Game:

Magic Carpet (1994)

Duration: 0:00

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15

REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 8:5/16:10 ASPECT RATIO. Commentary subtitles are available!
Happy 30th Anniversary, Magic Carpet!

This is footage from one of the prime “Crysis of [insert year here]” candidates of 1994; Magic Carpet (Bullfrog Productions, 1994), or at least the demo version that preceded it. It’s got all the bells and whistles! Deformable terrain, animated and reflective water, an absurd amount of billboard textures, accumulation motion blur and anti-aliasing are the most obvious technical features that will raise eyebrows and make processors sweat bullets.

All in all, the Pentium 90 MHz handles Magic Carpet pretty well. The game was of course programmed to work (albeit with added struggles) on 486 CPUs as well but some of the graphical features won’t turn on automatically unless a Pentium processor is detected at start-up. The only thing you probably don’t want to crank up is the resolution. No machine on Earth in ‘94 could handle high-resolution (SVGA) Magic Carpet at fullscreen. Shrink it enough and, sure, it will run… but now we’re back at the running-Doom-on-a-386 conundrum of having great speed versus having terrible screen real-estate. The poison is yours to pick!

This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Gateway 2000 P5-90 case and motherboard (manufactured April 27th 1994)
Intel 430NX chipset
Intel Pentium 90 Mhz processor (S-Spec SX879, heatspreader is marked week 12 1994)
256 KBs of asynchronous L2 cache
ATi Graphics Pro Turbo (Mach64 GX) 4 MB graphics card (P/N 109-25500-10, early revision with silk-screened blank FCC ID white rectangle, sticker with “FCC ID: EXM255” on card, manufactured around April 1994)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 sound card (CT2760, manufactured around Q2 1994)
48 MBs of FPM RAM; 8MBx2 (1993) and 16MBx2 (1997) SIMM, 60ns

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