Video playback on low-end MS-DOS machines #VintageComputing

Playing video on MS-DOS… it kinda was a thing with things such as the GRASP/GLPro and FLIC formats back in the day. But not on REALLY low-end machines, such as 8088s and CGA. Until the demo 8088 Corruption was released in 2004. And then its successor 8088 Domination in 2014. It can play videos at very acceptable quality on an 8088 at 4.77 MHz with (composite) CGA and a Sound Blaster 2.0.

Scali’s OpenBlog discusses video and audio playback on the oldest of devices:

I’ve had this idea for a while. Since I had done a streaming audio solution on PC speaker on my IBM 5160 PC/XT, I wanted to add video as well. It would make sense to combine the two, as I already wrote at the time. And the past few days I had a bit of spare time, so I decided give it a quick-and-dirty try.

The code for the XDC encoder and decoder are available on Github, so I just made my own fork at https://github.com/Scalibq/XDC.

See the video below and more in the post here and more results in a follow-on post here.


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