Why weren't external GPUs (think what modern GPUs are, but for 80s graphics so the IBM 5150 can be on the same level as arcade cabinets, that and Japanese text support on the IBM 5150) a thing for 80s PCs? Especially Japanese PCs like the PC88/98, X1, FM7/77AV and MSX.Sound cards showing up much earlier would've helped alot too.
>>12907892>Why weren't external GPUs a thing?They'd have required much higher bandwidth than what ports from the era could provide. >Sound cards showing up much earlierThey did. Fuller Box, Mockingboard, FM-PAC...
>>12907930Then they should've had those higher bandwidth ports to begin with.Also by sound cards showing up much earlier I mean 1981, not 1984-1987.
>>12907892ai reply farming thread
>>12907954No, a person made this thread, the IBM 5150 needed proper GPUs to be on the same level as arcade cabinets of the time.
>>12907976The 5150 was a business machine with zero consideration for video games put into it. That's why the graphical ability was so substandard compared to even contemporary 8-bit machines.IBM saw the fact that it could display graphs as perfect for what their machine was set out to do: boring business shit. IBM eventually made their own graphics card 6 years later with the 8514/A, but by then we already had systems like the Amiga with it's built-in graphics hardware. There was zero purpose for IBM or anyone else to produce a graphics card that could mimic the visuals seen in an arcade when the computer was launched in 1981.
>>12908000 (Me)Also, why would you want the GPU to be external? Regardless, it would still have to interface with the 8-bit ISA bus and still wouldn't be able to quite handle that level of graphical fidelity as >>12907940 pointed out.
>>12908003Whoops, quoted the wrong poster in that reply, meant to quote >>12907930
>>12907940>Then they should've had those higher bandwidth ports to begin with.You seem to be really mistaken on how the 5150 was designed. It was meant to be as cheap as possible and made from as many off-the-shelf components as possible. Having a larger bandwidth bus would've required a more expensive CPU than what they were targeting at the time. Hell, they even cheaped out on the CPU going with the 8088 instead of the 8086.
IBM PCs and compatible systems were first and foremost business computers. The evolution of DOS software from CGA to EGA to VGA was to allow for more colors at higher resolutions as the PC slowly crept its way onto having a Mac-like graphical interface. None of this required dedicated sprite-based graphics hardware like what was expected in arcades and consoles. Doom and Quake blew people’s minds using only software rendering, and once 3D graphics became the standard, sprite-based hardware quickly faded into irrelevance.It’s the same reason why PC sound capabilities were limited to screechy monophonic beep-boops until Ad-Lib and Roland came along: it just wasn’t relevant to people who only used computers for spreadsheets, databases, and word processing. Even then, the era of dedicated sound cards was relatively short-lived once CD-quality pre-recorded audio became standard.
>>12908042Thank you ChatGPT-kun
>>12908000It's reasons like that why Lenovo bought out IBM's consumer division, they needed to embrace it.Same with NEC.>>12908003Think the CGA cards the IBM 5150 did get, but with much more bandwhith.>>12908008The 8086 was already more powerful then the Z80, 6502 and 6800 powering arcade boards at the time.Also the 5150 was $1565 dollars at it's release, not cheap by any means.
>>12908046Fuck you
There were a number of big external "GPUs" in a box for the PC back in the late '80s and very early '90s designed for real time graphics. E&S made one, Kyocera made one, they were all very very rare and expensive. I read a whole FAQ about them a while back. There's a Vogons thread about 'em, none are suitable for gaymen so there's basically no interest in these today.
>>12908059I’ve read about 2D accelerator cards from the early 90s that were basically made to speed up Windows 3.x’s GUI and nothing else
>>12908068There were loads of nearly one-off 2D and 3D "GPUs" (really a whole separate computer in a box talking over a line or two run from an ISA port to an external box), I can't seem to find a link but I will find it eventually. Some professor's web site has a big big FAQ about these early units. Most were made for real time generation of broadcast graphics and simple 3D scenes.
https://stason.org/TULARC//pc/3d-graphics-cards-faq/index.htmlHere you can read the FAQ. There are a LOT of old graphics accelerators. They almost all seem very rare and expensive, some were over $100k. Most of them are well over $10k.
Intergraph, Fujitsu, other forgotten powerhouse names in there.
>>12907892>Especially Japanese PCsOnly Ken Kutaragi had any interest in 3D graphics in Japan. He was the only Japanese who was doing this back in the '80s. And his product, the predecessor of the Playstation (PS1 is just a modernized and shrunk-down chip version of Ken's broadcast video effects processor) was the only notable Japanese 3D graphics product until Fujitsu came up with something a couple years later, which was used in other Japanese broadcast effects processors. All 3D graphics research is American going back to the first real-time 3D computer graphics system, the Apollo Docking Simulator.
>>12908103We're talking about bringing early PCs to be on the same level as arcade boards of it's day, not 3D.
>>12907930I have the first PC sound card, the completely unknown True Sound Corporation True Sound Card, which has a high quality 16-bit DAC which can run at up to 56KHz, maybe higher but that's the top official support probably because it would already swamp most hard drives back then. It's from 1985. It strictly records, plays back, and edits digital audio. It's not for games and there's almost no software that supports it, I have a demo version of one of the three or four programs that do. I have five of them NIB, must have been in the estate of the dude who invented the thing. Found 'em at the Goodwill years ago. $50 for all five. While it's worthless for most every use, it's historical as the first known PC sound card with digital audio playback and recording, and also the DACs, can't remember the exact one, are ceramic versions of a very very sought after DAC and are worth a couple hundred bucks each in their own right to people who want 'em to repair or upgrade old CD players.I made a thread here years ago about 'em.
>>12908113Yeah it's called, redo the PC architecture to support sprite graphics.No add-in card will do this, it will amount to an add-in computer and what's the use of the PC then? Bear in mind many arcade boards used the 68000 which is actually more powerful than early PC CPUs.
>>12908113IBM PCs were never meant to be gaming machines. For that you had the Amiga with its arcade-like graphics and sound capabilities. Amiga didn’t survive the new era of 3D action games on PC though.
>>12907892'Math co-processors' became popular, and they served a similar function.
>>12908125That's pretty neat, I hadn't heard about it. Very little info available on the net, so I guess it's not documented/emulated by MAME/DosBox/PCem.Here's the thread:https://desuarchive.org/vr/thread/8965014/
>>12908047>Lenovo bought out IBM's consumer divisionNigger, that happened almost 30 years afterward>Think the CGA cards the IBM 5150 did get, but with much more bandwhith.Bandwidth from where?>The 8086 was already more powerful then the Z80, 6502 and 6800 powering arcade boards at the time.The IBM ran an 8088
>>12908126Arcade boards didn't use the 68000 until 1984 with Marble Madness, in 1981 it was still Z80, 6502 and 6800.>>12908182>The IBM ran an 8088But was upgradable to a 8086.
>>12908125We're talking about 1981 here, not 1985.
>>12908175It's a high quality board, well laid out, the DAC is top notch. They're in a box, under another box, in another box, behind a metric buttload of stuff right now or I'd go check to see what it is. I did look it up before.$1200 was quite a lot of bread to spend on something with almost zero software at the time. But IMHO it was probably the highest quality ADC solution for a PC at the time or for many years to come even after the Sound Blaster era, which only did (IIRC with SB Pro I had) 48 KHz mono or 24KHz stereo.>>12908202The whole premise of the thread is based on some retarded zoomer not knowing that at that time you had to design the architecture to include a video display processor to offload work from the CPU nor did they know about contention for memory between the CPU and VDP or whatever you'd call it.A classic example of a good video game experience at home in 1982 is the C64, which had built in sprite graphics, high quality sound including digitial audio, hardware scrolling, etc. but that meant compromise in those days, to have fast graphics in the early '80s you had to let the video processor and the CPU access the same memory and somehow lock the CPU out from changing it while it was being read by the display processor.You're really going to need a whole 'nother computer to plug into an ISA slot and just feed that thing some instructions, but not too many, and let it do its thing. To do what you say.But in 1981 arcade games were pretty shit and easily cloned, by and large, on the C64 1:1 with no real differences other than the chosen colors obviously. PC wouldn't become real popular for another half decade.Japanese computers came with a video processor and were not unlike the C64 in capability but they all had inferior sound for many years.
>>12908190nta, the first arcade game running on a 68k I know of is Quantum from 1982
>>12908175BTW I haven't looked at the files, if that thread's correct the DAC is 12-bit not 16, but I recall recording into a 16-bit format. Perhaps they just did that for interoperability and the last 4 bits are padded. Maybe some of the circuitry on the board is the low 4-bits done up in resistors or something, who knows. Low bits aren't that critical.I will dig around. I never even tried to play recorded files back on another computer, wonder what the format even is? Probably something you can feed directly into a DAC without any extra processing for such a board, meant to go in the earliest PCs.
>>12908234>wonder what the format even is? Probably something you can feed directly into a DACYeah, I would expect some sort of raw PCM (maybe with some delta-encoding, DPCM or ADPCM) with a proprietary header.If you're feeling altruistic you could look into getting in touch with some MAMEdev for preservation purposes (I imagine some of its surface mounted chips are ROMs).
>>12907892Because not everything was a PC (as in IBM PC-compatible) and x86 back then, and DOS compatibility wasn't important so there wasn't any reason to use a PC over something else. People would buy a computer designed for graphics instead, which had more powerful hardware and a better architecture. There were computers made for graphics like the Apple Mac and Lisa, Amiga, SGI IRIS, and Symbolics 3600, and they had a GUI OS too.
>>12907976R-Type used an x86 CPU>>12908000The IBM ps2 with VGA was better than the Amiga is a lot of ways but software didn't support it until a few years later.>>12908047The benchmark I ran was Indycar racing which ran about the same as the Amiga on an 8mhz V20 but cga so less bitplanes possibly>>12908059The mindset pc had a chipset that could do impressive scaling.You had plantronics which was like 2 cga cards stacked together, in 1985 that would have competed with basic 8 bit arcade games.>>12908370For home pcs the C64 outsold IBM in the home until 1990. The ps1 showed that IBM wanted the game market but Tandy fixed it and then it had some pretty good graphics overall.>>12907892Why not for the Apple 2 or ZX speccy as well
>>12908460>The ps1 showed that IBM wanted the game market but Tandy fixed itYou mean PCjr?
>>12908190>But was upgradable to a 8086.Nope. The 8088 was chosen specifically because an 8-bit external data bus allowed the rest of the machine to be much simpler and cheaper. You can't just take an IBM 5150 and swap the 8088 for an 8086, the rest of the hardware won't be able to use itIn fact internally the 8088 is practically the same as the 8086. It's an 8086 with a smaller external data bus to make the rest of the machine cheaper
>>12908537I thought you could upgrade it.
>>12908549You can upgrade it to an NEC V20 which is faster at the same clock speed, but still has an 8-bit external data busThere are V20s with higher clock speeds but the problem with the 5150 is that you need to use some additional board for higher clock speeds:https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/2020-03-02-overclocking-the-ibm-5150-8088-cpu-with-pc-sprint.html
