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

Posted on 2019-12-14, 16:54

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I believe I am still the only one who tested a GUs on a 8088. It's still along the road - I'll try it but I only have one non-permanent old PC on test bench at a time and I haven't tried any XT class boards these months. It's also more complicated to get progs/data on them as a shorted Audigy …

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

Posted on 2019-12-11, 17:57

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

In the meantime I tried it on yet another 286, Excel Tiger-12, for the fun of it. Despite having the fastest ISA implementation I've ever seen (VGA speed is on par with an overclocked OPTi 895) it worked with GUS classic 3.74 as flawlessly as... well, as it would work on any other properly working …

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Re: Building a Pentium 3 for Windows 98 and MS-DOS gaming

Posted on 2019-12-11, 17:35

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

In DOS, nVidia provided excellent VESA compatibility, on par with S3 and 3dfx and better than ATi. What's the problem with ATI cards' VESA compatibility? I know they can have performance issues in some boards/chipsets (write combining not functioning at 0xA000 segment and/or LFB) but the BIOS video …

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Re: UMBARIES.SYS, UMB driver for i420EX chipset

Posted on 2019-11-28, 20:49

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Very nice, thanks, Tiido! I hope I'll have time to try the ALI M1489 version on my Am5x86 build!

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Re: Are there motherboards with 133Mhz FSB, ISA slots AND an Intel chipset

Posted on 2019-11-06, 19:14

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Any downsides (late-era DOS-compatibility-wise) of the i820 chipset compared to the i440BX? I have a HP (FIC) KC-19+ with i820 chipset and RDRAM - and an ISA bridge. And when I used it with SB16 it seemed to work well but it definitely has issues with GUS, it needs great luck to get DMA working and …

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Re: 486 SX 16 & 20 MHz

Posted on 2019-10-28, 19:59

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I was wondering if there is a regular (non-OEM) motherboard that can drive these at 16 or 20 MHz. All my 486 motherboards start at 25 MHz. FIC 486-GIO-VT can do it if it has a VIA clock generator chip. It can go even lower though it'll have problems with HDD access eventually (but a 8MHz 486 is fun …

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

Posted on 2019-10-20, 11:49

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

FreddyV wrote: Aldo when doing the xm loader i saw that xm partition compression is simple. I may implement it. Memory usage for pattern can be divided by 3 Nice, that'll help A LOT more than leaving out 10k of code!

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

Posted on 2019-10-18, 19:11

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

hi, You need to use the turbo pascal CRT Fix. I do not fix the Executable when I release it. TP7P5FIX solved the problem too (when I tried it on the K6-2+/550 I tested this week). And any option you prioritize please keep an eye on memory usage. On a (max) 640k vanilla XT memory is a precious …

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Re: Intel vs AMD?

Posted on 2019-10-15, 15:52

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

gladders wrote: What types of things would I lose out on if I deviate from that chipset? My experience with early Athlon chipsets that they're weak at video access under DOS. My experimental build could run Win98 games like a champ, it performed well, but under DOS games/demos it lagged behind a BX …

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

Posted on 2019-10-14, 17:52

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Don't worry, it's specific to that very system. I'm not sure if I can make a video, never done that. Perhaps our tablet or my girlfriend's relatively new phone can do it...? I'm also well aware that 16MiB in a 286 is basically useless. I can't even imagine what software could make good use of it. …

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

Posted on 2019-10-12, 06:53

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Sorry for the late response... I've been preoccupied with (life and) the C64 world, cleaning, repairing, making cables, experimenting, cutting holes in floppy disks, and so on... So I've just tried MM10 on a(nother) 286-20 and EHA-CH07 was purrrrfect with the new 6-octave MOD limit. Unfortunately I …

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Re: How many Retro PCs do you got in your house?

Posted on 2019-09-17, 17:41

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Does a C64 count? I guess so :) So, the complete builds in cases and whatnot: 1. C64 (old or new, I have both) on Samsung 214T via s-video, 1541 and Oceanic drives, some fastloader cartridge, and X1541 for file transfer. A system I didn't have in its time. I had a Z80-based Eastern Bloc micro …

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Re: Low speedsys memory bandwith throughput on high end motherboards

Posted on 2019-09-07, 05:37

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Now what I'm really questioning is the usefulness of this "memory bandwidth" which basically only seems right in the opening post and wrong by a long shot every other time (including my own benchmark results from many systems), or completely made up in the case of 486s. An example could be ?my? (I'm …

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Re: Every Speed Reference Point on a Single CPU - VIA C3 Nehemiah

Posted on 2019-08-26, 14:46

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Wow, that idea is a handful! Copper is especially tough, it needs an old CRT display with some very specific VGA. And if you need some more challenge, try Optic Nerve! I could start it a few times on various hardware but it's rare and even if you can start it once there's no guarantee that it'll run …

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Re: Questions on DOOM performance on 486 DX2-66

Posted on 2019-08-24, 05:39

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Video bus speed matters for getting that framebuffer filled but DOOM is cpu bound more than anything. It depends. For a 486 with VLB/PCI VGA, yes it is. For a late Pentium it's all about the video card. Doom uses mode X (Y?) and 8-bit video memory access and scales crappily on faster hardware. And …

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Re: Questions on DOOM performance on 486 DX2-66

Posted on 2019-08-24, 03:21

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

For Doom, if everything else is right in the system, yes, a DX4 is an improvement over DX2. A proper DX4-100 is where it starts to reach its 35fps frame rate limit. Not in every situation, but in most. DX2-66 was the de facto top CPU when it came out as no one had a Pentium-66 in late '93. And it …

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