1994."

To which I say: no, it wasn't, 640x480 was absolutely standard back then, even at the low end. High end was higher: 800x600 and 1024x768 (with truly high-end systems going beyond that, even), and I already provided evidence to support that my recollection is correct. An already-outdated-then system might have not supported 8-bit color at 640x480 resolution, but the claim here was that the resolution was high end, but it demonstrably was not.

I don't need to be reminded of what stuff cost then: we've already established that my memory of that era is more accurate than you guys', plus I literally just reviewed a magazine of the era to refresh my memory and make sure I wasn't remembering wrong. (Link is still in my post.)

No one made any claims about 640x480 being high end in 1994. Indeed, old CGA cards had been capable of that resolution in 1 bit per pixel monochrome mode for many years.

What you've missed is the colour depth. In 1994 most machines, which the average family could afford, came with a VGA card which was only capable of 16 colours in 640x480 resolution. It you read my post you quoted again, you'll see I specifically mentioned 8-bit colour depth at 640x480. I'm not denying that 8-bit colour or even more and at higher resolutions than 640x480, were available back than, just that it was prohibitively expensive for most people.

[Ampera]

I dislike FreeDOS and the CDU MS-DOS 7.1 because of all the stupid 32-bit stuff and FAT32 support. It's just not needed for DOS. If you need more than 2GB of hard disk space per partition, then you should use Windows.

pretty dumb atitude.

if your in the repair industry and you have a 4gig storage and a 32bit board then using multiple partitions and 16bit code is just stupid.
so is bloating the system with windows filth.
and yes, that's what i think of windows.

btw, you cant have an o.s. that does stuff in the background (windows) because the equipment is shutdown by cutting the power - not pressing a button and waiting for the crap o.s. to flush it's caches and finish what it probably shouldnt have been doing in the first place!!!

The repair industry? I'm unsure as to what you mean by that.

If you are referring to embedded applications, Linux is probably the operating system of choice in that field. It's FAR superior to DOS in every respect. DOS is simple, lightweight, and supported, but I wouldn't imagine any sane designer jumping to it for applications that actually and seriously need more than 2GB of storage per partition.

When I think of it, in any real application, there is always going to be a better option when you escape the bounds of traditional DOS. Linux is good, and most microcontrollers are done using ASM or a higher level language on top of a basic operating system, or through compiled code.

FreeDOS and CDU DOS are VERY undercooked for any of that. They are unstable, the FAT32 implementation is buggy and breaks many DOS applications in some way, and in all, DOS isn't that stable of a platform to begin with. It's very easy to crash DOS (You could probably do it in 5-10 seconds using the right commands). I'm not saying it's a terrible idea for embedded use, but it's a terrible idea for high performance embedded use that for whatever reason needs more than 2GB per partition.

[Zero999]

I dislike FreeDOS and the CDU MS-DOS 7.1 because of all the stupid 32-bit stuff and FAT32 support. It's just not needed for DOS. If you need more than 2GB of hard disk space per partition, then you should use Windows.

pretty dumb atitude.

if your in the repair industry and you have a 4gig storage and a 32bit board then using multiple partitions and 16bit code is just stupid.
so is bloating the system with windows filth.
and yes, that's what i think of windows.

btw, you cant have an o.s. that does stuff in the background (windows) because the equipment is shutdown by cutting the power - not pressing a button and waiting for the crap o.s. to flush it's caches and finish what it probably shouldnt have been doing in the first place!!!

The repair industry? I'm unsure as to what you mean by that.

If you are referring to embedded applications, Linux is probably the operating system of choice in that field. It's FAR superior to DOS in every respect. DOS is simple, lightweight, and supported, but I wouldn't imagine any sane designer jumping to it for applications that actually and seriously need more than 2GB of storage per partition.

When I think of it, in any real application, there is always going to be a better option when you escape the bounds of traditional DOS. Linux is good, and most microcontrollers are done using ASM or a higher level language on top of a basic operating system, or through compiled code.

FreeDOS and CDU DOS are VERY undercooked for any of that. They are unstable, the FAT32 implementation is buggy and breaks many DOS applications in some way, and in all, DOS isn't that stable of a platform to begin with. It's very easy to crash DOS (You could probably do it in 5-10 seconds using the right commands). I'm not saying it's a terrible idea for embedded use, but it's a terrible idea for high performance embedded use that for whatever reason needs more than 2GB per partition.

I think what stj is saying is that for some applications, a real time, i.e. only one process at a time, operating system is required. Linux and Windows are not real time OSes, meaning they have a lot of processes running in the background, which can cause problems with things such as timing and higher power consumption, than necessary, in certain applications.

I'm curious about the problems you've experienced with FreeDOS? I've found it to be very good, but I've only run it under an emulator for running old DOS programs, never on real hardware.

[tooki]

I think you guys need to revise your timelines a tiny bit, your memory is a bit hazy, I reckon -- by 1994, 640x480@8 bit was not unusual at the low end, and the very high end was actually SXGA (1280x1024).  Remember, Windows 3.0 (released in 1990) was most commonly used with 640x480@4-bit, but 8-bit was common during its lifespan. By 1995, when Windows 95 came out, 800x600@8-bit was the recommended configuration, and 1024x768 was not unusual on beefier systems.

Looking at the ads in the Sept. 1994 issue of BYTE, I see that even ordinary laptops had 640x480 and 800x600 displays at 8-bit. The high end for Windows PCs (not even counting high-end workstations like Intergraph and Sun) was 24-bit color at SXGA, 3D acceleration was just beginning to hit the scene. It looks like the mainstream was unaccelerated 1MB SVGA, which allowed for 800x600@16-bit, with the CPU being the real bottleneck in that mode.

(For reference on the Mac side, the 1987 Mac II was the first to support external displays, and it supported 640x480 at 4-bit by default, 8-bit with VRAM upgrade. By 1991, high end Macs, namely the Quadra line, supported 1152x870@4-bit, and 8-bit with a VRAM upgrade. By late 1993, even some consumer Macs like the Performa 475 supported 1152x870@4-bit out of the box and 8-bit with added VRAM. Of course, such a display cost many times more than the consumer computer itself!)

What was cutting edge and what was common are two entirely different things. You have to remember, in the early 90's PCs were still not quite affordable for everyone. If you were a regular user on a budget you basically had two options: Buy a used name brand PC from someone upgrading (usually through classified ads) *or* buy a new mid-range no-name system from a local shop or computer show.

Anyway, in early 1994 the most common configuration by far (that the majority of people would have been capable running) would have been 640x480. I saw some statistics on this recently (common screen resolution from 1982 to 2016) but can't find it at the moment. One interesting thing about it was how VGA was by far the most popular resolution from shortly after its introduction up until just after Windows 95 came out; since, as you said, it recommended at least SVGA resolution. (It was that plus RAM prices falling that finally pushed people to upgrade I think.)

I mean, with the way Windows 3.1 ran programs there was little need for large screen resolutions for most home users.

I addressed what was cutting edge in my comment. The whole point was that hero999 originally said 640x480@8bit was a "quite high" resolution for 1994, which is utter nonsense: it was the entry level by then.

Obviously you lot must have had more money than my family had, back when I got my first PC at the age of 12: a 386 with a VGA card. I suppose a lot of you were working. There's a different to what the average family could afford and what you would have used at work. I believe my dad used a Pentium which did have a 640x480 display (or more) at work. I remember going into his office at the school holidays and been blown away at the graphics: it could show proper colour photographs at a decent resolution and could play real sound, rather than the beeps and squawks of the PC speaker.

Perhaps you're right about what was mainstream at work and for those with money but my family could only afford a low end machine, so I thought it was the norm.

We didn't get a computer till I was 12, either!

But you are saying simultaneously that a) 640x480 was a high-end resolution, and b) that your modest first PC had a VGA card: that's 640x480.

 

I don't think anyone is saying 640x480 was a high end resolution in 1994 (I'm certainly not saying that), however it was by far the most *common* resolution at that time. As I said before, PCs were expensive back then, so most first time home users either bought older used systems *or* a no-name mid to low tier system from a local shop.

Remember, this was a time when 8MB of RAM cost $400!

It's precisely what hero999 said:

On a 486, Windows, or even OS/2 is not that great of an idea. Of course it can run it, but I legitimately had trouble running Sim Tower, which is by no means a demanding game.

Have you looked at the minimum requirements for that game? They were quite high for a PC that age: 8-bit colours would have meant a resolution of at least 640x480 (Windows didn't support 320x200 8-bit until 95) which was quite high for a PC of 1994 vintage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower#Development

That says, paraphrased: "640x480, which was quite high for 1994."

To which I say: no, it wasn't, 640x480 was absolutely standard back then, even at the low end. High end was higher: 800x600 and 1024x768 (with truly high-end systems going beyond that, even), and I already provided evidence to support that my recollection is correct. An already-outdated-then system might have not supported 8-bit color at 640x480 resolution, but the claim here was that the resolution was high end, but it demonstrably was not.

I don't need to be reminded of what stuff cost then: we've already established that my memory of that era is more accurate than you guys', plus I literally just reviewed a magazine of the era to refresh my memory and make sure I wasn't remembering wrong. (Link is still in my post.)

No one made any claims about 640x480 being high end in 1994. Indeed, old CGA cards had been capable of that resolution in 1 bit per pixel monochrome mode for many years.

What you've missed is the colour depth. In 1994 most machines, which the average family could afford, came with a VGA card which was only capable of 16 colours in 640x480 resolution. It you read my post you quoted again, you'll see I specifically mentioned 8-bit colour depth at 640x480. I'm not denying that 8-bit colour or even more and at higher resolutions than 640x480, were available back than, just that it was prohibitively expensive for most people.

I didn't miss the color depth, I even addressed it. Your sentence used a subordinate clause stating that 640x480 was high end (the wording is such that the color depth is not a part of the claim). If that's not what you meant, well, it is what you wrote.

[Don Hills]

...  The repair industry? I'm unsure as to what you mean by that. ...

There are many industrial systems (CNC machines etc) that have PC based controllers running DOS. The PC often dies when the machine itself has many years of useful life left. Spare parts for the PC are usually long since unobtainable, so the challenge is to replace the PC with a modern equivalent, capable of running the original control software. That's the repair industry he was referring to.

[stj]

...  The repair industry? I'm unsure as to what you mean by that. ...

There are many industrial systems (CNC machines etc) that have PC based controllers running DOS. The PC often dies when the machine itself has many years of useful life left. Spare parts for the PC are usually long since unobtainable, so the challenge is to replace the PC with a modern equivalent, capable of running the original control software. That's the repair industry he was referring to.

exactly,
CNC's, exhaust/engine analysers, slot machines, some Megatouch stuff.
there's loads of expensive stuff out there that has old pc's in them

[Ampera]

I dislike FreeDOS and the CDU MS-DOS 7.1 because of all the stupid 32-bit stuff and FAT32 support. It's just not needed for DOS. If you need more than 2GB of hard disk space per partition, then you should use Windows.

pretty dumb atitude.

if your in the repair industry and you have a 4gig storage and a 32bit board then using multiple partitions and 16bit code is just stupid.
so is bloating the system with windows filth.
and yes, that's what i think of windows.

btw, you cant have an o.s. that does stuff in the background (windows) because the equipment is shutdown by cutting the power - not pressing a button and waiting for the crap o.s. to flush it's caches and finish what it probably shouldnt have been doing in the first place!!!

The repair industry? I'm unsure as to what you mean by that.

If you are referring to embedded applications, Linux is probably the operating system of choice in that field. It's FAR superior to DOS in every respect. DOS is simple, lightweight, and supported, but I wouldn't imagine any sane designer jumping to it for applications that actually and seriously need more than 2GB of storage per partition.

When I think of it, in any real application, there is always going to be a better option when you escape the bounds of traditional DOS. Linux is good, and most microcontrollers are done using ASM or a higher level language on top of a basic operating system, or through compiled code.

FreeDOS and CDU DOS are VERY undercooked for any of that. They are unstable, the FAT32 implementation is buggy and breaks many DOS applications in some way, and in all, DOS isn't that stable of a platform to begin with. It's very easy to crash DOS (You could probably do it in 5-10 seconds using the right commands). I'm not saying it's a terrible idea for embedded use, but it's a terrible idea for high performance embedded use that for whatever reason needs more than 2GB per partition.

I think what stj is saying is that for some applications, a real time, i.e. only one process at a time, operating system is required. Linux and Windows are not real time OSes, meaning they have a lot of processes running in the background, which can cause problems with things such as timing and higher power consumption, than necessary, in certain applications.

I'm curious about the problems you've experienced with FreeDOS? I've found it to be very good, but I've only run it under an emulator for running old DOS programs, never on real hardware.

That I did not think of.

My personal issues with FreeDOS and CDU DOS is with compatibility with anything using a FAT32 partition. Especially programs like windows, and other things that need direct drive access, FAT32 breaks it.

[Zero999]

I dislike FreeDOS and the CDU MS-DOS 7.1 because of all the stupid 32-bit stuff and FAT32 support. It's just not needed for DOS. If you need more than 2GB of hard disk space per partition, then you should use Windows.

pretty dumb atitude.

if your in the repair industry and you have a 4gig storage and a 32bit board then using multiple partitions and 16bit code is just stupid.
so is bloating the system with windows filth.
and yes, that's what i think of windows.

btw, you cant have an o.s. that does stuff in the background (windows) because the equipment is shutdown by cutting the power - not pressing a button and waiting for the crap o.s. to flush it's caches and finish what it probably shouldnt have been doing in the first place!!!

The repair industry? I'm unsure as to what you mean by that.

If you are referring to embedded applications, Linux is probably the operating system of choice in that field. It's FAR superior to DOS in every respect. DOS is simple, lightweight, and supported, but I wouldn't imagine any sane designer jumping to it for applications that actually and seriously need more than 2GB of storage per partition.

When I think of it, in any real application, there is always going to be a better option when you escape the bounds of traditional DOS. Linux is good, and most microcontrollers are done using ASM or a higher level language on top of a basic operating system, or through compiled code.

FreeDOS and CDU DOS are VERY undercooked for any of that. They are unstable, the FAT32 implementation is buggy and breaks many DOS applications in some way, and in all, DOS isn't that stable of a platform to begin with. It's very easy to crash DOS (You could probably do it in 5-10 seconds using the right commands). I'm not saying it's a terrible idea for embedded use, but it's a terrible idea for high performance embedded use that for whatever reason needs more than 2GB per partition.

I think what stj is saying is that for some applications, a real time, i.e. only one process at a time, operating system is required. Linux and Windows are not real time OSes, meaning they have a lot of processes running in the background, which can cause problems with things such as timing and higher power consumption, than necessary, in certain applications.

I'm curious about the problems you've experienced with FreeDOS? I've found it to be very good, but I've only run it under an emulator for running old DOS programs, never on real hardware.

That I did not think of.

My personal issues with FreeDOS and CDU DOS is with compatibility with anything using a FAT32 partition. Especially programs like windows, and other things that need direct drive access, FAT32 breaks it.

What's CDU DOS? I've never heard of it and Google doesn't return any results in English.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=CDU+DOS&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=Wix-Wb-_HMyBgAbmypr4Ag

[Ampera]

It's my shortening of MS-DOS 7.1 by the China DOS Union.


Basically, it was made by the CDU as a hacked apart copy of the ACTUAL DOS 7.1, which is just the kernel? version of 95B/98SE (think the NT version number for modern Windows). It has full LFN and FAT32 support, but enabling either of those is notoriously buggy. It breaks tons of stuff,  and it's not exactly kosher nor legal (They even dare to put it under a GNU GPL licence, wonder how well that would stand up in any court anywhere)

I still maintain the statement, that for the average desktop user outside of some REALLY weird use case, FAT32 on DOS is never really a good idea. If your desktop PC has more space than DOS can handle, then it's time to switch over to something better.

[timb]

I don't need to be reminded of what stuff cost then: we've already established that my memory of that era is more accurate than you guys', plus I literally just reviewed a magazine of the era to refresh my memory and make sure I wasn't remembering wrong. (Link is still in my post.)

Computer magazines in that era liked to review just released (or soon to be released) high end systems. Occasionally they would feature low or mid range systems, but generally the focus was on cutting edge.

Nobody is saying resolutions higher than 640x480 weren't available in 1994. They certainly were. What we're saying, and this is the important bit you need to focus on, is that most home users still ran at 640x480, due mainly to cost. Memory was still expensive, so getting a video card and monitor capable of showing 800x600 or 1024x768 @ 16bpp and a refresh rate greater than (or equal to) 60Hz was still very expensive.

It wasn't until Windows 95, the rise in popularity of the Internet and the bottom falling out of the memory industry did screen resolutions start increasing on the average consumer's PC.

You might have a magazine from 1994, but I have actual hard data showing the most used screen resolutions from the early-80's to 2016. VGA resolution was king until 1995/96, when 800x600 started taking over.

Again, just because something was available in 1994, doesn't mean it was economically viable for everyone.

I mean, look at the timeframe. What was there that really required a resolution higher than VGA for the average PC user in 1994? It's not like you could run apps side by side in Windows 3.11. Webpages were just text and a few GIFs. QuickTime and Indigo videos were QVGA resolution due to the processor power required to decode the compression. Consumers weren't editing digital photos back then. Basically, you wrote documents in Word Perfect (or Wors), worked on spreadsheets in Lotus (or Excel), balanced your checkbook with QuickBooks and played games (a lot of which still used DOS for maximum performance and used VGA resolutions, at most).

So yes, in 1994 VGA *was* the highest resolution your average consumer used on a PC.

[Naguissa]

I don't need to be reminded of what stuff cost then: we've already established that my memory of that era is more accurate than you guys', plus I literally just reviewed a magazine of the era to refresh my memory and make sure I wasn't remembering wrong. (Link is still in my post.)

Computer magazines in that era liked to review just released (or soon to be released) high end systems. Occasionally they would feature low or mid range systems, but generally the focus was on cutting edge.

Nobody is saying resolutions higher than 640x480 weren't available in 1994. They certainly were. What we're saying, and this is the important bit you need to focus on, is that most home users still ran at 640x480, due mainly to cost. Memory was still expensive, so getting a video card and monitor capable of showing 800x600 or 1024x768 @ 16bpp and a refresh rate greater than (or equal to) 60Hz was still very expensive.

It wasn't until Windows 95, the rise in popularity of the Internet and the bottom falling out of the memory industry did screen resolutions start increasing on the average consumer's PC.

You might have a magazine from 1994, but I have actual hard data showing the most used screen resolutions from the early-80's to 2016. VGA resolution was king until 1995/96, when 800x600 started taking over.

Again, just because something was available in 1994, doesn't mean it was economically viable for everyone.

I mean, look at the timeframe. What was there that really required a resolution higher than VGA for the average PC user in 1994? It's not like you could run apps side by side in Windows 3.11. Webpages were just text and a few GIFs. QuickTime and Indigo videos were QVGA resolution due to the processor power required to decode the compression. Consumers weren't editing digital photos back then. Basically, you wrote documents in Word Perfect (or Wors), worked on spreadsheets in Lotus (or Excel), balanced your checkbook with QuickBooks and played games (a lot of which still used DOS for maximum performance and used VGA resolutions, at most).

So yes, in 1994 VGA *was* the highest resolution your average consumer used on a PC.

I remember my brother's PC from 1992, as it was the 1st PC I ever touched.

486 DX 50, 4 MB RAM, 240MB HDD, Sound Blaster, Cirrus Logic Video Card on a Vesa Loca Bus with 1MB VRAM and MAX 800x600 regular or 1024x768 interlaced monitor.

I used 800x600 65K mostly on Windows 3.1 (3.11 later).

I'm from Spain, not the richest country of the world, and son of bartender....

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

[Halcyon]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

[Zero999]

I don't need to be reminded of what stuff cost then: we've already established that my memory of that era is more accurate than you guys', plus I literally just reviewed a magazine of the era to refresh my memory and make sure I wasn't remembering wrong. (Link is still in my post.)

Computer magazines in that era liked to review just released (or soon to be released) high end systems. Occasionally they would feature low or mid range systems, but generally the focus was on cutting edge.

Nobody is saying resolutions higher than 640x480 weren't available in 1994. They certainly were. What we're saying, and this is the important bit you need to focus on, is that most home users still ran at 640x480, due mainly to cost. Memory was still expensive, so getting a video card and monitor capable of showing 800x600 or 1024x768 @ 16bpp and a refresh rate greater than (or equal to) 60Hz was still very expensive.

It wasn't until Windows 95, the rise in popularity of the Internet and the bottom falling out of the memory industry did screen resolutions start increasing on the average consumer's PC.

You might have a magazine from 1994, but I have actual hard data showing the most used screen resolutions from the early-80's to 2016. VGA resolution was king until 1995/96, when 800x600 started taking over.

Again, just because something was available in 1994, doesn't mean it was economically viable for everyone.

I mean, look at the timeframe. What was there that really required a resolution higher than VGA for the average PC user in 1994? It's not like you could run apps side by side in Windows 3.11. Webpages were just text and a few GIFs. QuickTime and Indigo videos were QVGA resolution due to the processor power required to decode the compression. Consumers weren't editing digital photos back then. Basically, you wrote documents in Word Perfect (or Wors), worked on spreadsheets in Lotus (or Excel), balanced your checkbook with QuickBooks and played games (a lot of which still used DOS for maximum performance and used VGA resolutions, at most).

So yes, in 1994 VGA *was* the highest resolution your average consumer used on a PC.

Colour depth was also a factor.  Many people chose to use a lower colour depth than their graphics card could handle, because their card didn't have enough memory for the desired resolution and speed.

I remember my brother's PC from 1992, as it was the 1st PC I ever touched.

486 DX 50, 4 MB RAM, 240MB HDD, Sound Blaster, Cirrus Logic Video Card on a Vesa Loca Bus with 1MB VRAM and MAX 800x600 regular or 1024x768 interlaced monitor.

I used 800x600 65K mostly on Windows 3.1 (3.11 later).

I'm from Spain, not the richest country of the world, and son of bartender....

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

That would have been quite a high end system back then, especially the graphics.

The display was also a limiting factor, especially on laptops. I remember having a laptop in the late 90s which my dad bought for me second had. Although it had a 4MB graphics card, the screen limited the maximum resolution to 800x600 with 65536 colours. I'd often plug it into a CRT to get 1024x768 24-bit colour but it was a bit slow in that mode,

[Ampera]

My 1994 Ati MACH 64 has 2MB of RAM, works off the PCI bus (at that point brand spanking new) and supports a resolution of 1024x768 @60hz with 8 bit colours. It supports 640x480 8 bit per channel colours, and 800x600 16-bit colours. It's, in my experience, a slightly higher than mid range card. My S3 Trio32 beats it out because with the right display, it can go up to 1280x1024 on the same memory, (just at ~40hz) and on the older (albeit faster in some configurations) VESA Local Bus. The Trio32, however, is a bit of a higher range card, and I think it came out in 1995 (Pretty late for VLB actually)

So at the time, the average mid to high range card could pull those resolutions. Lower spec cards, especially those from cheapie manufacturers like Trident (my graphics card is chewing gum) couldn't handle resolutions much higher than 640x480. The main thing that held most cards down was memory, the size and speed of. 2MB can give you (depending on the card) around 1024x768 to 1280x1024 at varying refresh rates and colours. 1MB could give around 800x600 to 1024x768, depending on the card, with varying refresh rates and colours. You can keep chopping that down, as some cheaper cards only had 512k or even something as small as 256k, where really, only VGA spec resolutions were possible.

I could be wrong on some fronts, I'm sure that only the really lucky even got a MACH 64, never mind an S3 Trio 32, and most people were stuck with Tridents with bugger all in terms of memory, but I do not think that a 640x480 native resolution with decent colours is THAT out of the ordinary.

[tooki]

I don't need to be reminded of what stuff cost then: we've already established that my memory of that era is more accurate than you guys', plus I literally just reviewed a magazine of the era to refresh my memory and make sure I wasn't remembering wrong. (Link is still in my post.)

Computer magazines in that era liked to review just released (or soon to be released) high end systems. Occasionally they would feature low or mid range systems, but generally the focus was on cutting edge.

Nobody is saying resolutions higher than 640x480 weren't available in 1994. They certainly were. What we're saying, and this is the important bit you need to focus on, is that most home users still ran at 640x480, due mainly to cost. Memory was still expensive, so getting a video card and monitor capable of showing 800x600 or 1024x768 @ 16bpp and a refresh rate greater than (or equal to) 60Hz was still very expensive.

It wasn't until Windows 95, the rise in popularity of the Internet and the bottom falling out of the memory industry did screen resolutions start increasing on the average consumer's PC.

You might have a magazine from 1994, but I have actual hard data showing the most used screen resolutions from the early-80's to 2016. VGA resolution was king until 1995/96, when 800x600 started taking over.

Again, just because something was available in 1994, doesn't mean it was economically viable for everyone.

I mean, look at the timeframe. What was there that really required a resolution higher than VGA for the average PC user in 1994? It's not like you could run apps side by side in Windows 3.11. Webpages were just text and a few GIFs. QuickTime and Indigo videos were QVGA resolution due to the processor power required to decode the compression. Consumers weren't editing digital photos back then. Basically, you wrote documents in Word Perfect (or Wors), worked on spreadsheets in Lotus (or Excel), balanced your checkbook with QuickBooks and played games (a lot of which still used DOS for maximum performance and used VGA resolutions, at most).

So yes, in 1994 VGA *was* the highest resolution your average consumer used on a PC.

And I agree with that. What I've been disputing all along is the claim (made by hero999) that VGA resolution was "quite high" for 1994. It wasn't. It was the normal res for most users. The actual high end was higher than VGA.

P.S. I expressly stated that it was the ads in the magazine, not the reviews, that I was looking at. You're right that the reviews tend to look at cutting edge, but the ads in a mainstream magazine like that tended to focus on price. I also provided the link to the magazine in question so you can see for yourself.

P.P.S. Where did you find the screen res data? I was actually looking for that when responding, and couldn't find anything going earlier than 2000.

[tooki]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

[NivagSwerdna]

What I've been disputing all along is the claim (made by hero999) that VGA resolution was "high end" for 1994. It wasn't. It was the normal res for most users. But actual "high end" was higher than VGA.

In 1994 I believe I was using XGA (beyond SVGA).

[Halcyon]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

I won't get into a pissing contest over technicalities but VGA was "the shiz", especially when it came to DOS games in the early 90's. Let's not forget that the VGA and SVGA standards were developed in the late 1980's. When Windows 3.x came around, 640x480 was pretty much the standard. If you had a video card, drivers and a monitor that could handle more, then yeah, it supported it, but few applications made use of it.

Programs like Myst and Sim City 2000 SE complained about higher resolutions. Even on video editing machines, 640x480 was about on-par with NTSC and PAL standards.

[Ampera]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

I won't get into a pissing contest over technicalities but VGA was "the shiz", especially when it came to DOS games in the early 90's. Let's not forget that the VGA and SVGA standards were developed in the late 1980's. When Windows 3.x came around, 640x480 was pretty much the standard. If you had a video card, drivers and a monitor that could handle more, then yeah, it supported it, but few applications made use of it.

Programs like Myst and Sim City 2000 SE complained about higher resolutions. Even on video editing machines, 640x480 was about on-par with NTSC and PAL standards.

Lol, when I was about to edit this, you said that 640x480 is better than TV resolution.

NTSC resolution is 720 "pixels" by 486 lines.

PAL is slightly better by being 720 by 576 lines. Both are over TV. You can debate what was used, but those are the standards.

[Halcyon]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

I won't get into a pissing contest over technicalities but VGA was "the shiz", especially when it came to DOS games in the early 90's. Let's not forget that the VGA and SVGA standards were developed in the late 1980's. When Windows 3.x came around, 640x480 was pretty much the standard. If you had a video card, drivers and a monitor that could handle more, then yeah, it supported it, but few applications made use of it.

Programs like Myst and Sim City 2000 SE complained about higher resolutions. Even on video editing machines, 640x480 was about on-par with NTSC and PAL standards.

Lol, when I was about to edit this, you said that 640x480 is better than TV resolution.

NTSC resolution is 720 "pixels" by 486 lines.

PAL is slightly better by being 720 by 576 lines. Both are over TV. You can debate what was used, but those are the standards.

Yes sorry, I was thinking of CIF. Hence the edit. ;-)

Besides, everyone knows that PAL was "better" ;-) NTSC = Never The Same Colour (Color)

[tooki]

Lol, when I was about to edit this, you said that 640x480 is better than TV resolution.

NTSC resolution is 720 "pixels" by 486 lines.

PAL is slightly better by being 720 by 576 lines. Both are over TV. You can debate what was used, but those are the standards.

Well, the NTSC and PAL standards specify lines (525 and 625, resp) in the vertical, but not the horizontal resolution as such, since it is variable (a continuous analog signal). Broadcast TV usually managed over 400 horizontal, but VHS super long-play was often less than 250 horizontal!

As you alluded to, the NTSC and PAL standards are designed with overscan in mind: NTSC specifies 483 lines visible, PAL specifies 576 visible.

So while their visible vertical resolution was indeed above VGA, their horizontal resolution was usually far less in practice, due to the broadcast or composite signals normally used to transmit them.

Additionally, their temporal resolution is far worse, thanks to interlacing, at 29.97 frames/59.94 fields for NTSC, 25 frames/50 fields for PAL, vs 60 frames progressive for VGA. And since VGA signals are not composited onto crap cable, it produces far sharper images. In the PAL world, SCART connectors with discrete RGB existed, and reportedly produced vastly sharper images than composite or S-Video connectors. (This was used mostly in game consoles IIRC, but I'm not a gamer so I kinda ignored it. Some DVD players did too, I think.) Later, when HDTV started to come along, component video connections also finally gave NTSC and PAL a decent connection, but it was too late by then.

DVD shows NTSC and PAL at their finest, and indeed could look very good.

All in all, though, Halcyon's corrected claim that VGA and NTSC/PAL are "about on par" is pretty accurate.

Yes sorry, I was thinking of CIF. Hence the edit. ;-)

Besides, everyone knows that PAL was "better" ;-) NTSC = Never The Same Colour (Color)

Heheheh yeah. But at least NTSC's frame rate wasn't visibly flickery to me, which standard PAL absolutely was!

[Ampera]

We made NTSC first, you just copied us and did it better. We pioneer, Europeans steal. 

[Zero999]

I didn't miss the color depth, I even addressed it. Your sentence used a subordinate clause stating that 640x480 was high end (the wording is such that the color depth is not a part of the claim). If that's not what you meant, well, it is what you wrote.

I clearly said 640x480 and 8-bit colour in the same sentence. Even if the meaning was a little ambiguous, it's crystal clear what I meant now, so please stop misquoting me.

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

We didn't say that. You misunderstood. I thought I'd cleared it up in my previous post.

Yes, VGA cards were very common in 1994. No one denied that. We said that 640x480 8-bit or greater colour depth was uncommon. Note that 640x480 8-bit is not a VGA graphics mode! Please don't imply that it is. The old VGA cards didn't have enough memory to display any more than 16 colours, at a time at that resolution. The monitors at the time were analogue and therefore could display a theoretically unlimited number of colours but the graphics cards could not.

The VGA card only had 256KB of RAM. It could stretch to higher resolutions than 640x480 but not with a standard monitor. It was possible to play around with the registers, in a similar manner to mode X, to get 800x600 4-bit but the refresh rate was low and it wouldn't work with a standard VGA monitor, so it wasn't used much. Mode X could also give 400x600 resolution (800x600 as far as the monitor was concerned because the video card displayed each horizontal pixed twice) with 256 colours but again, it wouldn't work with a standard monitor, so 360x480 was as high as you could safely go.

One of the problems was that Windows 3.1 wouldn't work with resolutions less than EGA 640x350, so 8-bit colour was out of the question with a standard VGA card. There would have been enough memory for 640x350 or even 640x400, but the VGA card wouldn't permit it as the horizontal resolution was halved in 8-bit mode.

[Naguissa]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

We didn't say that. You misunderstood. I thought I'd cleared it up in my previous post.  Yes, VGA cards were very common in 1994. No one denied that. We said that 640x480 8-bit or greater colour depth was uncommon. Note that 640x480 8-bit is not a VGA graphics mode! Please don't imply that it is. The old VGA cards didn't have enough memory to display any more than 16 colours, at a time at that resolution. The monitors at the time were analogue and therefore could display a theoretically unlimited number of colours but the graphics cards could not.

The VGA card only had 256KB of RAM. It could stretch to higher resolutions than 640x480 but not with a standard monitor. It was possible to play around with the registers, in a similar manner to mode X, to get 800x600 4-bit but the refresh rate was low and it wouldn't work with a standard VGA monitor, so it wasn't used much. Mode X could also give 400x600 resolution (800x600 as far as the monitor was concerned because the video card displayed each horizontal pixed twice) with 256 colours but again, it wouldn't work with a standard monitor, so 360x480 was as high as you could safely go.

One of the problems was that Windows 3.1 wouldn't work with resolutions less than EGA 640x350, so 8-bit colour was out of the question with a standard VGA card. There would have been enough memory for 640x350 or even 640x400, but the VGA card wouldn't permit it as the horizontal resolution was halved in 8-bit mode.

But in '94 the common standard was SVGA...

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

[Halcyon]

Besides, everyone knows that PAL was "better" ;-) NTSC = Never The Same Colour (Color)

Heheheh yeah. But at least NTSC's frame rate wasn't visibly flickery to me, which standard PAL absolutely was!

Of course it was flickery! 50hz vs 60hz mains. NTSC looked horrible in Australia et. al.

We made NTSC first, you just copied us and did it better. We pioneer, Europeans steal. 

You may have been first, we improved. ;-)

How's your metric system going?

[Ampera]

Besides, everyone knows that PAL was "better" ;-) NTSC = Never The Same Colour (Color)

Heheheh yeah. But at least NTSC's frame rate wasn't visibly flickery to me, which standard PAL absolutely was!

Of course it was flickery! 50hz vs 60hz mains. NTSC looked horrible in Australia et. al.

We made NTSC first, you just copied us and did it better. We pioneer, Europeans steal. 

You may have been first, we improved. ;-)

How's your metric system going?

Good, we use it on a daily basis, while we have a customary system used for basic household tasks that nobody needs to do complicated maths on. Our 1/2 litre soda bottles are great, and gallon milk jugs are awesome too.

It would be neat to have a cleaner, softer system to use without all the SI complications for common tasks. It feels a bit homelier to say a gallon of milk instead of four litres. (rough conversion)

[Halcyon]

Good, we use it on a daily basis, while we have a customary system used for basic household tasks that nobody needs to do complicated maths on. Our 1/2 litre soda bottles are great, and gallon milk jugs are awesome too.

It would be neat to have a cleaner, softer system to use without all the SI complications for common tasks. It feels a bit homelier to say a gallon of milk instead of four litres. (rough conversion)

Really?

1/2 litre?! Our "standard" size bottles you keep in the fridge are 1.25L and the "large" ones are 2L. "Single serves" are 600mL which I disagree with... too much sugar.

Milk here is generally in 1L and 2L bottles.

EDIT: Photo of beverages.

[Zero999]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

We didn't say that. You misunderstood. I thought I'd cleared it up in my previous post.  Yes, VGA cards were very common in 1994. No one denied that. We said that 640x480 8-bit or greater colour depth was uncommon. Note that 640x480 8-bit is not a VGA graphics mode! Please don't imply that it is. The old VGA cards didn't have enough memory to display any more than 16 colours, at a time at that resolution. The monitors at the time were analogue and therefore could display a theoretically unlimited number of colours but the graphics cards could not.

The VGA card only had 256KB of RAM. It could stretch to higher resolutions than 640x480 but not with a standard monitor. It was possible to play around with the registers, in a similar manner to mode X, to get 800x600 4-bit but the refresh rate was low and it wouldn't work with a standard VGA monitor, so it wasn't used much. Mode X could also give 400x600 resolution (800x600 as far as the monitor was concerned because the video card displayed each horizontal pixed twice) with 256 colours but again, it wouldn't work with a standard monitor, so 360x480 was as high as you could safely go.

One of the problems was that Windows 3.1 wouldn't work with resolutions less than EGA 640x350, so 8-bit colour was out of the question with a standard VGA card. There would have been enough memory for 640x350 or even 640x400, but the VGA card wouldn't permit it as the horizontal resolution was halved in 8-bit mode.

But in '94 the common standard was SVGA...

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

Where? At work yes, but certainly not for the average home user.

Just look at the minimum requirements for software back then. How many titles mandated a minimum greater resolution/colour depth than what a VGA card could provide? Games were mostly DOS and ran in 320x200 8-bit colour and Windows titles would still run on 640x480 4-bit colour. There might have been some high end CAD and image editing software which required greater resolutions and colour depths but that was the exception.

[free_electron]

i had a Number-Nine systems Graphics card that could do 1600x1200 hooked up to a Nokia 445x 21 inch monitor. running windows 3.1. worked perfectly fine.

Number Nine Systems GXE 64 Pro  : http://www.ebay.com/itm/NUMBER-NINE-9-GXE64-PRO-PCI-GRAPHICS-CARD-S3-VISION964-WITH-WARRANTY-/232389290988. it has 4Megabyte VRAM. more than my main memory

[Naguissa]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

We didn't say that. You misunderstood. I thought I'd cleared it up in my previous post.  Yes, VGA cards were very common in 1994. No one denied that. We said that 640x480 8-bit or greater colour depth was uncommon. Note that 640x480 8-bit is not a VGA graphics mode! Please don't imply that it is. The old VGA cards didn't have enough memory to display any more than 16 colours, at a time at that resolution. The monitors at the time were analogue and therefore could display a theoretically unlimited number of colours but the graphics cards could not.

The VGA card only had 256KB of RAM. It could stretch to higher resolutions than 640x480 but not with a standard monitor. It was possible to play around with the registers, in a similar manner to mode X, to get 800x600 4-bit but the refresh rate was low and it wouldn't work with a standard VGA monitor, so it wasn't used much. Mode X could also give 400x600 resolution (800x600 as far as the monitor was concerned because the video card displayed each horizontal pixed twice) with 256 colours but again, it wouldn't work with a standard monitor, so 360x480 was as high as you could safely go.

One of the problems was that Windows 3.1 wouldn't work with resolutions less than EGA 640x350, so 8-bit colour was out of the question with a standard VGA card. There would have been enough memory for 640x350 or even 640x400, but the VGA card wouldn't permit it as the horizontal resolution was halved in 8-bit mode.

But in '94 the common standard was SVGA...

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

Where? At work yes, but certainly not for the average home user.

Just look at the minimum requirements for software back then. How many titles mandated a minimum greater resolution/colour depth than what a VGA card could provide? Games were mostly DOS and ran in 320x200 8-bit colour and Windows titles would still run on 640x480 4-bit colour. There might have been some high end CAD and image editing software which required greater resolutions and colour depths but that was the exception.

Software was limited due processor power and lack of acceleration, but hardware supported lot more of modes. My PC was able of 1280x1024@256colors, my monitor (cheap unbranded one) only 1024x768i... But friends PCs were similar.

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

[Ampera]

Good, we use it on a daily basis, while we have a customary system used for basic household tasks that nobody needs to do complicated maths on. Our 1/2 litre soda bottles are great, and gallon milk jugs are awesome too.

It would be neat to have a cleaner, softer system to use without all the SI complications for common tasks. It feels a bit homelier to say a gallon of milk instead of four litres. (rough conversion)

Really?

1/2 litre?! Our "standard" size bottles you keep in the fridge are 1.25L and the "large" ones are 2L. "Single serves" are 600mL which I disagree with... too much sugar.

Milk here is generally in 1L and 2L bottles.

EDIT: Photo of beverages.

I'm a moron.

The / was meant to be an or.

1-2 litre soda bottles are what I meant.

[skarecrow]

i had a Number-Nine systems Graphics card that could do 1600x1200 hooked up to a Nokia 445x 21 inch monitor. running windows 3.1. worked perfectly fine.

Number Nine Systems GXE 64 Pro  : http://www.ebay.com/itm/NUMBER-NINE-9-GXE64-PRO-PCI-GRAPHICS-CARD-S3-VISION964-WITH-WARRANTY-/232389290988. it has 4Megabyte VRAM. more than my main memory

Wow, do those still exist? Number9 cards were THE card to get back in the day. All of my friends who were into computers wanted one, but none of us could afford them.

Late 1993 or early 1994 is probably about when I sold my ALR FlexCache 386DX20 system with 5mb ram and built a 386DX40 system (AMD chip, of course) with 8mb ram and the cheapest video card I could find that did 1024x768 (I'm thinking it was a Trident). My next video card upgrade would bring me to 1280x1024 which was well beyond the specs for my NEC Multisync II monitor, but it still worked fine with Windbloze 95. Yes, I ran Win95 beta back in 94. I believe it was known as Chicago Windows back then. Was like 23 floppies.

After running such "high" resolutions on my machine at home I couldn't even LOOK at a computer running 640x480. I know I changed all of the computers at school to at LEAST 800x600. I actually got paid by my school to cut class whenever they had computer work that needed to be done. I used to teach all the office workers how to use software that I'd never even heard of before. Ahh, those were the days.

But back to the OP topic. I always wanted to run OS/2 (wait a sec, wouldn't OS/2 be HALF an OS? ;-D) but never really got the chance. I did buy a copy of Warp 4 at a computer show once, but returned it the next day because it was a time bombed Alpha release that already expired. One of the posters comments made me glad I never used it though. All of the "positives" they said about it are the main reasons I hate Apple, so if that post is true I would have absolutely hated OS/2 because IMHO there's nothing worse than Apple.

Sent from my XT1565 using Tapatalk

[timb]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

Go back and re-read my posts, please. I never said 640x480 was uncommon! In fact, I have been saying it was the *most common* resolution in use in 1994!

SVGA and XGA were available but relegated to expensive high end systems then (a video card and suitable monitor for those resolutions would have been expensive in 1994). You'd also need a PC with a PCI bus (which essentially meant you had a cutting edge Pentium) or VESA bus (which meant a high end 486) in order to support that video card. (Higher resolutions and color depth required more throughout than ISA could provide).

Again, this was a time when the average consumer bought new, low-end machines *or* used machines.

Also, keep in mind there are three factors when considering video quality of that era.

1) Screen Resolution (640x480, 800x600, etc.)
2) Color Depth (16, 256, Millions, etc. *or* 4bpp, 8bpp, 16bpp, etc.)
3) Refresh Rate (50/60Hz being the bare acceptable minimum, with 75Hz or higher being ideal.)

Your video card and monitor might support an 800x600 resolution, but only at 16 colors due to memory or bus limitations with the video card, then the monitor might only support that resolution at 60Hz, which would give you a headache after awhile due to the perceptible flicker.

There were a lot of factors that limited what resolutions you could use, however, pretty much every system, from low end to high end, supported 640x480@256 Colors.

[timb]

P.P.S. Where did you find the screen res data? I was actually looking for that when responding, and couldn't find anything going earlier than 2000.

I saw it a few months back, possibly on the Something Awful forums. There was a similar discussion about the timeline and evolution of video standards, so someone took raw data from various sources and made a nice little spreadsheet with graphs and stuff. I'm hoping I saved a copy of it; I'll check tonight.

[tooki]

I didn't miss the color depth, I even addressed it. Your sentence used a subordinate clause stating that 640x480 was high end (the wording is such that the color depth is not a part of the claim). If that's not what you meant, well, it is what you wrote.

I clearly said 640x480 and 8-bit colour in the same sentence. Even if the meaning was a little ambiguous, it's crystal clear what I meant now, so please stop misquoting me.

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

We didn't say that. You misunderstood. I thought I'd cleared it up in my previous post.

Yes, VGA cards were very common in 1994. No one denied that. We said that 640x480 8-bit or greater colour depth was uncommon. Note that 640x480 8-bit is not a VGA graphics mode! Please don't imply that it is. The old VGA cards didn't have enough memory to display any more than 16 colours, at a time at that resolution. The monitors at the time were analogue and therefore could display a theoretically unlimited number of colours but the graphics cards could not.

The VGA card only had 256KB of RAM. It could stretch to higher resolutions than 640x480 but not with a standard monitor. It was possible to play around with the registers, in a similar manner to mode X, to get 800x600 4-bit but the refresh rate was low and it wouldn't work with a standard VGA monitor, so it wasn't used much. Mode X could also give 400x600 resolution (800x600 as far as the monitor was concerned because the video card displayed each horizontal pixed twice) with 256 colours but again, it wouldn't work with a standard monitor, so 360x480 was as high as you could safely go.

One of the problems was that Windows 3.1 wouldn't work with resolutions less than EGA 640x350, so 8-bit colour was out of the question with a standard VGA card. There would have been enough memory for 640x350 or even 640x400, but the VGA card wouldn't permit it as the horizontal resolution was halved in 8-bit mode.

Even if (for the sake of argument) I accepted that when you said "resolution", you meant the entire mode (640x480 at 8 bit) and not just the resolution (dimension in pixels), the claim that 640x480@8bit was rare for 1994 still remains wrong. By 1994, the transition to higher resolutions and bit depths was already underway, even in affordable systems. The main limitation was CPU speed, in that giving the CPU more pixels to render could easily bog it down. Accelerated video cards (first for 2D, then for 3D) were invented to alleviate this, and eventually became commonplace.

[tooki]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

Go back and re-read my posts, please. I never said 640x480 was uncommon! In fact, I have been saying it was the *most common* resolution in use in 1994!

SVGA and XGA were available but relegated to expensive high end systems then (a video card and suitable monitor for those resolutions would have been expensive in 1994). You'd also need a PC with a PCI bus (which essentially meant you had a cutting edge Pentium) or VESA bus (which meant a high end 486) in order to support that video card. (Higher resolutions and color depth required more throughout than ISA could provide).

Again, this was a time when the average consumer bought new, low-end machines *or* used machines.

Also, keep in mind there are three factors when considering video quality of that era.

1) Screen Resolution (640x480, 800x600, etc.)
2) Color Depth (16, 256, Millions, etc. *or* 4bpp, 8bpp, 16bpp, etc.)
3) Refresh Rate (50/60Hz being the bare acceptable minimum, with 75Hz or higher being ideal.)

Your video card and monitor might support an 800x600 resolution, but only at 16 colors due to memory or bus limitations with the video card, then the monitor might only support that resolution at 60Hz, which would give you a headache after awhile due to the perceptible flicker.

There were a lot of factors that limited what resolutions you could use, however, pretty much every system, from low end to high end, supported 640x480@256 Colors.

I apologize, I seemingly did misread something you said, cuz yeah, you have been agreeing that 640x480@8bit was the standard. Sorry about that.

[helius]

SVGA and XGA were available but relegated to expensive high end systems then (a video card and suitable monitor for those resolutions would have been expensive in 1994). You'd also need a PC with a PCI bus (which essentially meant you had a cutting edge Pentium) or VESA bus (which meant a high end 486) in order to support that video card. (Higher resolutions and color depth required more throughout than ISA could provide).

The claim about bus throughput was repeated here before... it's simply wrong. No PC refreshes its video output over the bus, they are not Apple ][s in disguise.
By 1992, video cards supporting 1024x768 at 256 colors were affordable. They could be purchased for less than $150 with 1MB of VRAM as a 16-bit ISA card. A 15" monitor capable of displaying that resolution cost $400-700 depending on brand. The PCI bus wouldn't be released for two more years.
Other components like CPU and RAM were the primary contributors to cost.

[Zero999]

SVGA and XGA were available but relegated to expensive high end systems then (a video card and suitable monitor for those resolutions would have been expensive in 1994). You'd also need a PC with a PCI bus (which essentially meant you had a cutting edge Pentium) or VESA bus (which meant a high end 486) in order to support that video card. (Higher resolutions and color depth required more throughout than ISA could provide).

The claim about bus throughput was repeated here before... it's simply wrong. No PC refreshes its video output over the bus, they are not Apple ][s in disguise.
By 1992, video cards supporting 1024x768 at 256 colors were affordable. They could be purchased for less than $150 with 1MB of VRAM as a 16-bit ISA card. A 15" monitor capable of displaying that resolution cost $400-700 depending on brand. The PCI bus wouldn't be released for two more years.
Other components like CPU and RAM were the primary contributors to cost.

You've forgotten inflation. Those figures would be around double that in today's money. I'm glad you could afford it, but my family couldn't.

[Ampera]

To me, this is the glory of building retro PCs. Not only is it a history lesson for me, as I am not old enough to have experienced any of these machines, it allows me to make machines that would have been incredibly, or at least decently high end for the time at a now cheap price.

[NivagSwerdna]

TBH I think you are both right it depended on the setting.  So for high-end (Architects and the like were adopting high end graphics very rapidly at the time) and more standard applications were at a lower resolution.  I remember developing an application for a room which contained just over 1000 PCs (!) in 1995... pretty sure they were VGA.

[tooki]

SVGA and XGA were available but relegated to expensive high end systems then (a video card and suitable monitor for those resolutions would have been expensive in 1994). You'd also need a PC with a PCI bus (which essentially meant you had a cutting edge Pentium) or VESA bus (which meant a high end 486) in order to support that video card. (Higher resolutions and color depth required more throughout than ISA could provide).

The claim about bus throughput was repeated here before... it's simply wrong. No PC refreshes its video output over the bus, they are not Apple ][s in disguise.
By 1992, video cards supporting 1024x768 at 256 colors were affordable. They could be purchased for less than $150 with 1MB of VRAM as a 16-bit ISA card. A 15" monitor capable of displaying that resolution cost $400-700 depending on brand. The PCI bus wouldn't be released for two more years.
Other components like CPU and RAM were the primary contributors to cost.

You've forgotten inflation. Those figures would be around double that in today's money. I'm glad you could afford it, but my family couldn't.

$1 in 1994 is $1.65 in today's dollars. So nothing to sneeze at, but certainly not double. But either way, whether a graphics card cost $150 or $250, it's still reasonably affordable, it's not like we are talking about it costing thousands.

[Ian.M]

Back in the first half of the 90's we were running Windows 3.1 on a 386DX/25 system with crappy standard VGA on the motherboard, with a IBM 8514/A compatible card in it to give us 1024x768x16 or 256 colours on a large hi-rez multisync monitor (which I remember had 5 BNC sockets for the colours and syncs) so we could access a technical document system on CD-R  (using a 2x speed SCSI caddy CDROM drive) and get enough resolution on-screen to be able to avoid having to go wild printing out diagrams or futz around too much with the magnifier function.  I *think* it used Acrobat Reader for document display, but it might have been something proprietary.   Due to the high resolution, it soon became the preferred machine for doing the accounts in Excel, and then we treated it to a FAX modem (and faxed the boss's signature to it) so we could do paperless quotes and ordering!

[Zero999]

SVGA and XGA were available but relegated to expensive high end systems then (a video card and suitable monitor for those resolutions would have been expensive in 1994). You'd also need a PC with a PCI bus (which essentially meant you had a cutting edge Pentium) or VESA bus (which meant a high end 486) in order to support that video card. (Higher resolutions and color depth required more throughout than ISA could provide).

The claim about bus throughput was repeated here before... it's simply wrong. No PC refreshes its video output over the bus, they are not Apple ][s in disguise.
By 1992, video cards supporting 1024x768 at 256 colors were affordable. They could be purchased for less than $150 with 1MB of VRAM as a 16-bit ISA card. A 15" monitor capable of displaying that resolution cost $400-700 depending on brand. The PCI bus wouldn't be released for two more years.
Other components like CPU and RAM were the primary contributors to cost.

You've forgotten inflation. Those figures would be around double that in today's money. I'm glad you could afford it, but my family couldn't.

$1 in 1994 is $1.65 in today's dollars. So nothing to sneeze at, but certainly not double. But either way, whether a graphics card cost $150 or $250, it's still reasonably affordable, it's not like we are talking about it costing thousands.

My first PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse etc. and all cost around £400, or £750 in today's money, according to the this calculator, so I wasn't that far off when I said double (whatever the inflation rate was for the dollar, is irrelevant to me as I'm in the UK). It was a 386SX 25MHz, 4MB RAM and had a VGA card. I suffered that for a couple of years, then we upgraded the video card to a Trident and RAM to 8MB, so I could run M$ Encarta 96, which needed 8-bit colour or greater to run. I wanted to get a better PC so I could run Doom but wasn't allowed. Perhaps we were just poor?

A year later, we had more money and got a P200 with 32MB of RAM and a 4MB graphics card, which could run Quake and I was very happy. 

It's my shortening of MS-DOS 7.1 by the China DOS Union.


Basically, it was made by the CDU as a hacked apart copy of the ACTUAL DOS 7.1, which is just the kernel? version of 95B/98SE (think the NT version number for modern Windows). It has full LFN and FAT32 support, but enabling either of those is notoriously buggy. It breaks tons of stuff,  and it's not exactly kosher nor legal (They even dare to put it under a GNU GPL licence, wonder how well that would stand up in any court anywhere)

I still maintain the statement, that for the average desktop user outside of some REALLY weird use case, FAT32 on DOS is never really a good idea. If your desktop PC has more space than DOS can handle, then it's time to switch over to something better.

FAT32 was necessary because DOS was still a large component of Windows 95 to ME and hard drives were growing beyond what FAT16 could handle. It enabled larger partition sizes, yet kept the all important DOS compatibility.

That Chinese DOS sounds like a PoS and shouldn't be used.

My personal issues with FreeDOS and CDU DOS is with compatibility with anything using a FAT32 partition. Especially programs like windows, and other things that need direct drive access, FAT32 breaks it.

If you're taking about Windows 3.x, then it's not surprising it doesn't support FAT32 because it wasn't invented until Windows 95. I suspect any problems you have will be down to 32-bit disk access being turned on, which accessed the disk directly, but I imagine it would cause problems for file systems not supported by Windows 3.1. Try running windows in standard, rather than 386 enhanced mode, by typing win /s at the command prompt. If the disk access is slow, then load smartdrv.exe before loading Windows.

[timb]

SVGA and XGA were available but relegated to expensive high end systems then (a video card and suitable monitor for those resolutions would have been expensive in 1994). You'd also need a PC with a PCI bus (which essentially meant you had a cutting edge Pentium) or VESA bus (which meant a high end 486) in order to support that video card. (Higher resolutions and color depth required more throughout than ISA could provide).

The claim about bus throughput was repeated here before... it's simply wrong. No PC refreshes its video output over the bus, they are not Apple ][s in disguise.
By 1992, video cards supporting 1024x768 at 256 colors were affordable. They could be purchased for less than $150 with 1MB of VRAM as a 16-bit ISA card. A 15" monitor capable of displaying that resolution cost $400-700 depending on brand. The PCI bus wouldn't be released for two more years.
Other components like CPU and RAM were the primary contributors to cost.

Yeah, I think it's *you* who's got their timeline significantly off now.

PCI was released in 1992, though it was primarily only available on boards with high end server chipsets. In the home/small business segment it was a lot slower to gain adoption. That started happening in mid-1994 with the release of new chipsets for Pentium based systems.

Also, I can't find any $150, 1MB VRAM video cards capable of that  resolution in 1992. Care to link me to a catalog or advertisement showing some?

Also,  monitors are a different story. Sure, your $400 monitor might be able to do 1024x768, but only at 50Hz. Great if you want a migraine, not so much for actually doing work.

Finally, yes, in graphics modes (non-text modes/outside of DOS) the PC *does* have to refresh the video data over the bus. How the hell else would it update the frame buffer to redraw the screen, magic?

From Wikipedia:
"In the early 1990s, the I/O bandwidth of the ISA bus was becoming a critical bottleneck to PC graphics performance. The need for faster graphics was being driven by increasing adoption of graphical user interfaces in PC operating systems."

If a 16-bit non-DMA ISA interface was good enough, the VESA Local Bus (VLB) would have never been developed. Keep in mind, this was a time *before* consumer 3D acceleration, so the need to tie the video card directly to the 486's memory/processor bus was purely for 2D acceleration (or software based 3D in games and CAD).

[helius]

Also, I can't find any $150, 1MB VRAM video cards capable of that  resolution in 1992. Care to link me to a catalog or advertisement showing some?

These questions can be very tedious. If you adopt a less confrontational tone, you're more likely to get the references you want.

Here is a card capable of 1024x768 at 256 colors, released in 1991, and sold for $145.23 in 1992: The ATI VGA Wonder XL 1MB. At the same time, you could also buy the Diamond SpeedStar 24 for $159, or an Orchid ProDesigner IIs for $149.

Also,  monitors are a different story. Sure, your $400 monitor might be able to do 1024x768, but only at 50Hz. Great if you want a migraine, not so much for actually doing work.

You could buy a Panasonic C1395 for $429 [from the same issue]. It has a refresh rate of 60Hz at 1024x768. On a 14" screen this is not an excessive flicker for most people. For a hundred dollars more, you could go for NEC or MAG which were better quality. Keep in mind that in the days before EDID, monitors had to support whatever refresh rate the video card output. 1024x768@60ni was a standard SVGA rate, 50Hz was not. There was a 43Hz interlaced mode (on the 8514/A), but it had become largely obsolete by the 1990s.

Finally, yes, in graphics modes (non-text modes/outside of DOS) the PC *does* have to refresh the video data over the bus. How the hell else would it update the frame buffer to redraw the screen, magic?

What I would call "magic" or perhaps "slight of hand" is the tactic that uses a technical term, like frame buffer, in direct opposition to its accepted meaning. The frame buffer is just what it says, a complete buffer of the entire display. Even when the CPU is halted and the bus is frozen, it continues to supply the display at the bandwidth required for video refresh. So, the CPU and the bus are not involved in the refresh process at all. Q.E.D.

Wikipedia can be very poorly written, witness this amazing paragraph:

"Video cards always have a certain amount of RAM. This RAM is where the bitmap of image data is "buffered" for display. The term frame buffer is thus often used interchangeably when referring to this RAM.

Video card RAM is necessary to keep the entire screen image in memory. The CPU sends its data to the video card. The video processor forms a picture of the screen image and stores it in the frame buffer. This picture is a large bitmap. It is used to continually update the screen image."

Large, deep visuals have been output for the better part of 30 years from machines with much slower busses than ISA, like Q-Bus and VME.

[Halcyon]

Come on guys, there is a lot of knowledge between each of you, let's just leave it at that. It need not be a pissing contest about who was "more correct".

[Ampera]

Come on guys, there is a lot of knowledge between each of you, let's just leave it at that. It need not be a pissing contest about who was "more correct".

I think I am the most correct.

OS/2 is rubbish.

[timb]

Also, I can't find any $150, 1MB VRAM video cards capable of that  resolution in 1992. Care to link me to a catalog or advertisement showing some?

These questions can be very tedious. If you adopt a less confrontational tone, you're more likely to get the references you want.

Here is a card capable of 1024x768 at 256 colors, released in 1991, and sold for $145.23 in 1992: The ATI VGA Wonder XL 1MB. At the same time, you could also buy the Diamond SpeedStar 24 for $159, or an Orchid ProDesigner IIs for $149.

I wasn't trying to be confrontational, I was genuinely curious which cards you were talking about. Thanks for gathering some links!

What I would call "magic" or perhaps "slight of hand" is the tactic that uses a technical term, like frame buffer, in direct opposition to its accepted meaning. The frame buffer is just what it says, a complete buffer of the entire display. Even when the CPU is halted and the bus is frozen, it continues to supply the display at the bandwidth required for video refresh. So, the CPU and the bus are not involved in the refresh process at all. Q.E.D.

Yes, when the screen is just sitting there, displaying a static image, sure, the CPU isn't involved. However, that's just one, very narrow use case. What about when you're dragging a window around the screen? Or playing a full color game at resolutions above 320x240? Once you get out of text mode and into GUIs, you get to a point where every pixel is redrawn 60+ times per second, at higher and higher resolutions and color depths.

Also, keep in mind too that sometimes GUI programs would actually use the frame buffer as their screen buffer, by reading back portions directly from video RAM (instead of keeping a full working copy in the system memory). This essentially doubles the bandwidth required. (Read, modify, write.)

Again, why would they design an extension to the EISA bus designed specifically for video cards (VLB), in a time before consumer 3D cards were available, if regular old ISA was good enough? Answer: They wouldn't. They needed a way to connect the 486 CPU and memory bus directly to the video card's frame buffer at higher speeds than regular ISA allowed, for maximum performance.

[Zero999]

Yes, when the screen is just sitting there, displaying a static image, sure, the CPU isn't involved. However, that's just one, very narrow use case. What about when you're dragging a window around the screen? Or playing a full color game at resolutions above 320x240? Once you get out of text mode and into GUIs, you get to a point where every pixel is redrawn 60+ times per second, at higher and higher resolutions and color depths.

That's true. Remember when moving a window around you just saw the outline of the frame moving and not the whole window? Modern OSes often revert to this mode when using a generic unaccelerated driver.

Also, keep in mind too that sometimes GUI programs would actually use the frame buffer as their screen buffer, by reading back portions directly from video RAM (instead of keeping a full working copy in the system memory). This essentially doubles the bandwidth required. (Read, modify, write.)

Nowadays it's different but back then it was common. Try doing a flood fill on an image larger than the window on Paint Brush in Windows 3.1. You'll notice that the flood fill operation won't worn on areas off screen. It's because it works on the area in the video buffer.

Again, why would they design an extension to the EISA bus designed specifically for video cards (VLB), in a time before consumer 3D cards were available, if regular old ISA was good enough? Answer: They wouldn't. They needed a way to connect the 486 CPU and memory bus directly to the video card's frame buffer at higher speeds than regular ISA allowed, for maximum performance.

Yes, shifting the data back and forth was time consuming. One of the advantages with VGA mode X is the video buffer could have more than one page: 3 at 320x240 and 2 at 320x400, which sped things up. It also enabled 4 pixels of the same colour to be written to the buffer by only writing 1 byte of memory.

[Howardlong]

That's true. Remember when moving a window around you just saw the outline of the frame moving and not the whole window? Modern OSes often revert to this mode when using a generic unaccelerated driver.

It still does when you RDP into a box. You can also switch it off as part of the Performance options in the system control panel applet Advanced tab. Most of the visual effects are frankly just developer chrome nonsense and add nothing to end user productivity.

[Zero999]

That's true. Remember when moving a window around you just saw the outline of the frame moving and not the whole window? Modern OSes often revert to this mode when using a generic unaccelerated driver.

It still does when you RDP into a box. You can also switch it off as part of the Performance options in the system control panel applet Advanced tab.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with those terms. Do they refer to Winblow$? If so, I don't know, since I only use that at work and don't do any configuration.

Most of the visual effects are frankly just developer chrome nonsense and add nothing to end user productivity.

I largely agree, though find it much easier to move windows around, if I can see the contents, especially at higher resolutions. I remember using Linux on a live CD which booted with a generic driver, in some odd resolution and found the window frame difficult to see when dragging it around.

[timb]

That's true. Remember when moving a window around you just saw the outline of the frame moving and not the whole window? Modern OSes often revert to this mode when using a generic unaccelerated driver.

It still does when you RDP into a box. You can also switch it off as part of the Performance options in the system control panel applet Advanced tab.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with those terms. Do they refer to Winblow$? If so, I don't know, since I only use that at work and don't do any configuration.

Most of the visual effects are frankly just developer chrome nonsense and add nothing to end user productivity.

I largely agree, though find it much easier to move windows around, if I can see the contents, especially at higher resolutions. I remember using Linux on a live CD which booted with a generic driver, in some odd resolution and found the window frame difficult to see when dragging it around.

RDP is Remote Desktop Proctologist; Microsoft's take on VNC.

Though I have to admit, RDP has always been pretty good. Where VNC is essentially just sending highly compressed screenshots to the client (plus a virtual mouse and keyboard device), RDP is highly integrated into the OS. It creates a "virtual video card" of sorts that transmits draw commands and/or H.264 video to the client. This has a side benefit of allowing multiple users to remote into a single machine and each log into their own, unique desktops (even while someone is physically logged onto the RDP host machine).

Technically you can do that too on Linux with a special version of VNC (it essentially replaces the X-Windows server with a VNC service). However, like most other implementations of VNC, it provides poor image quality and isn't nearly as responsive as RDP.

RDP also transmits sound (through a virtual audio device unique to each user logged in), syncs the clipboard between the client and server and is damn fast. Image quality and responsiveness are good enough that you can easily play games remotely without noticeable lag.

Remote Desktop has always been one of the things Microsoft did right, in my opinion. As always, the proprietary nature kept it from being widely used outside of Microsoft's sphere of influence. (Only in the last few years did they finally release a client for iOS and macOS; there are open source implementations, but they use the older versions of the protocol and are reverse engineered, so not 100% stable. AFAIK there's no open source server.)

Apple integrated an enhanced version of VNC into macOS that provides some of the benefits of RDP (clipboard syncing, a virtual screen to allow multiple users to log in, remote scripting support, etc.) through what they call Apple Remote Desktop, or ARD. The one nice thing about that is it's still fully backward compatible with the vanilla VNC protocol, so you can get remote access to your system from basically any platform of the last 20 years (including an original Palm Pilot, which is nice if you wake up and find yourself in 1999, I guess.)

Edit: Uh, that's Remote Desktop Protocol, not Proctologist; damn autocomplete! Though, that would make for an interesting robot. They do robotic surgery already, why not a remote colonoscopy!

# assman@analcheck:~ ssh rectumroboto@hospital.med

[Halcyon]

RDP is Remote Desktop Proctologist; Microsofts take on VNC.

 

[tooki]

RDP predates MPEG-4 by many, many years. And the whole point is that it doesn't stream the screen buffer at all: RDP streams screen drawing (GDI)* commands, which are then executed on the terminal. For most things, this is far more efficient and responsive. This is similar to X Windows on UNIX.



*Does anyone know whether RDP has been updated to do the same with modern WPF graphics?

[Ampera]

I love RDP, and I wish it was better available on other platforms. It easily beats out VNC in every respectable way, unless you for whatever reason need pixel perfect accuracy, and you have a network made of solid steel.

[alm]

I agree that remote X and RDP would be a better comparison (sending rendering primitives over, rather than images), although you would obviously need to tunnel X over something like SSH to get any security (which SSH conveniently supports out of the box). I believe VNC is more like pointing a webcam at your screen and streaming the video. Its advantage is that it requires little on the side of the client so it can run both client and server on pretty much anything, including a Java applet back when that was still a thing.

[timb]

RDP predates MPEG-4 by many, many years. And the whole point is that it doesn't stream the screen buffer at all: RDP streams screen drawing (GDI)* commands, which are then executed on the terminal. For most things, this is far more efficient and responsive. This is similar to X Windows on UNIX.



*Does anyone know whether RDP has been updated to do the same with modern WPF graphics?

Actually, current versions do stream the screen buffer using an H.264 transport in certain modes. (Anything that requires 3D acceleration, watching videos in WMP, etc.)

You're correct that originally it was essentially compressing and sending the GDI commands. That has changed over the years and been blended with other technologies.

[Rick Law]

I love RDP, and I wish it was better available on other platforms. It easily beats out VNC in every respectable way, unless you for whatever reason need pixel perfect accuracy, and you have a network made of solid steel.

RDP wasn't really a Microsoft creation.  Microsoft licensed the technology from Citrix and deployed a dumb down version of Citrix remote as Microsoft Terminal Server (I think it started with Server 2000 or Server 2003).

Had RDP stayed a Citrix product, Citrix might have expand into to other OS'es.  Citrix as remote access was slowly being killed by the less capable (but cheaper) Terminal Server.

[hendorog]

I agree that remote X and RDP would be a better comparison (sending rendering primitives over, rather than images), although you would obviously need to tunnel X over something like SSH to get any security (which SSH conveniently supports out of the box). I believe VNC is more like pointing a webcam at your screen and streaming the video. Its advantage is that it requires little on the side of the client so it can run both client and server on pretty much anything, including a Java applet back when that was still a thing.

From a performance perspective, RDP is much faster than X over a link with any latency - like a WAN.
Performance wise, FreeNX/NX Server is the most comparable to RDP for linux. It radically improves the performance of X over a WAN.

[Howardlong]

I love RDP, and I wish it was better available on other platforms. It easily beats out VNC in every respectable way, unless you for whatever reason need pixel perfect accuracy, and you have a network made of solid steel.

RDP wasn't really a Microsoft creation.  Microsoft licensed the technology from Citrix and deployed a dumb down version of Citrix remote as Microsoft Terminal Server (I think it started with Server 2000 or Server 2003).

Had RDP stayed a Citrix product, Citrix might have expand into to other OS'es.  Citrix as remote access was slowly being killed by the less capable (but cheaper) Terminal Server.

It's even further back than that, NT4 had a terminal services version. Citrix had some sort of agreement with Microsoft around the WinFrame technologies. Citrix used there own ICA protocol rather than RDP though. I believe Citrix was also available on NT3.51, but I didn't use it then. It was a hugely popular way of deploying fat clients and client/server applications over slow WAN links.

As a technology, unlike Terminal Services, Citrix WinFrame and subsequently MetaFrame also added a degree of sandboxing and remote application desktop integration supporting mutilple end users on a single server. It was kludgy, but it worked (most of the time). It was certainly a difficult task to troubleshoot on production systems, and on the 32 bit back ends of the time, even Intel/Microsoft add ons like PAE and AWE to get around the 4GB RAM limitations of 32 bit weren't enough.

As time went on, disk and particularly RAM became much cheaper, 64 bit was introduced, and virtualisation became much more popular including full remote desktop enabling hot desking and remote working.

Nowadays remote desktop for end users is considered old hat as it doesn't work offline for the fraction of end users who think the world will end if they can't write emails and create content 24/7. So the world is moving to cloud based solutions with local sync such as Office 365/Onedrive which, for anyone who's used it, will know has its own limitations, primarily to do with syncing, availability, and a testing/change control process that doesn't include the customer.