wcs) (06/29/90)
In article <443@newave.UUCP> john@newave.mn.org (John A. Weeks III) writes:
]It goes something like this: to make your Cray PC-Compatible, you first
]have to slow it down by inserting 10,000 NOP's between every instruction,
]then remove all of the memory except 640K, buy a Cray CGA card for $53,000,
]and wire up a joystick to it somehow. There was more to it than this,
]but when you got all done, they claimed that you could run Flight Simulator
But be careful - in vector mode, the CRAY can do NOPs very fast ....
One of the early reasons for clock-speed switches on PCs was that,
if you run in high-speed mode, the SPACE INVADERS will come and
squash you before you get 3 shots off, and your flight simulator
will be simulating Piper Cub controls with a Lear-Jet engine.
Since my Toshiba 1100+ portable has proprietary slots that
presumably don't take too-slow add-on cards, I assume this is why
it's stiill got a slow-switch.
--
Thanks; Bill
Bill Stewart AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 HolmdelNJ 07733 2019490705 erebus.att.com!wcs
# Actually, it's *two* drummers, and we're not marching, we're *dancing*.
# But that's the general idea.carroll@m.cs.uiuc.edu (06/29/90)
/* Written 4:19 pm Jun 28, 1990 by wcs@cbnewsh.UUCP in m.cs.uiuc.edu:comp.sys.ibm.pc */ In article <443@newave.UUCP> john@newave.mn.org (John A. Weeks III) writes: >> [ ... ] but when you got all done, they claimed that you could run >> Flight Simulator >One of the early reasons for clock-speed switches on PCs was that, >if you run in high-speed mode, the SPACE INVADERS will come and >squash you before you get 3 shots off, and your flight simulator >will be simulating Piper Cub controls with a Lear-Jet engine. /* End of text from m.cs.uiuc.edu:comp.sys.ibm.pc */ Not to rain on your parade, but one of the strengths of Flight Simulator is that is is real-time driven, so you don't need a clock switch for it. If you run on a faster CPU, you get more updates per second, but things still run in "real time". P.S. So, to port it to the Cray, you'd just have to rig up a joystick, a CGA, and port the _assembler_ source to Cray assembler. Yes, folks, Flight Simulator is written in assembler. I know, I've seen it - I worked for SubLogic for a summer. Alan M. Carroll Barbara/Marilyn in '92 : carroll@cs.uiuc.edu + This time, why not choose the better halves? Epoch Development Team CS Grad / U of Ill @ Urbana ...{ucbvax,pur-ee,convex}!cs.uiuc.edu!carroll
bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante) (06/30/90)
<443@newave.UUCP> john@newave.mn.org (John A. Weeks III) : > [ ... ] but when you got all done, they claimed that you could run > Flight Simulator wcs@cbnewsh.UUCP : >One of the early reasons for clock-speed switches on PCs was that, >if you run in high-speed mode, the SPACE INVADERS will come and >squash you before you get 3 shots off, and your flight simulator >will be simulating Piper Cub controls with a Lear-Jet engine. carroll@m.cs.uiuc.edu <8000073@m.cs.uiuc.edu> : | Not to rain on your parade, but one of the strengths of Flight Simulator is | that is is real-time driven, so you don't need a clock switch for it. If you | run on a faster CPU, you get more updates per second, but things still run | in "real time". | | P.S. So, to port it to the Cray, you'd just have to rig up a joystick, a | CGA, and port the _assembler_ source to Cray assembler. Yes, folks, Flight | Simulator is written in assembler. I know, I've seen it - I worked for | SubLogic for a summer. Nope, sorry youngster... john and wcs are talking *early* versions of Flight Simulator, far removed from what you see these days. I still have a copy of FS 2. To run it, I put the floppy in and reboot. It starts up. If I reach around to the back of my machine and press the speed-change switch, it visibly slows down (in the ratio 4.77/8 :-), then if I push the switch again it speeds back up. When I tire of the game, I end it by... turning off the computer! CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn't work on my not-totally-compatible machine. And it was the standard for testing IBM hardware compatibility just for the reasons that I had to boot it off its own floppy and stop it with the power switch. It went right to the hardware, made no use of the BIOS to say nothing of DOS. No kidding it was in assembler, it stretched those 64K PC's to the breaking point. A quote: System Requirements To use the MS-Flight Simulator program, you must have an IBM Personal Computer with at least 64K bytes of memory, a monitor attached to the IBM Color/Graphics Monitor Adapter, and at least one disk drive. Although MS-Flight Simulator will work with any monitor type, a color composite monitor will yield the best results. If you use an RGB monitor, you will get black and white or shaded tones only. ... The manual includes a blurb about SubLogic and Bruce Artwick, probably because everybody knew that Microsoft didn't really write FS anyway. Aside from the fact that some of the PC's around me couldn't meet those stringent :-) system requirements, I was impressed with even the 4.77MHz speed. The original 6502 versions were *real* slow, and my C-64, serial- disk-drive version was *REAL REAL* slow. There were articles about Artwick's innovative display techniques to get any sort of image drawn fast enough. -- "Well, when *I* was a kid, we had to lick the road clean every morning with our tongues..."
bill@polygen.uucp (Bill Poitras) (07/04/90)
In article <8000073@m.cs.uiuc.edu> carroll@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes: >P.S. So, to port it to the Cray, you'd just have to rig up a joystick, a >CGA, and port the _assembler_ source to Cray assembler. Yes, folks, Flight >Simulator is written in assembler. I know, I've seen it - I worked for >SubLogic for a summer. No silly. The best thing to do would be to write a PC simulator for the Cray. You could emulate 8088 assembler, the port mapped I/O, and memory mapped video. Then you link into it a small loader and flight simulator, so when you run the cray executable, it will emulate a PC and then run flight simulator. To cope with the superfast speed, tell the emulator to suspend itself for so many microseconds after interpreting each instruction. Just my $0.02 +-----------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------+ | Bill Poitras | Polygen Corporation | {princeton mit-eddie | | (bill) | Waltham, MA USA | bu sunne}!polygen!bill | | | | bill@polygen.com | +-----------------+---------------------------+-----------------------------+