Re: SB Pro compatible vs SB Pro/16 compatible

Posted on 2017-05-29, 16:21

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Perhaps not that many, but one of them is Wolfenstein 3D, which is kind of a big thing. Ahh... So Wolf3D supports stereo on an SBPro? And it does not support SB16? So a SB16 with Wolf3D will give you mono sound? Problem is, the real SB16 is a bad card. It's extremely noisy, and it has bugs in the …

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Re: SB Pro compatible vs SB Pro/16 compatible

Posted on 2017-05-29, 14:27

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Why? Because of games that have SB Pro Stereo sound but no SB16 option? That is one aspect, pretty much. Are there many such games in practice? And from the other side, SB16 isn't really 'superior' to SB Pro in practice. We are talking the pre-CDROM era, where using 16-bit samples and/or high …

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Re: SB Pro compatible vs SB Pro/16 compatible

Posted on 2017-05-29, 11:34

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

dr.zeissler wrote: For a real dos-soundcard the sbpro stereo is much more important then sb16 support. I was under the impression that this assumption is far from being unanimously accepted here.

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Re: Is Vista now Retro

Posted on 2017-05-29, 10:45

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

To put things in perspective, back in 2006 Pentium Northwood and Athlon 64 were king. Pentium D and Athlon 64 X2 were the new hotness and Vista kind of sucked at leveraging multiple cores. The last Northwood P4s were made in early 2004, and by 2006 they were already dethroned. 2006 was well into …

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Re: Freeing enough Conv. Mem for TES:Arena? (Logs included)

Posted on 2017-05-29, 08:10

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I made some changes -- MSDOS doesn't even show in my memory list anymore but instead shows as "SYSTEM" .. I GUESS this is the same? Not sure why this happened. Probably when NOAUTO is used, it loads the MSDOS module only. Otherwise, it loads other things and calls it 'SYSTEM'. Here's my new MEM …

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Re: Old Windows and modern malware

Posted on 2017-05-29, 07:15

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Win98 - theoretically, yes, since a lot of the Win32 APIs are available, but I bet the kits they use would not work out of the box. With enough determination you could probably get it to run on Win98, but the gain would not be worth the effort. DOS - obviously not. It's not even remotely the same OS …

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Re: Anyone find early 2.5 shooters had more charm than early 3D shooters?

Posted on 2017-05-29, 07:11

by

by dr_st

in Milliways

in Milliways

I don't understand what the world in Quake is supposed to be. I don't know if the developers did either. Yeah, Quake always struck me as basically a giant tech demo with completely random levels and zero plot. Granted there wasn't much to Doom either, but at least the premise of being a space …

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Re: Freeing enough Conv. Mem for TES:Arena? (Logs included)

Posted on 2017-05-28, 11:06

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

It makes sense that with DOS 7.1 you don't need to load HIMEM.SYS before DOS=HIGH,UMB, because in the automatic setting, it will already load HIMEM.SYS by default. Also, with DOS 7.1 you should be able to use BUFFERSHIGH / FILESHIGH / LASTDRIVEHIGH, but according to the documentation , using DOS= …

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Re: Recommend a good ISA DOS soundcard

Posted on 2017-05-28, 09:18

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Some titles natively support the EMU chipset and upload custom waveforms for music and sound effects. There is no MPU-401 interface for the EMU chip implemented in hardware, however, so you must load a somewhat large sized TSR in order to have wavetable GM support in raw DOS. Furthermore, you're …

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Re: Is Vista now Retro

Posted on 2017-05-28, 04:16

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I actually used Vista in this 'Classic' mode for the first couple of years, and then I realized that I like the way Aero looks. 😀 Additionally I installed Classic Shell, so I can have both classic and modern start menus accessible (not that I use either much).

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Re: Recommend a good ISA DOS soundcard

Posted on 2017-05-28, 04:12

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Ampera wrote: That's the main reason why I like this card. It has out of the box great general MIDI, and with a 28MB RAM expansion, you can load some pretty spicy soundfonts. OK, I understand. I just think most people don't care about RAM expansion that much. Is this fully and automatically …

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Re: Recommend a good ISA DOS soundcard

Posted on 2017-05-27, 08:14

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

My sounds card of choice is the Sound Blaster AWE32 CT3670. It's basically an AWE64 EMU on an AWE32 card. This means it will do MIDI, Sound Blaster compatible 8&16 bit audio, as well as OPL3 emulation through CQM (Not for a purist, but for me, and the average Joe, few could tell the difference …

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Re: eBay shipments from Asia taking 2+ months

Posted on 2017-05-27, 07:00

by

by dr_st

in Milliways

in Milliways

International shipping from the USA is generally very expensive relative to other countries, but Canada and Mexico, being immediate neighbors, get reduced rates. For intercontinental shipping, it can easily be 3 times as much more expensive to ship from the USA than the same distance to the USA (in …

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Re: Anyone find early 2.5 shooters had more charm than early 3D shooters?

Posted on 2017-05-27, 06:57

by

by dr_st

in Milliways

in Milliways

clueless1 wrote: Once I figured out a good keyboard setup, Descent became very playable and fun. 😀 Could you share your setup? I'm always curious to learn these things. 😀

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Re: Anyone find early 2.5 shooters had more charm than early 3D shooters?

Posted on 2017-05-26, 18:40

by

by dr_st

in Milliways

in Milliways

Most 2.5D shooters used keyboard for input which gives a drastically different dynamic to the game. Come true 3D, mouse was the input device of choice. More emphasis on accuracy, actual projectiles in some cases which meant you could actually get a "head-shot" o.0. A friend of mine was pretty much …

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Re: Which XP?

Posted on 2017-05-26, 14:05

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

95DosBox wrote: If you install Vanilla and then SP1, SP2, and then SP3, you can only revert back to SP2, then go back to SP1, then back to Vanilla. Is there any practical reason why one would want to do this? I can't think of one.

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Re: Is Vista now Retro

Posted on 2017-05-26, 04:28

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

It would be a real killer OS if MS had created Intel xHCI USB 3.0 drivers for Vista and would have stolen any chance W7 would have been as great as it is today because for the most part they were on the surface nearly identical except for that one feature. Well, Intel xHCI came rather late into the …

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Re: Is Vista now Retro

Posted on 2017-05-25, 19:39

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Depends on what you mean by 'support'. Because a few posts above, things like IE11, Office and Visual Studio were mentioned. These are not the OS itself, but standalone applications. And that's the important difference here: The OS may be in the 'support lifecycle' in the sense that MS actively …

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Re: Is Vista now Retro

Posted on 2017-05-25, 13:04

by

by dr_st

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Win 8.1 can't do a lot of things that Windows 10 can, which makes it fall by the wayside quickly. In fact, Windows 8.x never really received much support for their Store Apps, if at all. Windows 10 UWP is taking off considerably better, with for example various AAA game titles having UWP support, …

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Re: eBay shipments from Asia taking 2+ months

Posted on 2017-05-25, 12:01

by

by dr_st

in Milliways

in Milliways

My experience is similar to kixs's - 30-45 days seems standard now, but more than that is very rare. It is still longer than it used to be. I think the problem is on the far east end. They probably have too many packages to process.

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