Intel’s 8088 processors have been made in 1979 and were
the Celerons of th 80’s. With CGA graphics cards, PC prices
fell to a more human region and you could get one for
about 1500 US$ by then. Of course they had some flaws…

The main advantage is undoubtful the price tag. While an 8086 PC would easily hit the 2000 US$ by then, the 8088 with it’s reduced instruction set was able to lower the price tag a little.

However few people know what even an 8088 that was correctly programmed and tied together with a CGA card (that could handle 2 colors normally) could produce.

A common CGA card was able to fit 16KB grapics data into it’s memory which allowed for maximum 640×200 resolution with 2 colors to be handled.

Typical Images are as follows:

By taking advantage of the color smearing, the NTSC color clock and a method similar to that used in the 16 color mode, it’s possible to display over 16 colors in composite monitors.

160 cycles of the NTSC color clock occur during the each line’s pixel period so in 40 column mode each pixel occupies half a cycle and in 80 column mode each pixel uses a quarter of a cycle. Limiting the character display to the upper or upper two scanlines, and taking advantage of the pixel arrangement in certain characters of the codepage 437, it is possible to display up to 1024 colors. This technique was used in the following demo.

A scene group (Hornet+CRTC+DESiRE) released a demo on an original IBM 8088 from 1981.
On the Oldskool compo Revision 2015 they were showing the real potential of such an 8088 with their 1st place demo and you’d be surprised what these old processors were still capable of even if we think back to an 80386SX…

But watch the video: