Re: Sound lag in dos games

Posted on 2021-08-12, 20:44

by

by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Does the BIOS has a setting to adjust the I/O recovery time and/or chipset related settings that affects the ISA bus? On the other hand, I have a 440BX motherboard with only one ISA slot that didn't work well with any sound card and replacing it with another motherboard fixed that for me.

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Re: GET OFF MY LAWN (the YouTube channel)

Posted on 2021-08-12, 16:54

by

by Gmlb256

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

I agree with most of the thing you said about modern games especially with always online requirement, homogenization of the genres, the quality of single-player and patches with occasionally very large download sizes. The unskippable videos (I don't like them either) sometimes is used to disguise …

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Re: How do I locate the address of the linear framebuffer in my VGA card?

Posted on 2021-08-12, 14:16

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by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

There is a very small performance gain when VGA Write Combining is enabled. Is this change unrelated to the PCI bus? It's CPU related. Also VGA write combining at least on P6 micro-architecture has some disadvantages depending of the card, when mode X is in use some images gets screwed up. I …

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Re: Are Creative sound cards, especially X-Fi, really worth it for EAX games?

Posted on 2021-08-12, 13:14

by

by Gmlb256

in Milliways

in Milliways

Surround sound in Quake 2 RTX also breaks when using OpenAL - same problem. OpenAL is just borked. OpenAL on latest games only works with OpenAL Soft since they use extensions not found on the Creative ones such as AL_EXT_MCFORMATS. Surround sound is supported on the Creative OpenAL but they use a …

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Re: Are Creative sound cards, especially X-Fi, really worth it for EAX games?

Posted on 2021-08-12, 12:39

by

by Gmlb256

in Milliways

in Milliways

As a former owner of a Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium I can related some of the things. I can recommend the Daniel_K's X-Fi driver pack since they have less issue compared to the official ones. In my experience the official drivers had some issues such as attempting to use for X-Fi MIDI playback, I …

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Re: I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream Display Problem

Posted on 2021-08-11, 21:47

by

by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

You're welcome!

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Re: I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream Display Problem

Posted on 2021-08-11, 21:37

by

by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I have found a manual of that game and says that there is a command line switch called VESA. Try it to see if it solves the problem on the S3 video hardware.

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Re: I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream Display Problem

Posted on 2021-08-11, 21:20

by

by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Probably the SVGA video mode is a non-standard one which predates VESA. Does the game support a VESA video mode? LineWars II has a similar thing where there is a accelerated S3 video mode that uses 800x600 but that only works on cards prior to Trio64 and this one checks if that mode exist or not.

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Re: I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream Display Problem

Posted on 2021-08-11, 20:55

by

by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Isn't the ASCII character thing related to the 8x14 font issue that happens on other games where the font is just garbage on some video cards? I'm not familiar with that game though.

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Re: Why is Doom slow but Quake fast on my Tseng Labs ET4000?

Posted on 2021-08-11, 16:55

by

by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

In this scenario the CPU is plenty fast. What then is responsible for Mode X being slow? Is it the Tseng ET4000 or the ISA bus? I'm not familiar with ISA graphics cards. Is it normal for them to struggle with Doom? Is it possible to summarize the Tseng ET4000 on the ISA bus as "unusually slow" at …

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Re: Impractical Computing and Retrocomputing Ideas (Humour)

Posted on 2021-08-11, 15:41

by

by Gmlb256

in Milliways

in Milliways

Configure a HDD with nonsensical sizes such as m471. This actually happened to me when cajoling a 64GB HDD to work on a BIOS which supports up to 8GB and surprisingly worked, I used the correct settings from another motherboard which detected it without issues.

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

Posted on 2021-08-11, 05:06

by

by Gmlb256

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

Nice Doom port! On my Socket 7 computer with a K6-2+/450 CPU and S3 Trio3D/2X video card the performance improved even in mode Y. I ran the following benchmark using The Ultimate Doom WAD demo3 without sound for each executable. - Original DOOM.EXE: 3863 gametics in 1049 realtics. FPS: 128.889 ( …

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Re: SB Live and Orpheus not playing nice together!

Posted on 2021-08-10, 21:35

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by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I have a system with a Live!, an Orpheus, An AWE64 Value and a Gravis Ultrasound. What purpose does the AWE64 serve in this collection? I would imagine that all bases are covered between the Live! for Windows and the Orpheus for DOS. Midi sound banks, perhaps? Very likely for SB16 and EMU8K …

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Re: SB Live and Orpheus not playing nice together!

Posted on 2021-08-10, 21:03

by

by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Weird. On my Pentium III PC I have both CT4830 SB Live! and a real CT2230 SB16 installed on it. With the VXD drivers installed for the SB Live!, the SB16 emulation will disappear from the Device Manager if the real SB16 is enabled on Windows and PC is rebooted. The opposite happens when I disable …

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Re: CD-ROM with SB Pro 2 CT1600

Posted on 2021-08-10, 14:33

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by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The only real Sound Blaster Pro 2 that uses the Sony CD-ROM interface is CT1690. CT1600 uses the Panasonic CD-ROM interface. You might be better off using a slightly modern IDE CD drive over a period-correct one since they may have aged poorly due to deteriorating moving parts. I suggest keeping …

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Re: Early Windows 95 Direct3 games (320x240) show half screen or garbage on fullscreen

Posted on 2021-08-10, 12:46

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by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

The S3 Trio64V+ driver that comes with older DirectX runtimes has less issues compared to the official one by S3. A notable one in the S3 ones was that the computer locks-up when trying to use a VESA mode in a DOS application while running Windows 9x on a that card, only when using S3VBE20 with …

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Re: Why is Doom slow but Quake fast on my Tseng Labs ET4000?

Posted on 2021-08-10, 12:25

by

by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Mode X has some tradeoffs and back then it made sense but the rules has changed by the time Quake was released. The main reason Carmack used it on Doom was to provide page flipping support (normal v-sync is expensive) as I noticed screen tearing on Heretic and Hexen when turning around while that …

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Re: Why is Doom slow but Quake fast on my Tseng Labs ET4000?

Posted on 2021-08-10, 04:51

by

by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Doom uses a tweaked mode called mode X (or mode Y since the resolution is 320x200) which is planar while Quake uses regular mode 13h which is linear. Linear mode is faster than planar mode because in planar mode there is possible overhead when switching between planes and some video cards can't …

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Re: IRQ9 on Graphics card? Yes or no?

Posted on 2021-08-09, 21:12

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by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

AFAIK, no since I have two cards that doesn't use an IRQ and works on Windows without any problem.

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Re: IRQ9 on Graphics card? Yes or no?

Posted on 2021-08-09, 21:07

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by Gmlb256

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

8088MPH doesn't use EGA or VGA graphics card. It uses a real CGA in ways that people believed it was not possible on a IBM PC.

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