[ajenner]

Most of the tricks in the demo should work unmodified (or could be made to work) on most CGA implementations of the era. Some clones had slightly different font ROMs so it would look a little bit wrong on those. The final lake effect (and the ripply picture shortly before it) use very tight cycle counting so probably won't work on anything except a genuine IBM PC/XT and CGA. Some effects (like the radial fire effect and the voxel landscape) should work on just about anything. The Amstrad PC1512 will have trouble with any effect that modifies the CRTC timing registers as it doesn't have a fully programmable CRTC and always generates a 15.7kHz/59.92Hz 640x200 image. I don't have personal experience with the Tandy 1000 and don't know how compatible it is off the top of my head.

[illys]

Thank you for your reply, it is conforting to know the tricks are solid. Maybe it will help some retroprogrammed CGA games to appear with more colors and effects.

I have a VGA XT clone (4.77/8 MHz) and an ATI Small Wonder CGA clone board. I will try to bind them together and run Area 5150.

[Scali]

The ATi Small Wonder is not entirely cycle-accurate. When I studied the CGADEMO by Codeblasters, I found that the scroller didn't look entirely correct, because the Small Wonder was slightly slower: https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2014/11/22/cgademo-by-codeblas... It appears to insert a few extra waitstates compared to an IBM card. This may trip up some effects in Area 5150.