There are a small handful of old games that support it 2 cpu's. But its mostly server stuff and flight sims and old US tank training sims. Any game built for IDtech 3 dose supports 2 cpu's. There was a list here of pre 2000 SMP apps.

That being said a app or game doesn't need to be SMP supported to benefit from the second cpu. If your maxing out one CPU the second will handle the back end stuff, like drivers, background apps and the OS.
Infact some 3'rd party drivers for video cards such as the VSA-100 (3dfx voodoo4/5) benefit from smp.

At the end of the day if your not using a dual cpu supported app/game you can see upto maybe 2-5% increase in performance if your maxing out one cpu. However you have other benefits, support for more ram, better motherboards, more stable systems, likelihood of on board scsi and so on. the second cpu may not be all that useful, but what comes with it is.

Jade Falcon wrote:

There are a small handful of old games that support it 2 cpu's. But its mostly server stuff and flight sims and old US tank trai […]
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There are a small handful of old games that support it 2 cpu's. But its mostly server stuff and flight sims and old US tank training sims. Any game built for IDtech 3 dose supports 2 cpu's. There was a list here of pre 2000 SMP apps.

That being said a app or game doesn't need to be SMP supported to benefit from the second cpu. If your maxing out one CPU the second will handle the back end stuff, like drivers, background apps and the OS.
Infact some 3'rd party drivers for video cards such as the VSA-100 (3dfx voodoo4/5) benefit from smp.

At the end of the day if your not using a dual cpu supported app/game you can see upto maybe 2-5% increase in performance if your maxing out one cpu. However you have other benefits, support for more ram, better motherboards, more stable systems, likelihood of on board scsi and so on. the second cpu may not be all that useful, but what comes with it is.

Not every IDTech 3 game does. Jedi Knight Academy (which I've probably spent 2000 or more hours playing) certainly does not.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Not every IDTech 3 game does. Jedi Knight Academy (which I've probably spent 2000 or more hours playing) certainly does not.

Yes it does, you have to enable it manually like most IDtech3 games.
Add r_smp 1 at the end of the shortcut or punch it in the console or in the games .cfg file. and you must have the game ruing on idtech3 1.06 or newer.

Since I got my IBM PS/1 2133 working last night, I've been considering using it for the older 5.25" games as well but it has no such floppy drive (although it has a bay for one). To my surprise, these 5.25" floppy drives cost a fortune! Does anyone know where I can get a working one at a decent price (that is, less than €50). Only extra demand, is that it should be beige and not yellowed so it doesn't look out of place in the case.

All I know is that Quake III Arena ran a hell of a lot smoother on my Abit BP6/dual Celeron 533/Radeon 8500 setup than Unreal Tournament did, although I'm pretty sure Q3A could also take advantage of HT&L, lessening the CPU burden further. Unreal Engine 1 games must need like a 1 GHz CPU at minimum to feel consistently smooth.

Anyway, having dual CPUs is a massive step up for system responsiveness, assuming the OS has proper pre-emptive multitasking (which rules out dual-CPU Power Macs on OS 9 more than anything else).

It's just that on the PC side of things, most games from that period still require DOS/Win9x to function properly or at all, which would make the second CPU pointless as Win9x only supports a single CPU. Putting on NT/2000 limits your gaming compatibility considerably, especially on hardware that just isn't cut out to run mid to late-2000s games when multi-core CPUs made SMP more widespread. (I'd say it largely took off with Supreme Commander, where having a Core 2 Quad benefited users much more than faster cores.)

I didn't know VSA-100 drivers benefited from SMP, though; my understanding was that 3dfx drivers were quite the opposite. But if that is indeed the case, it'd warrant pairing up one of my Voodoo5 5500 cards with the BP6 to keep the dual-processor theme going, to say nothing of how it's also the only AGP mobo I currently have that would even accept the V5.

Also speaking of id Tech 3, it's worth noting that ioquake3 disables SMP support by default for some reason; you need a special build to re-enable it.

System responsiveness is another thing to add to the goodies of a dual cpu setup.

As for 3dfx driver and SMP, none of the 3dfx drivers supported it, but a few 3'rd party ones do.
And for game compatibly with 2k, I only find a hand full of games that will not work in 2k, dos games aside with is fix by a simple boot disk or dos box.

xplus93 wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

Boguht a ThinkPad 600E from a thinkpad forum user the other day... and a genuine charger for it + a Xircom PCMCIA ethernet/modem […]
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Boguht a ThinkPad 600E from a thinkpad forum user the other day... and a genuine charger for it + a Xircom PCMCIA ethernet/modem combo card. Anyone used one of these bad boys?

Way back in the day I had a huge pile of those cards. Didn't have any use for them, so I got rid of them. Probably sent them to the thrift store or something.

Those are great for the ealyy wifi laptops since the mpci modems and NICs are sacrificed. I've got at least three or four stashed away for my latitude collection.

Hey, did those work well under pure DOS? I am thinking of maybe getting one for my FreeDOS 1.0 laptop (pentium 1, 64mbs of ram). Are they easy to configure/connect?

Thanks

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

spiroyster wrote:

hard1k wrote:

...

How much juice does that take? Or is that like redundancy for the redundancy... ya' know, just in case 🤣

So, like what's happening here o.0 thats 6x Socket8 & 2x Slot1? (Edit: Slot1 ram 😵 !) What connector between processor boards and mobo? Win2k I presume 😀. Someone should start a behemoth thread (>2 cpu systems, WinNT/Win2k). I wouldn't mind seeing what other WinNT/2K SMP systems there are.... no dual allowed!

What's the actual benefit of having a dual or quad CPU retro system for the purpose of playing retro games?

None. Thats why they are interesting. SMP wasn't really an x86 thing, so any x86 SMP (more than 2) pre Core or even P4/HT is pretty specialised. And yeah only servers, (even on workstations, not much CAD really utilised SMP. Maya 2.5 is one that comes to mind for 'batch rendering'). I would have thought 'servers' would be the market for these. And yes, NT (or derivative) only!

I have an Silicon Graphics VW 540 which is quad xeon slot2 @500 (and I have some 900 SL4XZ for it 😀), and has the benefit of an onboard Cobalt chipset (sgi home grown). It's probably the only >2 x86 SMP with a graphics system (as standard) that I know of, and I must say, I have never really understood its purpose. I would have thought most CG artists back then would have maybe benefited from SMP, but not for modelling, only rendering, and in most of these cases the workload was usually passed off to render farms (multi SMP servers or clusters), which traditionally (until GPGPU) didn't need (and rarely utilised) graphics accelration (entirely CPU). 😀

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

IIRC Dual-threading support for games didn't come along until 2003ish (Aquanox 2 has HT support IIRC) and it wasn't mainstream until 2006 and wasn't really mature for a further 2 years in around 2008. Not to mention most games right up until 2012 or 2013 had no Quad/Hexa-thread support at all. It was my understanding that back in the day multi-proccesing benefits were exclusive to workstation tasks such as video editing.

Quake3 supported SMP (1999), but only dual. I'm pretty sure the AAlchemy systems (specifically 8264) shipped with supermicro dual slot mobo's? if they were shipped with 2 CPU's, idk, if said shipped system actually used the other CPU, idk, if it was the quantum3D driver that used the SMP or simply for better system 'responsiveness'.... idk. o.0

There is ALWAYS* an advantage to having 2+ cpus.

ALWAYS.*

Even if the game is mono core, the OS can do other things during. Need to access the hard drive? 2nd cpu. Need to run a CD emulator in the background? 2nd cpu. I could go on.

*provided you also use an multi-cpu capable os, like NT,2K,XP

Gered wrote:

For a lot of us, our preferences for what hardware we choose to use in our builds these days are going to be primarily rooted in what we remember using most often back in those days.

True that. I grew up on a Unisys 286 and that exact machine became mine just over a year ago. I refurbished it and upgraded it to what I wanted it to be back in the 80's. Cyrix 486slc2-50 and Intel 486dx2-66 was something I had in my early teens, yet I longed for a dx2-80/VLB system back in 94/95 as Pentium was way off the scope, price wise. I have even gotten a C64 this year, as I never had one before, yet grew up using at others place all the time around 83 to 87 and I even grew up using other peoples Amiga's all the time. (Got an Amiga this year as well)

Yeah... I perfectly understand that we want what we were used to back then, plus we have all the fun memories too.

Speecking of AAlchemy systems, some were used by the us army for a tank tranning sim. I spoke to a friend that is way high up in IT in the army and they still have a few in use. The software is from around 2000 and supports both CPUs. Or so he says.

Edit
I also second what bob said.

Is the 66mhz FSB an issue for a 6 CPU system? Thats only 11mhz per CPU...

Newbie question.

ratco when I get it, I'll let you know... does seem to have packet drivers

I found these at work and decided to bring them home to see if they were useful.

My USB floppy drive arrived. Now I don't have to transfer downloads to the Win98 machine to get them onto a disk!

Pretty sure I have that exact, or reference clone floppy drive. Works pretty well!

@Groovy nice haul. What are those bottom cards?

sketchus wrote:

Pretty sure I have that exact, or reference clone floppy drive. Works pretty well!

@Groovy nice haul. What are those bottom cards?

I have one too. There actually built by Sony according to my BIOs

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

sketchus wrote:

Pretty sure I have that exact, or reference clone floppy drive. Works pretty well!

@Groovy nice haul. What are those bottom cards?

I have one too. There actually built by Sony according to my BIOs

Mine is a Teac according to windows.

oeuvre wrote:

Boguht a ThinkPad 600E from a thinkpad forum user the other day... and a genuine charger for it + a Xircom PCMCIA ethernet/modem […]
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Boguht a ThinkPad 600E from a thinkpad forum user the other day... and a genuine charger for it + a Xircom PCMCIA ethernet/modem combo card. Anyone used one of these bad boys?

My dad had one back then when he had a Compaq Armada E500S laptop back then, and I don't know where it is ATM, however, I think I tossed it out since it broke in half somehow.

probnot wrote:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

sketchus wrote:

Pretty sure I have that exact, or reference clone floppy drive. Works pretty well!

@Groovy nice haul. What are those bottom cards?

I have one too. There actually built by Sony according to my BIOs

Mine is a Teac according to windows.

Same. Dell sold them, and I also have a Toshiba one still in a sealed box if my Dell one fails. I haven't tried it with winimage, but i doubt it would work.



ratco wrote:

Hey, did those work well under pure DOS? I am thinking of maybe getting one for my FreeDOS 1.0 laptop (pentium 1, 64mbs of ram). Are they easy to configure/connect?

Thanks

I only use them under 9x. Anything older and I use 3com cards. I mainly use them because they were a standard dell part. My Inspiron 5000 even has labels next to the PCMCIA slot for the different ports.