Antiquities: multimedia technology of the early nineties

Multimedia - term how, particularly with this falls into the pit aaaaa at the end. But it’s impossible to come up with an adequate replacement, unless some kind of “audiovisual all-around” is even worse. For computers, multimedia technologies can be described more simply: the ability to display images, video and sound, not just text. And, most importantly, the ability to interact with the contents of the screen, not to use passively, like transmitting on TV, but to steer the process of immersion in a multimedia (now, again!) Nirvana yourself. And in 2020, this is some completely obvious thing: well, yes, pictures, videos, and so what? Also breaking news for me.

In the early 90s of the last century, the situation was different: computers had just begun to crawl out of the ancient ocean of harsh text interfaces. Of course there were colorful games, but they were more like a creative interpretation of the real world, with thick pixels on a small screen. In the late eighties, several technologies immediately endowed the computer with the capabilities of a television, only more interesting. These are sound cards, multi-window graphic shells and, finally, CD-ROM drives, which have significantly increased the amount of data processed on a single desktop. In my leisurely process of building a good 386th computer from the beginning of that decade, I could not get past this dawn of computer interactivity. tl; dr: I screwed the CD-ROM to the old computer.

All articles on the topic:

0. 1992 in the computer press
1. Consider the motherboard of the 386th computer
2. The benchmark of the 386th processor and the dashing nineties
3. Difficult choice of sound card for DOS games
4. Features of Sound Blaster Pro 2
5. Roland MT-32, an alternative sound for DOS games
6. Ruthless upgrade of the 386th PC
7. Multimedia technologies of the early nineties <- you are here The

diary of a collector of old pieces of iron I keep in Telegram .

In 1991, the Multimedia PC Working Group was created: an association of software manufacturers (Microsoft), hardware (Creative Labs) and computer vendors (Dell, Gateway and others) to promote multimedia technologies to the masses. The consumer must be persuaded to buy expensive modern hardware: by and large, he still does not need it. The MPC Group in 1991 is like an association of cryptocurrency developers in the 2010s. The technology is interesting, but complex, and most people and companies on this planet are doing fine without it. All members of the association are financially interested: Microsoft has the Windows 3.x operating system suitable for multimedia technologies, Creative sound cards, desktop manufacturers combine components and software into system units sparkling with all shades of beige. There is another reason for coordinating efforts:an unavoidable early stage zoo of standards and approaches in which the consumer, even if he is willing to spend money, is difficult to understand. The first list of requirements for a “true multimedia PC” is as follows:

- A processor no worse than 386SX with a frequency of 16 megahertz
- 2 megabytes of RAM
- A hard disk of 30 megabytes
- A video card with support for VGA 640x480 mode, 256 colors
- A single-speed CD-ROM drive, loading the processor in data reading mode by no more than 40%
- Sound card capable of processing digital sound with parameters of 22 kilohertz, 8 bit during playback and 11 kHz, 8 bit during recording
- Operating System Windows 3.0 graphical shell with Multimedia Extensions

From 2020, these characteristics seem ridiculous. In 1991, they cut off a huge fleet of PC computers based on the 286s and earlier processors. This is a real top, without any discounts. In March 1992, PC Magazine made multimedia PCs the theme of the issue . As has always been established in this journal, the editorial staff accurately measures the speed of reading from a CD-ROM, counts the number of instruments during FM synthesis, examines the overall performance of computers, and measures the frequency response of sound cards. It’s more interesting for me to look at the appearance and evaluate the cost of authentic artifacts. For instance:

A set to upgrade your PC to "multimedia" from Creative. Sound card and CD-ROM, $ 850 (1,560 adjusted for inflation). The kit used a sound card Sound Blaster Pro, almost the same installed on my computer. The Matsushita single-speed drive, with Panasonic's proprietary interface, connects to the sound blaster. There are not enough speakers here, but such kits were also there - usually with cheap passive plastic pots.

Complete systems. On top of the budget: 386SX / 20, 32 kilobytes of cache, 4 megabytes of memory, 120 megabyte hard drive, single-speed CD-ROM and monaural sound card. For everything: $ 3,300 ($ 6,000). Below, more expensive: the same processor, but 5 megabytes of RAM, 105 megabytes HDD, two 16-bit slots out of three are occupied by a sound card (Creative, apparently also Sound Blaster Pro) and a separate optical drive controller. Better display and graphics card. Price: $ 5,000 ($ 9,200).

In short, in all respects my slowly building retrocomputer is better. Let me remind you of its characteristics at the moment:

• TI SXL2-50 processor with 8kB of cache, “almost 486th”, comparable in performance to 486DX-25
• Motherboard with 256KB cache (20ns) and 8 ISA expansion slots
• 16 megabytes of RAM with parity (4 modules 4MB 60ns)
• Diamond SpeedStar Pro Cirrus Logic GD5426 1
• WinBond IDE, FDD,
• 256 IDE-CF
• Creative Sound Blaster Pro 2
• MIDI- HardMPU Roland MT32

And what, quite a multimedia computer. It remains only to add an optical drive, but here for a while I add an outrageous anachronism to the configuration of the retroPC. In a good way, you need to look for a vintage 1-2-speed optical drive. It will require a separate expansion card, since it is highly likely to find a device with a SCSI interface. If you're lucky, you can find a CD-ROM with a Panasonic interface, and then it can be screwed to the Sound Blaster Pro sound card. Ideally, you need a drive that uses discs in a protective case - in the photographs of real devices above all the CD-ROMs are exactly that. Why did optical drives have this crutch at the beginning of computer life? I am familiar with two versions. Thus, it was possible to simplify the mechanism of loading a disk into the drive.Either expensive at that time ($ 20-60 per program on CD) media wanted to be better protected. It was assumed that for each compact the owner will buy a caddy, and will store it in it, protecting from scratches.

Optical suffering
I will look for an authentic CD-ROM, or I will dwell on a later instance, which is suitable in appearance and features. It's not just about speed. The functionality of the early drives revolves around playing audio disks: the average non-poor owner of a PC in 1991 had much more than data disks. In my reality of the nineties (not in the 92nd, but much later, of course), the computer optical drive was at the same time the first device for reproducing digital sound. This seems to be the case with many, so the front panel of the early CD-ROMs displayed hardware buttons for playing, switching tracks, as well as a headphone jack with volume control. There were even versions with a remote control, as in the picture on the right.

The right drive of the early nineties is now not easy to find, but with the later there is no problem. I have accumulated five different models, bought for 50-100 rubles on occasion, or extracted from other retroPCs. All of them support at least writing to a CD. I decided to start with one of the latest models with an IDE interface: LG GH22, my copy was released in 2008. At the same time, you can compare the progress in the speed of reading data from a CD: from 150 kilobytes or 300 kilobytes per second in 1992 to 7.2 megabytes per second (48x, and this is not the highest speed).

But this drive did not work. I set the slave operation mode with a jumper to connect it to a single IDE interface on a multi-card, along with an adapter for Compact Flash. Handed the cable and power. I installed a driver from LG on a computer in MS-DOS (which is not necessary, later models had much less compatibility problems). Everything worked, except for playing audio discs. Digital audio on older computers was not transmitted from the drive: there was a lack of performance. All CD-ROMs were equipped with their own digital-to-analog converter, and the analog signal was already sent to the sound card. To do this, you need a cable, as in the photo above. The problem is that the connector on this drive existed, but was not soldered: later, almost no one used this option, and manufacturers began to save.

Okay, change the drive to the 2006 LiteOn SHW-16H5S. It supports burning DVDs at 16th speed, burning CDs to 48th, which we are not at all interested in at the moment - unless you can spoil the discs and write some data for retroPC to CD-RW discs, which are a real vintage drive I would not read. It has an analog output, and finally I can listen to audio discs on a retrocomputer. Directly in the Dos Navigator file manager:

You can evaluate the performance of the drive in the Speedsys benchmark. The average read speed is 1,500 kilobytes per second (10x). The flash drive that I use instead of the hard drive works a little faster (1800 kilobytes per second), so the performance is limited more by the ISA bus rather than the processor. Even at tenth speed, this drive is very noisy, which is not very good.

Windows and drivers
True multimedia requires Windows. The installation process of Windows 3.1 I described in detail here , I will not repeat. But last year I experimented with the original Windows 3.1, and on this computer I installed a modification of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups - the latest release of this system in 1993. And immediately in Russian, so as not to have problems with localization. Unlike Windows 95, which runs on this PC slowly, despite the incredible (at that time) 16-32MB RAM, Windows 3.11 is fast, it feels a little faster than Windows 10 on a modern laptop with Core i7.

It remains to put the drivers for the sound card and video card. I use the standard set of utilities from Sound Blaster Pro: a basic media player, sound editor, microphone recording and (most useful) mixer. At the same time, I connect the conclusions from the PC Speaker on the motherboard to the sound card - so that all the sound goes to the speakers. Unfortunately, this entry in SBPro is not regulated. Using utilities of those times with an authentic design is a special pleasure for the retro builder. The driver for the video card was taken from the extensive library on the Vogons forum : it is required to set the resolution to 800x600, optimal for both my LCD monitor and Windows 3.1 itself.

In Windows, the Lite-On drive, which previously worked fine in DOS, started to fail, constantly throwing a data access error. He did not understand, replaced with another drive: a slightly older Plextor PX-230A, without DVD support. Added to it the modern CD Be Quiet utility for DOS: with its help, you can arbitrarily limit the reading speed, set 600 kilobytes per second suitable for the era.

At 4x speed, the drive works silently, but sometimes forgets about the limitation: it makes sense to make a batch file and create a shortcut for it in Windows. Now you can find a couple of artifacts and feel the dawn of multimedia in all its glory.

Wikipedia to the Internet
The "standard" MultimediaPC can be reduced to two requirements: you need a sound card and a CD drive. Well, a computer that can handle the data stream from a CD. The CD seriously expanded PC capabilities in the early nineties. With a typical hard disk capacity of 100-200 megabytes, you get additional media up to 650 (later 700) megabytes, and even removable media. For publishers, a bonus appeared in the form of difficulties with the pirated distribution of discs. CD stamping is an expensive pleasure, user piracy is unlikely: there is nowhere to copy such a volume of data. You can rewrite CDs, but CD-R discs are more expensive than releases in the store - $ 100 apiece against ~ 50, and the recording infrastructure will cost tens of thousands of dollars.

It remains to figure out how to score these 700 megabytes. When the compacts got to my village and fell in price to my income, these were collections of 700-on-disk DOS games, telephone directories and noticeably heavier software by the end of the nineties. In 1992, the majority of multimedia publications were encyclopedias, collections of pictures, and primitive games with heavy animation. In short, everything that we now use using the web, which at that time did not exist. Having a CD drive was an advantage and a way to make money. In the magazines of those times you can find ads for the sale of discs with photos "under BBS". It was assumed that system operators will purchase them, connect to their "board" and will earn on paid access to pictures. Finally, they started releasing "the same thing, but with multimedia,"for example, the publication of the Microsoft Works office suite with animated demos and an announcer reading readme. More examples are in the 1994 Computer Chronicles show:



Copies of discs of those times are easiest to find on archive.org, there are generally many discs with old software and games. It’s easy to choose the right ones - the cover and the disc itself should have the MPC logo. Attempts to standardize the "multimedia computer" stopped pretty quickly: in 1996, the third version of the specifications was released with a Pentium 75 and 8 megabytes of RAM. On this, the association self-dissolved: in the late nineties the advantages of “multimedia” were obvious, and most of the new computers had sufficient performance (and accessories) for sound, video, MIDI and animation.

I selected two disks of those times, and decided to start with the “technical” release - MPC Wizard of Softkey International (it is not related to Softkey software online store that ceased to exist in 2018). MPC Wizard checks your PC for MPC standards. My desktop is fully compliant with MPC Level 1, even with a margin. Now I have officially a multimedia retrocomputer, with help. Only the Audio CD playback test was not passed, but I suspect because when copying the disc, the section with the audio track was lost.

The MPC Level 2 computer did not go through one parameter: performance when displaying graphics, which is most likely limited by the video card. In addition to the test, the disc contains an interactive catalog of programs of the same publisher: tag with a rich video background, a video course on Windows 3.1 and numerous thematic collections of pictures about animals, flowers, New York and fish.

Finally, I tried the “true” multimedia release with the MPC logo: High-Tech America Encyclopedia. There is, for example, a detailed article about the Mir space station, and from it you can get an idea of ​​the rudimentary interactivity. There is a theme navigator, search, text and photos are attached to each article, and for some there are videos that play directly from the CD.



From the MPC Wizard disc, I took a test video with a speech by John F. Kennedy about the program of flights to the moon. It is saved in Microsoft Video format, resolution 320x240, 15 frames per second. Above is a copy of it on YouTube, which I converted to 4K before downloading. Just because I can.

It will not be enough
Let's go back to March 1992. Based on the test results, PC Magazine decided not to award the Editors' Choice Award to any of the products studied. "Too early". The authors of the theme of the issue faced a lot of problems and outright glitches, low productivity and high cost. Most important: it was a moment when new hardware and software were released every six months, making the previous generation irrelevant. As soon as you spend money on an eight-bit sound card, as 16-bit has already come out. Bought a single speed CD-ROM? Well done, and in stores already four-speed, and are cheaper. Multimedia technology twenty-eight years ago was such that it is better to wait a couple of years. Or buy, but not for their own.

On the whole, I treated the multimedia part of my 386th PC: it would be nice, but not necessary. Enough sound in DOS games. But in the process, excitement dismantled me: what if you can still do it even better? In the same issue, PC Mag is asked the right question: why is there no video support? Both input and output. Is it possible to watch a movie on the 386th? Theoretically, even in such a configuration it is possible, but - see the example video above. Only in such terrible quality and only in a window, even a full screen will not work. However, there is a theoretical possibility, so the study of early interactivity continues, already with specialized, expensive and rather rare iron now.