Re: Mod Master XT 1.0 Released : Play .MOD, .XM and .VGM on a 8088 4MHz

Posted on 2023-04-03, 20:53

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

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 …

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Re: Mod Master XT 1.0 Released : Play .MOD, .XM and .VGM on a 8088 4MHz

Posted on 2023-04-02, 13:42

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

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 …

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Re: in praise of low end budget hardware!

Posted on 2023-04-02, 04:02

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

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 …

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Re: Renaissance : Nothing On, with a GUS not all music playing ?!

Posted on 2023-03-26, 20:08

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

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 …

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Re: Want to build a DOS/Win98 Gaming PC

Posted on 2023-03-23, 03:41

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

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 …

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Re: Doubt about Quake 2 benchmark on a Pentium II 400MHz

Posted on 2022-12-22, 09:54

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

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...?

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Re: Asus A7V (KT133) and compatible cpu

Posted on 2022-12-04, 14:36

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

* 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 …

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Re: CPU/GPU Undervolting experiences, is it safe for the rest of the components?

Posted on 2022-11-28, 03:52

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

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 …

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Re: CPU/GPU Undervolting experiences, is it safe for the rest of the components?

Posted on 2022-11-27, 19:59

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

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 😁)

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Re: Celeron 300A

Posted on 2022-11-26, 00:15

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

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 …

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Re: Best memory configuration for a first generation Pentium (Socket 4)

Posted on 2022-11-22, 19:31

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

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.

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Re: Era-specific hard drive capacity. Share your thoughts.

Posted on 2022-11-13, 12:12

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

* 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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Re: What motherboard for a 1.4GHz p3 Tualitin CPU?

Posted on 2022-11-12, 04:01

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

My Tualatin P3 build has one single purpose: to be an overkill DOS demoshow machine. So the ISA slot was important above anything else. Of the parts available to me, I went with an MSI 694T Pro, with VIA 694T (Apollo Pro 133T) chipset and it works for me quite well in this role. For the VGA I use an …

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Re: 486 dx4-100 outperforms P100

Posted on 2022-10-24, 02:52

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

On a side note, 3dbench is heavily video speed dominated. What do these boards give in landmark or speedsys in this categori with those cards? I suspect the P5 result will be abysmal while, if my memory serves, the EXP8449 had top notch PCI speed for a 486.

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Re: USB to Serial Mouse using the Pi Pico!

Posted on 2022-10-23, 04:47

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

BTW it's worth mentioning that I'm writing the keyboard side of things with XT in mind but I don't have immediate plans to support XT largely before I don't have an XT class machine or interface to test with. I'm kinda tempted to send over an XT m/b with an 8-bit VGA... A USB->XT KB adapter would …

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Re: 15kHz why does it matter,what is the fuss about?

Posted on 2022-09-23, 14:38

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I couldnt afford monitor in ~95 and used ISA Trident card reprogrammed for 15KHz on 21' TV with Euro RGB connector and "special" cable (afair just an AND gate for syncs). I was in similar boots, I used a Tseng ET3000 that had an EGA mode, made huge debug dumps on the BIOS switching video modes and …

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Re: Your favorite 4:3 1600x1200 @ 70Hz+ LCD?

Posted on 2022-09-19, 02:36

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Well now that I am reading this thread - you might have explained a strange phenomenon I ran into a bit earlier. I have a few Samsung 214T monitors stockpiled as it's 4:3 with composite and S-video inputs, perfect for very old machines. I watched C64 demos on it and I was satisfied. Yet when I tried …

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

Posted on 2022-08-09, 19:05

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

No computers trickled down to my department lately- but among the LCDs I found a pair of working Samsung 214T monitors. I remember I almost bought one like 15 years ago and now appreciate its connector set even more. Well, on top of having a nice classic 4:3 ratio it has composite and S-video inputs …

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Re: Dealing with energy consumption of old hardware

Posted on 2022-08-05, 22:56

by

by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well, on the opening post, it's more than easy for me. My most loved era is the DOS-capable (ISA and all) hardware and most of these are actually less power hungry than my (already almost vintage) main Ivy Xeon/gtx650 rig. I've just measured the 486 I have on the test bench now, it's an MS-4138 with …

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Re: EDO or SDRAM? Pentium 233MMX + Socket 7

Posted on 2022-02-17, 15:06

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by alvaro84

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

idan182 wrote on 2022-02-17, 14:41: Does EMS needs set up? or that would be automatically if I use EDO RAM? The presence of EMS doesn't depend on the used memory type at all. It indeed needs a driver, either EMM386 or the like under DOS or given by Win98 to its DOS tasks.

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