@sliderider
To confirm, you were able to watch DVD's using a PCI-based 486 and a DXR2? What motherboard, cpu and, operating system did you use?

Zup wrote:

sprcorreia wrote:

I still have my Encore 5x kit, with the DXR2 and a 5X DVD drive. I remember that back then it was great to have one of this kits. I believe Space Jam DVD came bundled.

And you did NOT go into a killing rampage?

If you haven't already, you will when you check out the immaculately preserved Space Jam Website.

It's probably the last site on the net that will load properly in a 16 bit browser.

You could play DVDs fine on a Pentium MMX machine with the right video card. I think by the time AGP really started taking off in '98 or '99, most mainstream and upper video cards had built in MPEG support (I know by this point, the ATI Rage did).

feipoa wrote:

@sliderider
To confirm, you were able to watch DVD's using a PCI-based 486 and a DXR2? What motherboard, cpu and, operating system did you use?

I don't remember the motherboard details as I no longer have it but I was using an AMD DX2-80, DOS 6.22 and WindowsFW 3.11. I also had a VL-Bus video card that I don't recall what it was and a Soundblaster 16. No PCI slots. The DVD decoder card offloads the work from the CPU so it can play movies at a reasonable speed. Trying to play movies without it was a slide show.

@sliderider
How did you use a dxr2 without a pci slotted motherboard? The DXR2 is a PCI dvd decoder card. Also, I don't think the DXR2 works in Win3.1X. I am confussed, can you clarify how you got DVD playback working on a 486?

My concern with a 486 is disk interfaces and buses. It's not easy to get low CPU usage out of them since VLB is poor at DMA and PCI designs are lacking. ISA is even more questionable. A DVD moves 1.5MB/s continuously.

I tested DVD playback on a Dual P233MMX using NT4 and a PCI Voodoo3 3000 and ATI Rage Pro. It doesn't work very well. On lower Bitrates you get 12 to 16fps, higher bitrates drops down to <10 fps. I tried also alot of DVD Decoders, where it seems for me that PowerDVD is fastest on such old hardware.
I think you require at least iDCT in hardware to get real CPU load benefit, which did the ATI Rage Pro 128 f.e.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AT … its#Rage_series
Then software DVD playback generates alot of PCI load, that adds to HDD transfers...

So I guess, a AGP card with iDCT, a P2 233MMX, suitable player is required
or at least a Celeron 400 MHz.

My DXr2 runs at the moment in a P166MMX with Intel chipset mainboard. On a 486 this could really get an adventure. Better dig out your SCSI subsystem and use TV-Out of the card. Overlay would require additional PCI transfers and PCI Bus Mastering on 486 PCI boards is a 'volatile' feature. I guess Saturn chipset could be a good choice.
According this list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_ch … #80486_chipsets
The Saturn II already supports PCI 2.1 which is quite astonishing for March 1994, because next PCI 2.1 capable chipset was Intels 430HX with PIIX3 in their new north/southbridge concept. Even PPro had to wait until May 1996...

Zup wrote:

And you did NOT go into a killing rampage?

It could have been worse. In late 1997 I saw Batman & Robin bundled with some!

The Creative DXR2 manual states that the minimum system requirements are a Pentium 100, 2MB video card, 16MB RAM, and Win95, 98, NT4.

My Cyrix 5x86-133 is comparable to a P100-110 in integer and P83 in floating point. I have never had any issues with PCI bus mastering in Win95, 98SE, or NT4. I have a SCSI2 DVD-ROM drive hooked up and use an Ultra2 (80 MB/S) harddrive for the OS.

I've noticed that Windows NT4 seems to have about a 10% performance enhancement when compared to Win98SE (as determined by various Windows-based benchmark programs). I have also noticed about a 20% increase with 2D graphics performance w/NT4 (a big decrease with 3D graphics, though -- may be related to the different DirectX versions?). The PCI graphics card is a Matrox G200, 16MB SDRAM.

I am curious if this sytem can play the DVD's considering the DVD interface is SCSI2. Has anyone tried a DXR2 or DXR3 with a SCSI DVD-ROM? How did it compare to that of an IDE DVD-ROM?

feipoa wrote:

I've noticed that Windows NT4 seems to have about a 10% performance enhancement when compared to Win98SE (as determined by various Windows-based benchmark programs). I have also noticed about a 20% increase with 2D graphics performance w/NT4 (a big decrease with 3D graphics, though -- may be related to the different DirectX versions?). The PCI graphics card is a Matrox G200, 16MB SDRAM.

NT4 2D speed is usually between 2x and 15x faster than Win9x for the different 2D accelerated driver functions. This depends ofcourse a bit on the graphics card you use. I'am not really sure, is this helps much on DVD playback, since the CPU calculations is the main point.

For 3D there is no Direct3D. Better use Glide/OpenGL. I think Glide as fast as the identical system in Win9x, though overall memory management in NT4 might be better.

Looks like I'll have to test this out for myself.

feipoa wrote:

@sliderider
How did you use a dxr2 without a pci slotted motherboard? The DXR2 is a PCI dvd decoder card. Also, I don't think the DXR2 works in Win3.1X. I am confussed, can you clarify how you got DVD playback working on a 486?

It had to be ISA because like I said I never had a PCI 486 board until recently and I was definitely watching movies on my 486. Unless I did have a PCI 486 board and I just don't remember it correctly which would really suck because I threw that board in the garbage in a cleanout about 8 years ago before I knew they had any value. I still remember the first DVD movie I bought for it was The Good, The Bad and the Ugly with Clint Eastwood. I know I still have the DVD player but not sure if I still have the card. If I have time I'll dig around in a few boxes and see if it's still here.

I put the Dxr2 on my 486 and it didn't work. Creative DVD player hangs as soon as I put a DVD in the drive or try to load a file. The card works ok in other systems. The machine has an AMD 5x86 133Mhz and 32MB of RAM. Remember that a VGA card capable of overlays is needed for the Dxr2 to work. Any other player that is capable of using the Dxr2, apart from the Creative one ? The card was recognized just fine in the system.

sliderider wrote:

feipoa wrote:

@sliderider
How did you use a dxr2 without a pci slotted motherboard? The DXR2 is a PCI dvd decoder card. Also, I don't think the DXR2 works in Win3.1X. I am confussed, can you clarify how you got DVD playback working on a 486?

It had to be ISA because like I said I never had a PCI 486 board until recently and I was definitely watching movies on my 486. Unless I did have a PCI 486 board and I just don't remember it correctly which would really suck because I threw that board in the garbage in a cleanout about 8 years ago before I knew they had any value. I still remember the first DVD movie I bought for it was The Good, The Bad and the Ugly with Clint Eastwood. I know I still have the DVD player but not sure if I still have the card. If I have time I'll dig around in a few boxes and see if it's still here.

Are you sure it wasn't a VideoCD? I really can't imagine a DVD playing at all in a 486, regardless of disk subsystem or hardware decoder.

A hardware decoder card should relieve the CPU of everything aside from moving the data to the card so I think it might be manageable if you can get 1.5MB/s data transfer without pegging the CPU. It should be possible.

megatron-uk wrote:

sliderider wrote:

feipoa wrote:

@sliderider
How did you use a dxr2 without a pci slotted motherboard? The DXR2 is a PCI dvd decoder card. Also, I don't think the DXR2 works in Win3.1X. I am confussed, can you clarify how you got DVD playback working on a 486?

It had to be ISA because like I said I never had a PCI 486 board until recently and I was definitely watching movies on my 486. Unless I did have a PCI 486 board and I just don't remember it correctly which would really suck because I threw that board in the garbage in a cleanout about 8 years ago before I knew they had any value. I still remember the first DVD movie I bought for it was The Good, The Bad and the Ugly with Clint Eastwood. I know I still have the DVD player but not sure if I still have the card. If I have time I'll dig around in a few boxes and see if it's still here.

Are you sure it wasn't a VideoCD? I really can't imagine a DVD playing at all in a 486, regardless of disk subsystem or hardware decoder.

Nope, not a VCD. I had a few animes on VCD, but no live action films. If I manage to find the card again I'll try it out on one of the 486 PCI boards I have now.

I bought one of these for a few dollars so I'll test it out on my 486 when it comes in.

Did anyone even bothered reading my post/question ? Thanks.

Maybe nobody has a DXR2. 😉 I suggest Google groups.

@unmei220
Yup, I read it. I determined that there was sufficient lack of information to warrant a personal investigation.

1) Maybe it will work using a Matrox G200? What graphics card did you use? Maybe other PCI-based graphics cards will work with it?

2) Maybe it will work with a SCSI DVD-ROM?

3) Maybe it needs Pentium instructions, whereby a POD83 would render the DXR usable in a socket 3?

4) Maybe it will work in a M919 or MB-8433UUD motherboard? Those work very well with PCI 2.1 cards. What motherboard did you use?

5) Maybe there are updated drivers that will make it work?
Did you try it on Win95, Win98SE, and NT4? There's NT4 drivers!

6) At least one other poster said they've gotten DVD playback working on a 486 -- a glimer of hope.

7) $5 well spent just to know if it works.