Re: ATI Graphics Solution

Posted on 2019-07-15, 09:17

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Only CGA, EGA, Tandy/PCjr and AT&T 6300 were ever used in games afaik. Don't forget about Hercules, and not just the original HGC - there is at least one game with support for Hercules In Color. Also, there's a game using BGI, which contains the PC3270 BGI driver - it's an amateurish game, so I …

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STB VGA 640 with CHIPS F82C451 A

Posted on 2019-07-14, 18:04

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I'm looking for software for STB VGA 640 card, based on CHIPS F82C451 A chipset. I've found the following line in some BBS file listing from 1992: 640UTIL.ZIP 41339 10-30-91 VGA 640 utilities/Demo. ...but the file itself is nowhere to be found. Any help?

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

Posted on 2019-07-13, 05:22

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

So it's dropping channels when there's not enough CPU power... Consider lowering the mixing rate instead - that what eg. Visual Player does.

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Re: Intrest in new ISA cards?

Posted on 2019-07-10, 02:04

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

This is on my to-do list, after I finish up an ankle-biter project I'm working on now. Will I ever get to it? Who knows. Will anyone care when / if I do? Probably not. More than likely I'll post a thread and get half a dozen replies about others who did it first and probably better. But it sounds …

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Re: Gravis UltraSound on a 8088 4.7 MHz PC ?

Posted on 2019-07-10, 01:15

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

You already can :blush: . My IBM XT clone has a built in trident SVGA card. Trident chipsets for ISA aren't accelerated, can't do anything special with them. With an accelerated chipset, however, it might be possible to do smooth animation despite the slow CPU. Just imagine: a game in 640x480x8bpp, …

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Re: Gravis UltraSound on a 8088 4.7 MHz PC ?

Posted on 2019-07-09, 15:02

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Oh dear... Now I'm waiting for somebody to install in such a machine some SVGA card with hardware BitBlt (and maybe some other functions), and run some software that makes use of them. And then use both SVGA and GUS at the same time!

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2019-07-09, 14:30

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

oeuvre wrote: Can I see a picture of this contraption? That sounds crazy Pics taken from https://allegro.pl/oferta/karta-wifi-symbol-s … adka-8283090774 - apparently still for sale...

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Re: Intrest in new ISA cards?

Posted on 2019-07-09, 12:29

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

HanJammer wrote: Also I would be interested in covox-on-ISA card. Some Sound Galaxy cards emulate Covox Speech Thing and Disney Sound Source.

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2019-07-09, 06:33

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Probably, but if they are only for long-dead standards. Indeed. I also have an ISA WiFi card in the form of ISA-PCMCIA adapter + PCMCIA WiFi card, and the included WiFi card only supports the original 802.11 standard, ie. 2 Mbps max. It's probably possible to replace the PCMCIA card with a newer …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2019-07-09, 06:23

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

an 8-bit SB clone, based on ES488F chip with OPL2. I wonder, how compatible is this thing with the original SoundBlaster? Are there any particular games or tests I could run? Yet another SB 2.0 clone. Try running some program that reports SB DSP version - it should display something like 2.01 You …

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Re: 1GB HDD recognised by BIOS but not MS-DOS...Help!

Posted on 2019-07-09, 01:33

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The interface is ST-506 (MFM) / ST-412 (RLL). Both ST-506 and the original ST-412 are MFM. The difference is that the former is without buffered seek, and the latter with buffered seek. In both interfaces the data is transferred in analog form, so in theory it's possible to use any of them with any …

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Re: 1GB HDD recognised by BIOS but not MS-DOS...Help!

Posted on 2019-07-08, 05:00

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

But will that tell the OP if track zero is bad? Kind of. Badblocks displays logical numbers of bad blocks, ie. single numbers, instead of CHS triples. If it can't be partitioned and formatted, what good is it? There may be at last two reasons: - HDD defects - some garbage in the MBR causing FDISK …

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Re: 1GB HDD recognised by BIOS but not MS-DOS...Help!

Posted on 2019-07-08, 01:17

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

First and foremost, make sure the HDD is OK. You can eg. boot some Linux, and run something like: badblocks -s -v -w /dev/hda It writes (and reads back) several patterns to the entire drive, the last pattern is 00, so in the end the disk is absolutely clean. And in some cases it may actually fix …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2019-07-04, 10:05

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

In my experience if we're strictly speaking about games, a good 286-12 with 0 wait states will keep up with a 386sx16. And a 286-16 will usually outperform it. Yes, it's a well-known fact. 386SX has a paging translation unit, ie. additional level of logic elements between the CPU core and memory, …

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Re: ATI Graphics Solution

Posted on 2019-07-03, 05:40

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Oh dear, even more magic at work: thread necromancy :D If anything, comparing Catacomb 3-D with Wolf3D shows that the memory layout does not have much of an impact on performance at all. Wolf3D is slightly slower, but that is probably explained by the larger levels with more enemies and more …

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Re: Need winzip and winrar for DOS ?

Posted on 2019-07-02, 21:35

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

ARJ saw no real improvement for decades now, its creator at some point wanted to replace it with a new program - JAR (not to be confused with Java ARchiver), but it failed to get traction.

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Re: Need winzip and winrar for DOS ?

Posted on 2019-07-02, 09:12

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I usually use Info-ZIP - http://infozip.sourceforge.net/ Probably the second most portable piece of software, the first being the "Hello World" :D And it still allows extraction of modern archives on vintage systems. The last version of RAR for DOS (3.93) can't extract archives created using modern …

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Re: The best graphics cards of 1992

Posted on 2019-07-02, 04:13

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Warlord wrote: back then they are considered hardly graphics cards, just video cards are best, 2d acceleration if anything. Dumb framebuffer is still graphics. If we were talking about early 80s cards, like MDA, then indeed, can't really call them "graphics"...

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Re: Win98SE When is the hardware overkill?

Posted on 2019-07-01, 19:52

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Warlord wrote: Overkill is any dual core or higher CPU even if its old like Pentium D which no one in their right mind should even use. Seconded. DOS and DOS-based Windows are inherently uniprocessor, using them on anything multicore/hyperthreaded is a mistake.

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Re: MonochromeVGA (simulating a monochrome monitor)

Posted on 2019-07-01, 11:55

by

by Grzyb

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Come to think of it, I saw a similar thing back in the era... Some guy had a VGA monochrome monitor which only paid attention to the Green component of the input signal. So, red and blue objects were totally invisible. In order to fix that, he implemented grayscale weighting using some resistors. …

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