Re: Which gfx card to choose?

Posted on 2008-04-16, 17:29

by

by swaaye

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

I had a Viper VLB once. It used a Oak chip for DOS. It is very, very slow in DOS. The Number Nine Imagine 128 does the same thing actually, with a Windows accelerator chip and a cheap, slow secondary chip for VGA compatibility. The Windows drivers are questionable for Viper, especially if you are …

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Re: Voodoo 4500/PCI is actually *slower* than a 3000/AGP!

Posted on 2008-04-15, 17:48

by

by swaaye

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

Yeah I'd lean towards either bus contention with other cards or a poor PCI implementation with low bandwidth. A way to test that would be a buffered HDD transfer rate test from say HDTach. If say your UltraDMA/133 drive is only pulling 50MB/s buffered, that's not good. BTW, an AGP Voodoo card only …

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Re: Voodoo2 vs. Voodoo3/5

Posted on 2008-04-11, 19:45

by

by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

2.3 Ghz is usually where the mobile Barton's start to want more than 1.65v. 2500 MHz is usually a >1.8v proposition. Especially with a desktop Barton. I had a desktop chip that needed >2.0v to get there. It'll dump tons of heat at 1.80v and up. Gets to be rather pointless because it won't be much …

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Re: Creative's way: how to make friends

Posted on 2008-04-11, 18:08

by

by swaaye

in Milliways

in Milliways

Yeah, as someone who also say PC sound go from nothing to what it is today (ie PC speaker -> Tandy 1000 -> SBPro -> Ensoniq Soundscape -> AudioPCI -> SBLive! -> Audigy 2) , I think the wannabe-audiophile PC users kinda miss the point. :) I want a card that does what I need, which happens to include …

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Re: Voodoo2 vs. Voodoo3/5

Posted on 2008-04-11, 18:01

by

by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yeah you need a mobile chip to have unlocked multipliers. Closing the L1 bridges on Palomino and later is extremely hard because of the change from that ceramic package to the "organic" one. You should be able to undervolt that thing quite a bit with the clock rate reduced that much. Probably can't …

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Re: Computer Gaming World is DEAD. Long live "Games for Windows"

Posted on 2008-04-09, 18:54

by

by swaaye

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

I don't know what to say. It was time for it to go, I think. The mag hasn't really been "great" since pre-2001, IMO. The '90s were just an incredible time for them and the industry. Then funding, advertising, and readership fell apart from 2000 onward and the mag suffered badly in various ways. Jeff …

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Re: Voodoo2 vs. Voodoo3/5

Posted on 2008-04-09, 18:46

by

by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have a Athlon XP-M 2500+, a mobile Barton core, on a Shuttle AK31A. That has a KT266A chipset. I had to do a wiremod (put wires into) the socket to get the mulitplier up to a nice 16.5x (lol). BIOS sees it as a "Unknown CPU Type", as did my now-dead nForce2 board, but it works perfectly. It's …

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Re: Voodoo2 vs. Voodoo3/5

Posted on 2008-04-06, 18:41

by

by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

let's put it another way: If you want 100% Glide compatibility in every way, you have to use a Voodoo1. A Voodoo2 may be able to be coerced into playing the older games too, but it's not a guaranteed thing. Voodoo Banshee/3/4/5 have considerable advantages over Voodoo1/2/Rush. Unless you are sure …

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Re: Voodoo2 vs. Voodoo3/5

Posted on 2008-04-05, 05:58

by

by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yeah 3dfx never got a card out with HW T&L. Geometry "assist" is just a software-based equivalent that may or may not work, as you read. I've never even messed with it. Games of those days didn't need it at all. I wouldn't be surprised if "geometry assist" was added solely to get a few extra points …

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Re: Voodoo2 vs. Voodoo3/5

Posted on 2008-04-04, 19:14

by

by swaaye

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Voodoo3 and 5 will just look better because of the removal of the pass-thru cable. They are obviously going to be faster too. Voodoo5 adds 32-bit color depth too. Its anti-aliasing is quite good, but it does drag down performance quite a bit. Go look up reviews of it. They will have screenshots. A …

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Re: A 486 and PIII system on steroids.

Posted on 2008-04-02, 17:56

by

by swaaye

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

I like your PIII system. When the powerleap tualatin adapter first came out I tried to take my Abit BF6 PIII system to it maximum potential. In theory it should have made a pretty good machine, but in reality my system became somewhat unstable. I just ended up selling the adapter and getting an …

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Re: Transparent Real-Time nVidia Logo in D3D Games...

Posted on 2008-04-02, 17:50

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by swaaye

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

I believe this is something that is available through a checkbox in older drivers... They dropped it eventually.

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Re: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Posted on 2008-04-02, 17:49

by

by swaaye

in Windows

in Windows

I have SFA but I haven't tried playing it for like a decade. :) It is designed for Windows 95/98 though so it would be best to play it under those. Otherwise I'd suggest some web searching. There are bound to be discussions about problems with it out there. Make sure you patch it. That game was a …

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Re: 4 graphics cards in one PC?

Posted on 2008-03-31, 17:57

by

by swaaye

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

Your Dell monitor sounds really good. I'd be very happy with one that had 1:1 and aspect options. I don't want a widescreen though, and I think 19" is good from a size point of view. One of the nice things about Dell is that they have manuals for just about everything they sell inside the support …

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Re: Creative's way: how to make friends

Posted on 2008-03-30, 21:49

by

by swaaye

in Milliways

in Milliways

Onboard audio has always sucked. The only reason NVIDIA got more of a bad rap than other motherboard with onboard sound is because their motherboards are targeted to gamers. Onboard audio still sucks but because it's just sound people don't give a shit. The thing is, NV's NVAPU in NF2 MCP-T (I …

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Re: Power Supply Recommendation?

Posted on 2008-03-30, 20:56

by

by swaaye

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

Soundscape won't work without it. It's the card that I had trouble with. It's actually the only card that I tried without -5v.

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Re: Creative's way: how to make friends

Posted on 2008-03-30, 20:44

by

by swaaye

in Milliways

in Milliways

You better look at products not made by companies in general because all companies operate like that. :) Creative was just dumb for announcing it to a public forum. Crowd mentality will thus ensue. Big time. Their driver support is not that bad. Really. Just what other 10 year old sound card besides …

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Re: Power Supply Recommendation?

Posted on 2008-03-30, 20:37

by

by swaaye

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

The biggest issue is that you need to get one with a -5v feed. If it lacks this, ISA cards may not work. Make sure you look at the specs for that -5v feed. It seems that sometime around 2001 or so (I'm guessing), this was removed from the ATX spec. Most PSUs out there today do not have it, as I …

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Re: 4 graphics cards in one PC?

Posted on 2008-03-30, 16:10

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by swaaye

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

Just about any video card these days can be set to not stretch (within Windows that is). DOSBOX can be set to your native res at full-screen, but not to scale so that it's 1:1. And then most LCDs (all?) I've used also have their own scaling options in their setup menu. The way to make sure would be …

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Re: my little Midi box

Posted on 2008-03-29, 20:09

by

by swaaye

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

lots of Socket A coolers will fit on Socket 7. You could look for a 1U server heatsink and that would probably solve the heat problem. Also could consider a Winchip or Winchip 2. They run cooler than anything else for Socket 7, if I recall correctly, and are very compatible little CPUs (work in …

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