Re: Were VLB video cards ever good?

Posted on 2020-11-14, 09:16

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Basically I can put the fastest isa card I have into a super socket 550Mhz system and I can put my fastest VLB card into a 133Mhz 486 system and the 486 beats the super socket 7 system in the dos doom or pcpbench benchmarks easily. I assume even 66Mhz and 100Mhz 486 systems would also beat the …

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Re: questions about 2 graphic cards?

Posted on 2020-10-20, 03:28

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have seen slow ET4000 cards too. Yesterday I was lucky, it sped up when I changed JP1. Of course it's different on various cards. Maybe sometimes none of them work.

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Re: Request for information about old computer hard disk data

Posted on 2020-10-13, 02:30

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Just my two cents, these office files usually can be compressed very well, cutting the number of needed floppies by ... a lot. So you wouldn't have to remove this HDD. I think it's worth a try to make a .rar solid archive (very useful option with many small files of the same kind!) split into 1.44M …

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Re: Improving Quake performance on POD83.

Posted on 2020-09-06, 18:21

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Basically you won't get the exact same result on the same config if you run the benchmark a second time. Or a third time.

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Re: FastDoom 0.4. A new Doom port for DOS, optimized to be as fast as possible for 386/486 personal computers!

Posted on 2020-09-02, 16:47

by

by alvaro84

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

Can i ask does it work with just the doom1.wad the shareware version? If i buy the gog games doom II can i use its wad. Just having a little trouble running it on real 386/40 Thanks The Ultimate Doom version works both with Doom.wad and Doom2.wad. Btw, I did some more tests with 0.5 and 0.6: Doom …

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Re: I recently found this hardware, AKA the Dumpster find thread.

Posted on 2020-08-29, 09:03

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You know, normally it would make perfect sense.

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Re: I recently found this hardware, AKA the Dumpster find thread.

Posted on 2020-08-29, 06:13

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Finally, I could get to dismantle a few old (and not that old) PCs and I'm pretty satisfied with the yield. From an old AT case (unfortunately cases are almost always in bad shape) I pulled out a Shuttle HOT-419 with an AMD 486DX4/100 and a VLB S3 Trio64 - I've been looking for something like this …

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Re: FastDoom 0.4. A new Doom port for DOS, optimized to be as fast as possible for 386/486 personal computers!

Posted on 2020-08-22, 17:42

by

by alvaro84

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

Now I finally got to test fastdoom. This time the test hardware was a Digital Celebris 560, at least its innards: - VLSI chipset - Pentium 60 - 24MiB of FPM RAM - Onboard S3 Vision 864 - together with the VLSI chipset it yields a (n un)healthy SiS496 PCI level of VGA performance. So, it's ~12k in …

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Re: Where did 83 MHz come from, and why didn't it catch on?

Posted on 2020-08-21, 02:56

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Wait, 60MHz FSB was provided for the 60MHz and later the 90, 120 and 150MHz models, far more widespread than the other obscure frequencies you mentioned. So it was backed by Intel, the leading manufacturer of the S5-S7 platform, while 75-83MHz was never official with its chipsets. Even though a …

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Re: Fastest sdram system?

Posted on 2020-07-28, 13:41

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It works fine with SDR and isn't even that much slower than with DDR. I had it with both kinds back in the day, pity that I don't have proper benchmarks from back then, nor do I have the board anymore. On a side note, it's not on nForce2 level, of course, not even with DDR memory. But it has a …

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Re: FastDoom 0.3. A new Doom port for DOS, optimized to be as fast as possible for 386/486 personal computers!

Posted on 2020-07-21, 15:40

by

by alvaro84

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

Does FastDoom use chunky or mode X? Just because rendering in the main memory then copying it to the frame buffer by dwords can be significantly faster, especially when a fast CPU meets a slow VGA (like in my 1996/97 system where the AMD 5x86 was seriously held back by a dog slow Tseng ET3000 😁)

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Re: Fascination with the lowest end hardware from a given class

Posted on 2020-05-29, 15:10

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hm, it's not always high-end vs low end, I often like to see that a given game or demo struggles a little bit on the config. Not too much, that can be disillusioning. But to see that I found just the right hardware for that piece of software (or the almost perfect :D) can be really satisfying. I'm …

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Re: Tales of Celeron and imagination

Posted on 2020-05-14, 12:56

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You made me curious. You've eliminated one of the Celeron's bottlenecks here, the lower FSB. The other, the halved cache, of course, remains. Let's see how it fares against the full fledged P3.

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Re: 1 vs 2 SDRAM sticks -- which is better

Posted on 2020-05-10, 05:01

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

As said earlier, BX doesn't support 512MiB modules, only 16-chip 256MB ones. 815 and VIA 694 does, though. In boards based on these chipsets a 16-chip (usually double sided) 512MiB module is basically equivalent to two 8-chip (usually single sided) 256MiB ones. Two 16-chip 256MiB modules put a …

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Re: What games for a 286-6

Posted on 2020-05-09, 19:57

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'd definitely try Elite. The Plus version (in MCGA mode) lags seriously near large/multiple objects when I de-turbo my 286-20 to 8 MHz/WS0 (very good at 20MHz though) but the original CGA version should run just fine.

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Re: Tualatin 1.4 512k vs Athlon Thunderbird 1Ghz

Posted on 2020-04-19, 15:51

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

If you can find some PC150 SDRAM, you might try that if your current memory won't go past 137 MHz. You could also try using a 2:3 divider (if available) to drop it down. PC150 memory wasn't around that long before DDR supplanted it and it disappeared. Although you can find nice sticks that aren't …

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Re: DOS pc advice

Posted on 2020-03-07, 13:12

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have 512MiB in my DOS-oriented (read: very late compo machine, with GUS 3.74, thankfully working in this MSI 694T Pro) Tualatin P3 rig. It has a single 512MiB module and could probably take said 2GiB in double stacked 1G sticks but even this amount is an overkill. I don't really know about …

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Re: GLX Player the only XT player ? Check Mod Master...

Posted on 2020-02-01, 19:23

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I revised the IBM 5150 vs Amiga 500 battle, the winner is .. :) Go watch: https://youtu.be/cCLsvhZiuGo This video is English sub-titled. What the 8088-4.77 can pull off (with the right code, of course!) is really impressive. It clearly struggles to deal with it, though. If it can't play all the …

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Re: 386 motherboard recommendation

Posted on 2019-12-25, 08:43

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have the exact same board, but yours appears to be a later revision than mine, but mine has an AMD 386 DX40 populated. Some time in the new near i'd like to sit down and have a play with this board. This is the second time I have one of these and I''m finally satisfied. For some reason I couldn't …

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Re: What Hard-drives have the best retro "ticking" sound ?

Posted on 2019-12-25, 08:22

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

CelGen wrote: The The 225's and 251's made that great hollow knock while the 3.5" miniscribes made that very familiar stepper motor whirr. Plus, apart from whirring like a buzzsaw those good old ST-225's have that really nice chirping head movements. I really like that. The loud whirring, not so …

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