my 486 parts arrived just before the weekend so I spent the weekend setting up and configuring. AMD 486 @ 100mhz, 16mb ram, SB16, M912 VLB Socket 3 mobo (UMC chipset) and a mistake of a video card purchase, a Trident TVGA9000b ISA. Using a Gotek was fun to set up DOS and Win 3.11 although I had major grief using the Floppy software (the Ipcas one), it turns out that it would not, for the life of it, create boot sectors when applying floppy image files to the folders. My solution was to copy the floppy image files to usb, transfer to a win98 pc, burn those images to a CD, copy the CD contents to the same PC that had w98se install existing on the hdd (18 minute boot up of win98 on this 100mhz 16mb beast). From there I used a floppy imaging tool to deploy the floppy images to the separate floppy partitions using the gotek. Things worked first time which was fantastic and even the old AF 6.4gb spinning hdd had zero issues.
The trident has some really odd VGA signal issue, in text mode or if it is just drawing pixels it works fine and doesnt have ghosting, but as soon as the images are coming from an actual graphic or animation I get like a phase/clock ghosting across the entire image, about 40 stripes of odd shading. It's also MUCH slower than what I remembered (had one of these tridents in a 486 many years ago), i feel like i'm getting about 12fps in doom and even a windows 3.11 desktop is laggy to refresh 🤣. I quickly put in an order for a cirrus logic VLB card last night, which should make this 486 into a bit more of a 1995-ish build.
I played a bit of wing commander academy, jurassic park (ocean, 1993), heretic (ran better than doom by about 5fps?), "better" wolfenstein 3d - it adds A and D as individual strafe buttons, beneath a steel sky and monkey island. much nostalgia.
also I learned about early CD-ROM burning and the cd formats quickly after seeing that the dos files I burnt for my pentium system could not be copied across due to using a newer file system. good weekend indeed.
