I have some progress. Interestingly, after a couple of hours of research I learned that there is an MR Bios hack available for my board variant. Lo and behold, after installation I am now getting 45fps in Quake with the TNT2, and about 40fps with the Mach 64. I went through all the options and memory was set to 'aggressive' by default! Duke3d showing also correct performance.
So it would seem the original bios gimps the performance and everyone here suspecting ram and cache settings was correct.
In the process of reading what little Intel documentation still exists for the Advanced/Monaco board, I also discovered that the board was set to feed the CPU 3.6V intseat of 3.3 volts, which would explain why the thing ran so hot that it needed socket 370 heatsink/fan. Hopefully with this I can go back to using the original low-profile heatsink. The otiginal processor was a Pentium 133, so maybe it was an early enough example that it needed 3.6V?
I will re-flash the original bios just for testing as I would like to find out if I can get the original working correctly.
Horun wrote on 2022-09-24, 01:44:
Can you post a picture of your board ?
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/ast-ad … -612-221475-f01 which is a custom variant of https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/intel- … anced-ma-monaco
Sphere478 wrote on 2022-09-24, 05:58:do you mean two 32s or two 64s? […]
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do you mean two 32s or two 64s?
To comment more on this though, can you drop the ultimate retro link to your mobo if you can? 😀
are you running from dos native or windows dos, or rebooting to dos from windows? which windows if so?
there is another thread here recently where they had bad performance on the cache. it is unresolved ATM but an idea I had was it might be stuck in write through policy. long shot.
does anyone know if there is a program that lets you play with or see what is going on with wt/wb through software?
Two 32s to make 64. I was thinking also there was a ram caching issue with the board, so I put in two 4mb EDO sticks that I knew work well, and same result.
Not sure what that website is. Google return links I posted above.
I tried both native dos (f8, command prompt only) and also exiting windows, no difference. I use Windows 95 osr 2.1
Can you link the other thread?
does anyone know if there is a program that lets you play with or see what is going on with wt/wb through software?
Would like to know this as well! I'm going to need to look into a way to enable hidden bios features also. I think it's Phoenix bios though so no idea if tools exist to do it. I may just stick with the hacked MrBios because it also has large disk support but I would really like to learn how to fix the original dud bios. I have an NEC Ready MMX machine with the next newer version of this board and same locked bios, but it performs exactly as expected so this is something AST must have messed up.
Does anyone have a default intel bios for the Monaco board? AST part number ends in BU0Q, while inte's ends in BU0D