Re: Boxes to store RAM modules
Posted on 2023-09-12, 20:30
A less professional but cost effective way I use - are 3.5" HDD boxes. As long as as a DIMM, as wide as a SIMM-72, they contain many modules in my cupboard.
Re: Abit AB-PB4 twin paradox
Posted on 2023-08-28, 18:55
Ok, two years have passed since then. In the meantime I grabbed all the ALI M1489 boards I could get my hands on. Now I could even allocate some more time for more testing and research and it seems to me that the older "SC" variant is really the faster of the two and the crossover apparently …
Re: How can i make an 1:1 copy of my HDD on a 486 machine.
Posted on 2023-08-09, 02:29
Fortunately DOS is a rather polite OS - you just partition/format the target drive, sys it if you didn't format it with the /s switch, run a "fdisk 2 /mbr" which I never had to back in the days yet I do a lot lately. Then you can simply copy over all the files, using the very NC you mentioned. Given …
Re: GPUs that auto-resize to the correct Aspect Ratio on DOS (4:3 on a 16:9 monitor, DVI output)
Posted on 2023-07-26, 21:06
On a funny side note - 256-byte intros (which run, in most cases, at 320x200) usually just don't have the space to deal with non-square pixels and despite being "classic" DOS programs they look best on a 16:10 display that has no idea that 320x200 should be a 4:3 resolution. But they're the …
Re: Mod Master XT 1.0 Released : Play .MOD, .XM and .VGM on a 8088 4MHz
Posted on 2023-06-11, 14:22
Do you have a link to the file format ? Hell no... Damn, I read something back, like 25 years ago... IIIRC it's a very simple format with uncompressed 9*64 patterns that can change instruments any time but default to the first 9 instruments by default. I surely can't make up a detailed description …
Re: Cirrus Logic CL-5446
Posted on 2023-05-18, 02:54
Though Riva128 is supported by UniVBE to get those 15-bit modes. And it has superb DOS performance. And when it's not about 15-bit, it supports a great pile of crazy low res VESA modes like 400x300. The main difference between this and Voodoo3 is that its truecolor modes are 32-bit while Voodoo …
Re: Mod Master XT 1.0 Released : Play .MOD, .XM and .VGM on a 8088 4MHz
Posted on 2023-04-12, 18:44
No problem, I have enough common sense not to try to play OPL music on the GUS, especially not on an XT 😁 Oh, OPL. I have a pile of .HSC music, do you plan to support these? They have a very simple structure, exactly like some uncompressed module - with OPL2 instruments.
Re: Mod Master XT 1.0 Released : Play .MOD, .XM and .VGM on a 8088 4MHz
Posted on 2023-04-11, 18:16
I bit the bullet this afternoon and set up a GUS in this XT board. Well, two different ones as the ACE I tried first didn't really work as I wanted it to. After two unsuccessful tries it finally started to play music in ModMaster but it was quite garbled. When I removed the turbo jumper it started …
Re: Mod Master XT 1.0 Released : Play .MOD, .XM and .VGM on a 8088 4MHz
Posted on 2023-04-03, 20:53
What was the last version you used ? Hm, I had a MODM15 folder on the XT HDD, but I certainly tried newer.... anyway, today I connected my USB FDD to my light online PC and then a bog standard 1.44 drive to the XT (via a tiny FDC card with an own BIOS and jumpers for drive types, a neat little …
Re: Mod Master XT 1.0 Released : Play .MOD, .XM and .VGM on a 8088 4MHz
Posted on 2023-04-02, 13:42
Just put together my XT test system with an SBPRO2 and listening to mods on it. Naturally I got the idea to look back if there's a new version of ModMaster - and there is! I'll have to try it as soon as I can muster the energy and motivation to forward it to the XT's SCSI HDD.... (And it tells you …
Re: in praise of low end budget hardware!
Posted on 2023-04-02, 04:02
Well I used budget hardware almost all along the way and while I hated some of these I have strong nostalgic feelings about others. The best example is what I just had to build later is Am5x86 with an ALI M1489 based motherboard and a bog standard PCI S3 Trio64. Was it cutting edge back then? No way …
Re: Renaissance : Nothing On, with a GUS not all music playing ?!
Posted on 2023-03-26, 20:08
Probably they simply load the music files into system memory the same way, regardless of the sound card then "forward" the samples to GUS memory once the entire module is in. Or they handle GUS the same as an SB and do software mixing and only upload the output buffer(s). Just half educated guesses …
Re: Want to build a DOS/Win98 Gaming PC
Posted on 2023-03-23, 03:41
My edge case would be running Optic Nerve, an early 486/SB demo. It's notoriously hard to do, AFAIK it runs on Dosbox but I tried to run it on literal dozens of retro builds and succeeded only once - and I couldn't even repeat this success anymore, not even with the same build/config... BTW, yes, I …
Re: Doubt about Quake 2 benchmark on a Pentium II 400MHz
Posted on 2022-12-22, 09:54
The days I played Quake2 on a Riva128 are long gone so I don't remember the driver details but that 60fps is very suspicious- isn't it the vsync frequency...?
Re: Asus A7V (KT133) and compatible cpu
Posted on 2022-12-04, 14:36
* by my thinking - I just don't see a way for an SSD to know which sectors are allocated or free, if they don't have their own file system driver in which case TRIM wouldn't even be a thing but the SSDs themselves would come with warnings in huge red letters how to partition them and what file …
Re: CPU/GPU Undervolting experiences, is it safe for the rest of the components?
Posted on 2022-11-28, 03:52
Curious, I think that not many Socket S7 motherboards allow down to 1.3v, it would be interesting to know at what voltage the processor could maintain its standard frequency. It is something like the opposite of overclock, to overclock you often have to raise the voltage because this is the …
Re: CPU/GPU Undervolting experiences, is it safe for the rest of the components?
Posted on 2022-11-27, 19:59
Well I tried it with a few things and often went too low for stock speeds but I vaguely remember that a k6-2+ was so cold at 1.3V/150MHz that it could run even without a heatsink and a Palomino 1700+ was stable at 1100MHz at a similar voltage (it was actually a messed up mod for overclocking 😁)
Re: Celeron 300A
Posted on 2022-11-26, 00:15
A few years ago I decided to get an overclocked 300A as it was super popular in its days and said to be easily and surely overclocked. So I wanted one that does the trick at stock voltage and run at 450MHz stably at default 2V. I don't know the reason but I have had quite bad success rate, like one …
Re: Best memory configuration for a first generation Pentium (Socket 4)
Posted on 2022-11-22, 19:31
Btw I have a Digital Celebris 560 board with (the same?) VLSI chipset and it has a strange quirk. It can only support "3 sides" of memory (pairs) - so its configured like yours, a pair of single and a pair of double ranked FPM SIMMs. It's EDO tolerant too but doesn't seem to benefit from EDO RAM.
Re: Era-specific hard drive capacity. Share your thoughts.
Posted on 2022-11-13, 12:12
* I mostly use mechanical hard drives, also ran into strange "LBA" incompatibilities at the early years of it. Therefore I have multiple DOS drives to boot various 486/socket4/mrbios 386 things. But the "master" is always the one that's compatible with the more modern interpretation of LBA, the one …
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