I have updated the video!

Should be nicer to look at...

The Youtube video looked very good, in terms of the speed of the game. However, it's a shame you got killed so quickly. 😉 Your monitor looks widescreen. Do you get a stretched image, for DOS games? Also, your benchmark scores of 19.0 and 8.5 are interesting. The 19.0 score states that it's slower than a 386DX-33, but the 8.5 score shows that it's faster than a 386DX-40. So, I guess the usefulness of these benchmark utilities can be taken with a "pinch of salt".

Edit: Your Edit above looks a bit odd. 😉 Edit 2: Seems OK now.

Yes it's a widescreen for testing. I will eventually source a 1600 x 1200 LCD, but for the time being this will do...

I didn't die 😉 I'm not THAT bad Hahahah

I pulled the "emergency ejection seat" to end the game in a different / interesting manner...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I didn't die 😉 I'm not THAT bad Hahahah

I pulled the "emergency ejection seat" to end the game in a different / interesting manner...

🤣 ! Sorry. 😦 I'm not familiar with that game. I incorrectly assumed you got shot down. 😊

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Yes it's a widescreen for testing. I will eventually source a 1600 x 1200 LCD, but for the time being this will do...

I've been thinking about getting a 1600x1200 LCD. I was thinking about this one -

http://www.pcbuyit.co.uk/product_info.php?man … products_id=327

What do you reckon?

That monitor is EXCELLENT 😁

- S-IPS panel (great viewing angles, excellent colours)
- DVI
- Modern look

Another choice is buying a 24" widescreen LCD with 1920 x 1200 pixels which has aspect ration control. Most of the 24" have this option that way you can also play 1600 x 1200 simply with black bars on the side...

Just another option!

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Another choice is buying a 24" widescreen LCD with 1920 x 1200 pixels which has aspect ration control. Most of the 24" have this option that way you can also play 1600 x 1200 simply with black bars on the side...

Just another option!

I'd say that's the best option, because that way you get the best of both worlds - both "old" and "new" aspect ratios inside the same monitor. But I'm still nervous about getting a widescreen monitor, because I'm not sure which monitors support "hardware scaling". When I go to a manufactuer's website, they often omit this type of information. Eg, the Dell U2410 UltraSharp 24" Widescreen looks like a good monitor:

http://www.dell.com/us/en/dfo/peripherals/mon … ell-u2410&s=dfo (Monitor on Dell's website - but I can't see any info about hardware scaling.)

http://www.trustedreviews.com/monitors/review … 24in-Monitor/p1 (A good review of this monitor)

They all scale. Check the manual (which you can often download) and look for 1:1 pixel mapping or aspect ratio scaling.

There is no guarantee though, as I am not sure how these modern LCDs would handle a 320 x 200 signal. Testing is really your best option. A old notebook with a boot disk and prince of persia would be a quick way to test...

So 4:3 1600 x 1200 will work guaranteed, but 24" widescreen you really need to test before you buy as results will vary from model to model.

New 19" LCDs are still available (1280 x 1024 resolution) and really reall cheap 2nd hand (20" are quite pricey for some reason). They are actually 5:4 but it's not such a big difference. You won't notice unless you know about this and look for these differences...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

They all scale. Check the manual (which you can often download) and look for 1:1 pixel mapping or aspect ratio scaling

That's a good idea. I've just done that, for the Dell U2410 monitor. It's on this page:

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/MONITOR … en/ug/about.htm (See "Preset Display Modes", about 60% down the page.)

And it looks encouraging. They guarantee 1600x1200 will work, at 60Hz. I wonder how the old VGA DOS stuff will work? Would the monitor automatically select 720x400 @ 70Hz, or 640x480 @ 60Hz? At the moment, my 5:4 19" LCD selects 720x400. I'm not sure if it is able to select 640x480 - I've never seen it do this. However, 720x400 @ 70Hz looks OK, in pure DOS.

Yea I wouldn't worry about resolutions as much as LCD take whatever you put into them and simply scale / stretch it to the native resolution.

So if you have a 4:3 LCD screen and you put in a 4:3 signal (whatever resolution it doesn't matter) you will get a 4:3 full screen image...

On a 24" I have my doubt about 320 x 200 games. I doubt they considered this input resolution when they designed the monitor. There is only one way to find out and that's test before you buy!

Good project! The video-shoot angle is uh....a bit out of "sync"? 🤣

But I agree, the speed is playable on a PIII with the L1 cache disabled. Never thought the power of the L1 cache can be so......substantial.

Also thanks for your Soundblaster installation disks! I grabed a set for my SB Pro 2.0 cards!

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Yesterday I finally got that Slot 1 adapter going and now have a PIII 1 GHz running. I had to set the FSB to 133 (overclocking) but from what I found on the internet, the BX440 chipsets do this quite happily.

From what I've heard, I understand that the i440BX chipset is not very stable at 133 FSB. It's officially designed to run at 100 FSB only. I understand that you can gently overclock it to 112 FSB, without any (or too much) trouble. I've run in to problems with this chipset OC'd to approximately 120-124 FSB. In fact, I don't think I've ever managed a successful POST at 133, although I haven't tried this with many boards.

I understand you are using the Gigabyte GA-6BXC rev. 1.9 board. I've got one of these, and also a rev 2.0 board. (I'm not sure what the difference is.) So you've got your 6BXC mobo running at 133 FSB - I'm impressed! 😀 Apparently, there are a couple of i440BX chipset based boards which are known to be consistently stable at 133 FSB, but I can't remember the model names, although an Abit mobo may be one of them.

I dug up a 440BX board to test. It's an Asus P2B. It's got a Powerleap adapter in it, with a Celeron 1.4 GHz processor. I disable all of the cache options inside the BIOS, and run Norton Utilities "Sys Info" DOS exe. I get a score of 16.0, which is less than half the value of the 386DX-33 reference score. I guess that's about right, because your higher score of 19.0 is achieved with the FSB OC'd to 133.

I see that Celeron is a FSB 100 cpu right? Did you use CL3 or CL2 memory (this also makes a difference)...

From what I read in old reviews, I got the impression that most BX440 boards could handle 133 MHz. Later mainboards had Native support for 133 MHz e.g. VIA had one, these boards are often S370 and also come with ISA slots.

Intel i815 are very stable, but no ISA slot as far as I know. These newer boards also have soft BIOS, so no mucking around with jumpers...

Malik has a DFI board, S370 with 3 isa slots. I would love to have one of these. I saw a PC chips or something with 2 ISA slots listen in the UK, but couldn't find more information.

There are quite a few with 1 isa slot, but I really want 2 so I can have a Soundblaster and a Midi card.

Asus P2B are excellent, I almost bid for one, it was the version with 2 CPU slots, but the seller wanted 40 bucks and that was just out of the question...

My netbook is the perfect 386. With L1 cache disabled it gets almost 30 points. BUT no ISA soundcard support 🙁

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I see that Celeron is a FSB 100 cpu right? Did you use CL3 or CL2 memory (this also makes a difference)...

Yes that's right, it's a 100 FSB model. I went to the mobo's BIOS set up area, and changed the memory timings. I made them faster. The SDRAM I am using is CL2. I reran "sys info", and got a score of 18.5. I then OC'd the mobo's FSB, by changing some jumpers. I OC'd the FSB to a very cautious 105 FSB. "sys info" now reports a score of 19.4. That will do! 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

From what I read in old reviews, I got the impression that most BX440 boards could handle 133 MHz. Later mainboards had Native support for 133 MHz e.g. VIA had one, these boards are often S370 and also come with ISA slots.

Thanks for the info.

The i440BX chipset as it is can handle 133MHz FSB fine. It is just that there is a missing AGP clock divider, the videocard AGP bus will get overclocked at these speeds. So it depends on what the videocard can handle.

Yea I read that Nvidia cards are quite tolerant. I use a TNT2 and it works just fine!

I got Wing Commander in the winter 1990/1 and played it through. I've spend a lot of time in front of it, using a 286-16 and a 286-20. From looking at your intro, it runs too fast. I have tried to get the game at "classic speed", and found that 800 MHz w/o L1 was closer to it.

Interesting!

As a Kid I finished this Game on a 286 machine. I believe it only had 10 or 12 MHz and a EGA video card. Looking back I can't believe I finished the game 😁 Also just the bare bones PC speaker...

Yea I should have recorded more of the gameplay, but the battery light was flashing... Intro and animations are fast, but once you play the game and there are a few ships around it does slow down. However it also makes the game a lot easier 😁

I can't wait to hear how this game sounds with a Roland...

Testing with real Soundblaster cards, there is quite a difference between DosBox and real hardware. However with midi this isn't a issue as the midi data is simply passed on and they same hardware as 20 years ago play the music.

So it is quite likely that once I have Roland gear I will simply use DosBox as digital speech sounds quite the same under DosBox, it's only FM synth where I can hear differences.