Re: The "12-bit" Sound Blaster 16 Myth

Posted on 2019-06-05, 18:09

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

That's a lot to pay for an SB Pro. But..... I mean... PC stuff really WAS expensive back then. I don't think that's any kind of excuse though. I mean, these ads also contain a lot of other information, such as videocards, network cards, HDD controllers and such. Even if you compare the SB Pro to …

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Re: The "12-bit" Sound Blaster 16 Myth

Posted on 2019-06-05, 16:46

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

To completely drive my point home, I looked for an old Dutch magazine from around that time. I managed to find one from October 1992. I took some pictures of some ads in there, with Sound Blaster Pro cards: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/dq5xma5x29h0bsd/AAA9koBf5Zb-kSeQzwBKE2FNa?dl=0 Note that my …

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Re: The "12-bit" Sound Blaster 16 Myth

Posted on 2019-06-05, 07:22

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

PCs at that time (1991) were sold for thousands of guilders. The SB Pro was meant for PCs, and for a (at that time) niche objective to boot. Now *that* is a ridiculous statement: "Because PCs are expensive, any addon can be expensive, no matter how cheap it actually is to build". Can you also …

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Re: Need help from Soundblaster Pro CT1330A owner!

Posted on 2019-06-04, 17:38

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

On the SB Pro installation disk, test-sbc.exe plays the 2-operator test in stereo -- which I didn't know before. The high arpeggios are played on the right channel, for example. The lower riffs are panned center. So that's Dual OPL2 functionality covered. That's interesting, I didn't know that (I …

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

Posted on 2019-06-04, 15:16

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Yes, software mixing was used on Amiga from time to time, in games such as Turrican II, to allow for one or more extra channels for sound effects, while the music can continue playing without sacrifice. It is mentioned on MobyGames: https://www.mobygames.com/game/turrican-ii-the-final-fight/trivia …

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

Posted on 2019-06-04, 15:02

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

FreddyV wrote: I have been told that 8 Channels tracker were not made on amiga 500. Then you were told wrong. Both work fine on an Amiga 500.

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

Posted on 2019-06-04, 12:53

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

This was fun to play 8 channels MOD when an amiga 500 Can't. The Amiga can, actually :) The most wellknown 8-channel tracker on Amiga is OctaMED: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OctaMED But there were also more 'traditional' SoundTracker/ProTracker-clones with 8-channel support. One I recall is …

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Re: Need help identifying 8088 motherboard

Posted on 2019-06-04, 09:47

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Note that on an XT there are dipswitches to select the video... CGA, MDA or other. This is because the CGA and MDA BIOS code are included in the motherboard. When using VGA, this needs to be bypassed, and the BIOS on the VGA card can do its work.

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Re: Playing DVDs on a Pentium II/III - also is my L2 cache enabled?

Posted on 2019-06-04, 07:43

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Zup wrote: I guess any computer that can do more than 500 MHz should play any DVD without acceleration I think that depends a lot on the target resolution. Scaling video is very expensive without acceleration. So playing a DVD at 1024x768 or higher resolution is going to be very CPU-intensive.

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Re: Playing DVDs on a Pentium II/III - also is my L2 cache enabled?

Posted on 2019-06-03, 18:30

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I thought Media Player Classic used hardware acceleration and DirectShow filters (I do have the K-Lite codec pack installed), but trying to use MPC results in worse performance than VLC. PowerDVD also includes some of its own optimized DirectShow filters (which can also be used by Windows Media …

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Re: Playing DVDs on a Pentium II/III - also is my L2 cache enabled?

Posted on 2019-06-03, 18:15

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I wonder what's hobbling VLC. It's a cross-platform solution, which especially in the early years didn't do much to leverage hardware acceleration, because that requires platform-specific APIs. So on early hardware, VLC is mostly a software solution, and will require a fast CPU. PowerDVD is based …

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Re: Need help from Soundblaster Pro CT1330A owner!

Posted on 2019-06-03, 17:42

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

SB Pro 2.0 and SB16 have (mono) OPL2 compatibility at 220 and OPL3 at 222, but still listen for OPL2 at 228 and 388. To be more exact, the OPL3 chip is backward-compatible with the OPL2. The OPL2 has two ports: a register index port and a data port. The OPL3 is designed to have two banks of …

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Re: Playing DVDs on a Pentium II/III - also is my L2 cache enabled?

Posted on 2019-06-03, 12:07

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I don't think VLC is a particularly good choice. Using a DirectShow-compatible player would give you a better chance to use as much hardware acceleration as possible. Something like PowerDVD would be a good bet.

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Re: Dual booting Windows 95 and NT 4.0 on a 486

Posted on 2019-06-03, 09:31

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

jesolo wrote: Windows NT 4.0 does support FAT (but not FAT32). Sysinternals provides a driver to use FAT32 from NT 4.0. Although it can obviously not be used as system partition. Likewise, Sysinternals has a driver to access NTFS from Win9x and DOS.

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Re: vgaonly - 16-bit RGB?

Posted on 2019-06-03, 07:40

by

by Scali

in DOSBox Development

in DOSBox Development

It might actually simplify some parts of the code to use 32-bit (DOSBox doesn't really deal with 24-bit, AFAIK) output instead; To get into the confusion of 24 vs 32-bit colour: I think there are two separate meanings of 24-bit colour: 1) Any pixel format that uses RGB data, where each component is …

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Re: ATI Graphics Solution

Posted on 2019-06-01, 17:43

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

That is true but only if you have one common bus. With 386 came L2 cache and 486 had L1 on-chip. And at this point you can have the CPU work entirely on the cached data (and code) and DMA doing its job. And best of all - it's a "free" performance upgrade. Not a single code change would be required, …

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Re: Non X86 systems that take x86 add on cards.

Posted on 2019-06-01, 15:30

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It would have been cool to see the reverse, non-x86 add-on boards for x86 machines. Sadly we seem to use software emulation exclusively now. Technically not really an add-on board (although it's ISA, it was never sold separately, and not sure if it would work in any other machine), but this …

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Re: ATI Graphics Solution

Posted on 2019-06-01, 15:13

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

That would indeed have been nice with the benefit of hindsight. I suspect that would have been way down on IBM's list of priorities for VGA, though, for a couple of reasons. One is that system RAM to VRAM blitting speed was probably not very important for the kind of workloads that they were …

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Re: ATI Graphics Solution

Posted on 2019-06-01, 13:20

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Sure, you could add clever DMA etc... make sort of an Amiga out of it (that is what you're suggesting basically, even though you're probably not aware). But what's the point? That's not what a PC is. And it's not what a PC will ever be. In fact, here's an interesting computer for you: https://en. …

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Re: Non X86 systems that take x86 add on cards.

Posted on 2019-06-01, 12:54

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

1) the BIOS *is* the platform; that's my Sun/386 example - it's a bog-standard 386 but with firmware unlike PC BIOS, so effectively a completely different beast even if the CPU could run the same code; the code would run, but would be meaningless with completely different architecture. Not …

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