Bigeye #1: i486 DX2

Created on May 22, 2020
Indexed on August 20, 2022 at 01:26 PM

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Bigeye is fully moving itself into Razorback, all in the form it should have been in the first place. The annotations have been moved down into the description so they don't obstruct the gameplay footage. No more shoddy tie-ups and no more stupid letterboxing, just pure Quake!

This is NOT the big one I've been planning to roll out, but given the current situation, I figured now would be a good time to put it here. It should at least serve as an indicator that Razorback is about to get serious about self-hosting videos.

What is this?

Bigeye is a series of 30+ different recordings of Quake running on different computer hardware configurations. It basically involves relaying a save file from one computer to the next, so that when a new map starts, the hardware is changed. Various pieces of notable hardware dated from 1989 to 2006 are used in the entire playthrough.

And now, the computer...

The Chicony CH-491F, which appears to be from 1993 or 1994, may not seem too remarkable, but at the same time, it kind of is for having all 16-bit ISA slots as well as 3 VLB slots, along with 3.3V CPU support.

Originally, VLB was not used in this system at all; the VGA and multi I/O cards were just upgrades I made to it long after it stopped being my grandpa's daily driver in January 2000.

This is the system that got me knee-deep into retro computing. I used it on a few occasions when I visited my grandpa's house (usually around some holidays) from 2000 to 2004, and then it was largely forgotten about until I really started getting interested in MS-DOS.

A few visits in 2007 to try out the command interpreter and some old games really kept me asking for more, even though I was much more into Macs at the time and wanted to start a vintage Mac collection (which never really happened due to various barriers, unfortunately).

Actually, I had myself really wanting to go back to the days of Windows 98 since 2002, but this old and seemingly cryptic machine I once used for playing DONKEY.BAS is how I learned all these other angles of computing I was previously unaware of. It was so cool to learn how to use a computer so differently.

As you see here, Quake is incredibly punishing on a 486. It's highly dependent on a strong floating point unit to be able to render each frame quickly, and CPUs prior to the Pentium did not emphasize it all that much.

Such an extension to the CPU was previously suited to high-end applications such as CAD software. While the Pentium dominated new system sales for 1995 in the United States, most programs were largely driven by integer operations, so the 486 was still viable for some time.

The Trident VGA card I have installed provides a significant bandwidth improvement despite being a bit bleh-ish. A 0.3 FPS improvement over the Tseng Labs ET4000AX may not seem like much, but for a game like Quake, you really want every bit of improvement you can get.

You may notice that the sound pitch is lower than it should be. There's an ESS sound card in here of some sort; they were popular Sound Blaster Pro clones back in the day, tightly integrating everything into a few chips at most.

At some points, I deliberately look downward to speed up frame rendering, which is a technique better associated with GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64. In the case of a game like Quake, if you want to avoid slowdowns in real-time speedruns, just get a faster computer!

Due to the low frame rate of Quake on this computer, this portion takes a pretty long time, so just hang in there. The level completion time reported by Quake won't match up with the actual take taken on this computer.

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Comments

Kugee - August 23, 2022 at 05:56 PM

deleteyouremails: Wish granted. Check the bottom of the index page.

I think it would be better if series were listed in ascending order. It would make it easier to watch the videos in chronological order.

I really appreciate how, in browsers that don't support the <video> element, you actually link to videos instead of just saying "Ayo Thisa Browser Donut Support Teh Video Elemet"

Kugee - August 21, 2022 at 03:08 PM

Psychological barriers were always a bitch, I tell you. I should've gotten started on doing something like this in 2019, but not having the sufficient knowledge to get something like this up and running with the necessary packages for a public server is basically what led me to figure that the only way to host videos without them being poisoned is to use some kind of alternate platform. But doing so really only made things worse for me in the long run.

Smaller websites self-hosting all their content is a more realistic future for the internet - the tried and true method, an evolved form of Web 1.0.

Blue Horizon:
- Agree. It captures exactly what I wanted to comment.
- It is nicer that way indeed.

By the way I wonder what Razorback's PHP code looks like...

Blue Horizon - August 21, 2022 at 10:41 AM

This easily beats the Vlare copies (or at least, that's where Bigeye was originally intended to be published before some site problems prevented Kugee from doing so) by leaps and bounds, since whereas that site (and YouTube) would force videos to be 720p or higher to have 60 frames per second to be accepted - even for standard non-letterboxed videos, having embedded links to locally stored videos on the server as well as the browser or player of choice do the rest is liberating from video sharing sites shamelessly cutting corners for their own benefit.

I also like the added subtle touch you did with the main page, showing three blips and videos at a time rather than one.

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