The trick was pretty easy to guess but still a lot of fun to see put into practice. The EGA monitor bits, and more broadly just the idea of trading color bit depth to multiplex signals for multiple monitors into a single framebuffer and physical output is pretty cool. The Windows display driver idea actually implemented on real hardware would be tons of fun. I could have seen products actually doing this "back in the day" to do multi-head setups. I'm kinda surprised examples don't exist.
jchw 27 minutes ago [-]
Since everyone is vibe coding everything anyway I fully expect there to be a Windows 3.x display driver that works this way soon. I'm sure people in the retro computing hobby feel a certain way about this, but it's definitely also hard to deny the amount of "Project Structure" in README and "// ---- Input Handling ---------------------------------------------" snippets I've been seeing lately in a lot of new homebrew and other projects. (Another fun one: comments that are justified to a specific column but off by one in only one of them. I'm sure humans do this too, but AI does it more.) I don't really care that much personally although it's silly that people kind of have to be wink-wink-nudge-nudge about it for the foreseeable future.
badc0ffee 43 minutes ago [-]
I think it's just that monitors were so much more expensive then, especially those capable of the 350-line EGA mode.
8 minutes ago [-]
EvanAnderson 34 minutes ago [-]
I'm sure that was a factor. As much as certain job roles today love multi-head (I'm particularly thinking head spreadsheet users) I could still have seen it being a possibility. Certainly, multi-head for AutoCAD was "a thing" pretty early, albeit the paradigm there was one monitor for graphics and another for text.
genxy 26 minutes ago [-]
Multihead for debugging full screen apps is/was pretty sweet. Now we just use ssh or a remote debugger. I haven't finished the video, fingers crossed that he hooked 4 joysticks for multiplayer pong.
Didn't realize how wholesome 8bit guy is, great channel.
Rendered at 17:10:45 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The trick was pretty easy to guess but still a lot of fun to see put into practice. The EGA monitor bits, and more broadly just the idea of trading color bit depth to multiplex signals for multiple monitors into a single framebuffer and physical output is pretty cool. The Windows display driver idea actually implemented on real hardware would be tons of fun. I could have seen products actually doing this "back in the day" to do multi-head setups. I'm kinda surprised examples don't exist.
Didn't realize how wholesome 8bit guy is, great channel.