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Oldskooler Ramblings
Personal blog · trixter.oldskool.orghardwareprogramminggames
Oldskooler Ramblings is a personal blog at trixter.oldskool.org about hardware, programming and games. Since 2011, 46 different Hacker News readers have linked it 59 times, most often “8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators (2015)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Trixter's blog for detailed writeups of retro PC demos and hardware tricks, such as 8088 MPH and 8088 Domination, which show what the IBM PC's 8088 CPU and CGA display can do.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- One commenter calls the 8088 MPH writeup 'epic'; another calls the 8088 Domination writeup 'excellent'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
the unlikely child born of the home computer wars
Most-linked posts?
- 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators (2015)20 people · 23 mentions · first linked 2016-11-28
- 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 14 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-06-20
- At a disadvantage (2011) – Which was faster, an IBM PC or a Commodore 64?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-11-20
- Maze Generation in Thirteen Bytes (2012)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-12-17
- Maze Generation in Thirteen Bytes2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-03-19
- 8088 Domination Post-Mortem – Conclusion2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-06-21
- 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-08
- /2014/06/20/8088-domination-post-mortem-conclusion/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-08-24
What Hacker News says?
Some of the ports of Bad Apple have had to deal with this and they narrowed it down to the few changes needed for each frame. When there were too many pixels to change all at once, they would make fewer changes in exchange for a loss of quality. https://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19/8088-domination-post... https://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/20/8088-domination-post...
Comment linking /2014/06/20/8088-domination-post-mortem-conclusion/
on “Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display”Submitted 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators as a story · 319 points
HN discussion> With a few hundred mb file that sounds slow even today. That depends upon how fast one can perform the memcopy of the entire buffer. It has been said that latency amounts of 100ms are perceived as instantenous ( https://www.pubnub.com/blog/2015-02-09-how-fast-is-realtime-... ). So if we take 100ms as our latency budget, then the max file size we can 'edit' with a straightforward memcopy (i.e., no gap buffer) becom…
Comment linking /2013/01/10/optimizing-for-the-8088-and-8086-cpu-part-1/
on “Text Editor: Data Structures”Submitted 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators (2015) as a story · 283 points
HN discussionWatch the 8088MPH demo on youtube, then read how it was done [0], it's absolutelly insane what you can extract from an IBM PC 5150. [0] https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...
Comment linking /2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/
on “Voyager 2 is back online after eight months of radio silence”Submitted 8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1 as a story · 252 points
HN discussionThat reminds me of the cheap "MP4" players popular a few years ago (many of them iPod Nano clones...) that could play low-res video and had UI animations too - the animations were just a series of bitmaps and the video was basically MJPEG. The processor was a 24MHz Z80 with a few hundred KB ( kilobytes ) of RAM. It takes very little processing power to stream images from memory onto a display. An even more dramatic…
Comment linking /2014/06/19/8088-domination-post-mortem-part-1/
on “WatchKit”Submitted A mixed-format, mixed-architecture, mixed-sided diskette (2008) as a story · 113 points
HN discussionThe "PS/2 thin fonts" ( http://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/#ibmps2_isa ) look very similar to the larger sizes of the X "fixed" font ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_(typeface) ) which I've taken a liking to using for just about everything, including in my terminal and editor windows. Also noticed that the owner of the site, VileR, seemed familiar... then realised he's one of the authors of this asto…
Comment linking /2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/
on “A collection of text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era PCs”Submitted Maze Generation in Thirteen Bytes (2012) as a story · 102 points
HN discussionThe minimalist scene is still out there, it's just a niche within a niche. For instance, here's a demo from 2015, done in immediate mode and 256 bytes - I've got a feeling you'll enjoy it as much as the live audience clearly do: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07KHwjebf7k For another recent example, also in 2015 some wizards managed to coax 1024 colours (among other impressive visual effects) out of an original IBM PC…
Comment linking /2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/
on “The lost art of 3D rendering without shaders”Submitted Demoscene Blu-ray finally available after five years as a story · 75 points
HN discussionPart 2 is already up, no? http://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/20/8088-domination-post-...
Comment linking /2014/06/20/8088-domination-post-mortem-conclusion/
on “8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1”Submitted 8088 Domination Post-Mortem – Conclusion as a story · 29 points
HN discussionRelated earlier post: http://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/04/18/the-strangest-kind-of...
Comment linking /2014/04/18/the-strangest-kind-of-problem/
on “8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1”Submitted Maze Generation in Thirteen Bytes as a story · 5 points
HN discussionMore sophisticated hardware doesn't necessarily have any single master clock in this sense, so it doesn't make much sense to talk about a "cycle-accurate" emulator of a modern PC, for example. Even in a modern PC, many of the clocks are divided down using PLLs which maintain a fixed frequency and phase ratio, so it is theoretically possible to make such an accurate emulator, but it would be difficult to write and ma…
Comment linking /2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/
on “LaiNES – Cycle-accurate NES emulator in around 1000 lines of code”Submitted At a disadvantage (2011) – Which was faster, an IBM PC or a Commodore 64? as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> 16-bit x86 code dependent on interacting with real hardware under precise timing doesn't always work well in a VM. This reminds me of the 8088mph demo - 1k colours in CGA, and a bunch of other impressive stuff. 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators (oldskool.org) 319 points by drv on April 8, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 99 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9338944 https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/…
Comment linking /2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/
on “A 386 PC for Your RP2350”Submitted Maze Generation In Thirteen Bytes as a story · 3 points
HN discussionCannot wait to read the writeup. The one for 8088mph was epic: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...
Comment linking /2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/
on “Area 5150: 8088 MPH gets a successor”Submitted How to reasonably archive color magazines to PDF as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSelf-modifying code that depends on the pre-fetch queue might be the best place to look for intent. Might be easy to tell if the program is doing it for some larger purpose or simply to fail subtly or overtly if it sees unrealistic processor behavior. Indeed, in the PC world taking advantage of the prefetch queue as a sort of "loop buffer" was relatively common in demos, where a loop would patch instructions to exec…
Comment linking /2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/
on “Classic NES Series Anti-Emulation Measures”Submitted The first 256-color game on the IBM PC (2017) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionDo demosceners keep secrets like that? I only know of the ones who publish super detailed blogs about techniques, because... those are the ones I read. E.g. https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al... And a much more recent one, video here (I recommend watching the chat replay! Should start ~ 7h02m40s) https://www.twitch.tv/videos/589179638?t=7h02m40s and blog post http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/…
Comment linking /2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/
on “The Vanishing Of Ashlar: 4kb demo using GPU for sound and pathtracing”Submitted Maze Generation in Thirteen Bytes as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHuh, I'm surprised to find that you're right, unless you count NASM. Randall Hyde last updated HLA in 2015 (and it didn't support the 8086 anyway), WalterBright last updated DMC in 2013, and SDCC doesn't support the 8086. But I remember the 8086 as being a lot of needless effort that we had to cope with because it had a large installed base: near, far, and huge pointers, EMS bank switching, shitty TSRs that would st…
Comment linking /2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/
on “Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students”Submitted The Care And Feeding of the M24/6300/6060/1600 (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTo be fair, that whole demo is a technical tour de force. Some more information about it: https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...
Comment linking /2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/
on “PC Speaker To Eleven”Submitted Do Not Use the EBay Global Shipping Program as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
