I made a tileable background for my 1995 Packard Bell 812CD and also recoloured the Tiles.bmp to blue.

As you can see it's inspired by the graphic designs of the late 80's / early 90's. I sorta wanted something rad that would stand out, so far this fits the bill nicely. 🤣

And here it is in case someone wants to use it:

Also here is what the blue version of tiles looks like

And once again here is the actual tile so you can use it:

I got around to benching my Digital Venturis 466 this evening. Overall I am pretty happy with the results. This is the first benching program I have ever ran on a DOS system.

Upgraded my Intel 233mhz system to AMD K6-2 550 (Only seeing it as 522mhz, as my 100mhz frequency jumpers seem to be at 95mhz, but it's still a nice upgrade.)

I have a board that will only report up to 400MHz K6 processors. They do, however, run up to 600MHz without any issue so it is clearly an issue with the BIOS. Guess strange goings on with faster K6 boards is "A thing" to some degree then. No doubt you will have seen a pretty significant performance leap anyway. Even if you are 27MHz short. The cool thing with the K6 is that you can turn the multiplier down, easily letting you scale to different levels of performance. Of course, cache can be meddled with too. My 500MHz model is currently at 266MHz because I wanted to "Emulate" a fast Pentium system, I shall be turning it up soon to emulate an average Celeron.

Oldbitcollector wrote:

Upgraded my Intel 233mhz system to AMD K6-2 550 (Only seeing it as 522mhz, as my 100mhz frequency jumpers seem to be at 95mhz, but it's still a nice upgrade.)

Many boards have a 95 MHz setting for the K6-2 333/380/475 and K6-2+ 570, some odd Cyrix 686/M1/M2 model also used 95 MHz FSB. Check the jumper settings again.

Or perhaps your board is running at 550 but your board dosnt report the speed correctly like HighTreason suggests, you can check that with "Speedsys" or some other utility.

Installed a 512k RAM/512k ROM upgrade to my Amstrad CPC 😎
Now I can run this awesome demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqjZNnjNu3Y BATMAN!

Went through the 486 and weeded out all of the DOSBOX capture directories - had a few gigabytes of AVI on that thing taking up precious HDD space. Also reorganized the entire Games partition alphabetically except the major franchises that I gave their own dedicated folders (ie. Sierra, Maxis, SCUMM, and Emulators).

Did more programming on the game, still unable to move when at the main game screen kicks in after the introductory cut scenes... but I did manage to script in the other GUIs. All that's left of those is to script the Settings GUI - in particular - the sliders.

I'm doing my GUI as a mix of LucasArts layout and Sierra Style. Essentially, it's an artier version of the Monkey Island/Day of the Tentacle Interface. Most of them will have stylized backgrounds to go with them - mostly resembling old electronic equipment as found in the games location. Once this is all working and scripted, I will be importing these GUI into my other games (maybe with small tweaks).

Things to tie up on the GUI end
- make backgrounds & custom buttons for the other GUIs
- do some final tweaks to the LA style main interface, mostly fixing button and cursor mode issues
- fix that problem with the main character being unmovable after the game starts and hotspots being present but unclickable

Surprisingly, after a few tweaks, this game is also running faster on the 486 now. I've been removing a lot of crap from code to make AGS happier and it seems to be working. Just using clear, cohesive coding. I made a copy of some other scripts so I can get an idea of what is going on here - I seem to be getting better at scripting off-the-cuff like I do when I'm playing guitar, weird how I can apply that to computers now.

Removed the onboard cmos battery from my 386. And placed a AA battery holder to accomodate a 3.6v AA battery.

Oh, dear. Oh dear oh dear. What a disaster.

A fashion disaster that is. Mullet Man visits Hull Fair 2015...

Anyway, today I installed my new Quadro4 only to find the same problem happens as does with the Ti... Given this is now four cards that were known to work I am starting to think that there may be an issue elsewhere. I did before but found none, now I am not so sure. Cannot even get a picture in Safe Mode but the system is still responsive; So hitting the Win key, pressing up and hitting enter opens the Shut Down dialog and lets me turn off the system without issue.

I will try to restore the ghost when I can think how to boot the system. It won't boot from DVDs for whatever reason despite booting fine from CDs.

Played Warlords II Deluxe on my 433DX/S: too slow. I am now copying the game via FastLynx/LapLink LPT to my 466DX2: should run a lot faster. 😀 I just have to remember to disconnect the PC speaker.

Reminder: set the SB16 MPU-401 to 300: otherwise the output is messed up when another MPU-401 lives on that address.

Playing this game on a DX33 reminds of playing Civilization on a PS/2 30 8086 with V30: AI turns just take too long to compute. 😉

Teardown began on a Hitachi 21" fixed resolution CRT.

As you can see it needs at least a recap. It will take several weeks for the parts to come in.

HighTreason wrote:

Oh, dear. Oh dear oh dear. What a disaster.

OMG - I almost spit out my coffee. Those two women are probably wondering 'wtf'. Nice work!

More work on the game last night - fixed the gameplay issue I was having. Turns out it's because when dialog is run in Adventure Game Studio 2.3.1, the game state is paused, and after my cutscene ended, the game paused - preventing any interactions with hotspots. Now the main player can finally move, so I'm now going to start programming the previous room data X,Y coordinates so I can start navigating all three rooms and have the player show up in the right spot, that will take me a little bit of reading now to figure out how to pass the DATA= field to the next room and re-render to a specific spot in the next.

Either way, it's awesome, now we have full GUI, full cut scene, I also now need to start making the character sprites. I've also decided not to disclose which game I'm working on yet for teaser/premier purposes. The gameplay idea I'm using is rather unique in that it mixes - point n' click mixed with survival and random events with a simple resolution only occasionally hindered by a mix of priority and time vs. distance. Is that cryptic enough?

creepingnet wrote:

More work on the game last night - fixed the gameplay issue I was having. Turns out it's because when dialog is run in Adventure Game Studio 2.3.1, the game state is paused, and after my cutscene ended, the game paused - preventing any interactions with hotspots. Now the main player can finally move, so I'm now going to start programming the previous room data X,Y coordinates so I can start navigating all three rooms and have the player show up in the right spot, that will take me a little bit of reading now to figure out how to pass the DATA= field to the next room and re-render to a specific spot in the next.

Either way, it's awesome, now we have full GUI, full cut scene, I also now need to start making the character sprites. I've also decided not to disclose which game I'm working on yet for teaser/premier purposes. The gameplay idea I'm using is rather unique in that it mixes - point n' click mixed with survival and random events with a simple resolution only occasionally hindered by a mix of priority and time vs. distance. Is that cryptic enough?

Nice. Sounds like you've put a lot of work into it. I look forward to the reveal.

I discovered that the FPU in a K6-2 300 is so slow that the Windows GUI actually becomes a little choppy while playing MP3/AAC audio in the background. I mean, I knew the FP performance of those processors sucked; just didn't think they sucked that hard!

CelGen wrote:

Teardown began on a Hitachi 21" fixed resolution CRT.
As you can see it needs at least a recap. It will take several weeks for the parts to come in.

Hey! I probably had the same monitor on my desk like a decade ago, just with different branding:

Very cool display. I used PowerStrip to generate its custom resolution & sync polarity, eventually gave it away when I switched to an Eizo LCD.

Today I spent a good chunk of my morning messing around with my XT clone =)
I'm trying to keep it somewhat period correct software-wise. It is a late 10MHz 8088 motherboard (1989 copyright) + CGA clone from eastern Europe. I'm yet to purchase an 8-bit NIC to use its option ROM for stuff like XT-IDE, so I'm stil using that bootable floppy with the ROM on RAM approach I created. It does eat my conventional memory, but in trying to be period correct I'm finding that 500KB or RAM (512KB installed, 12KB taken by the ROM image isn't bad at all. I have already ordered the CIs to expand it to 640KB, though, just because I can.
Full specs:

• 10MHz 8088 processor (down to 4.77 with the turbo button off)
• Late motherboard - I've talked about it here (pics+ROM dump+manual)
• Pravetz CGA clone - Can't get color from the composite output, but I'll try diagnosing it. It is a full clone (using discrete components like the original CGA). I replaced the font ROM with a regular english one from IBM CGA cards
• Prime 2 Multi-IO card - IDE port working with a CF card (which works in 8-bit mode). An old 700MB HDD is a no go
• 2GB CF card - overkill but it was all I had. I'll buy another (something like a 512MB card should be overkill already) and return the 2GB card to the 486 it belongs
• AT desktop case I borrowed from my 486 (which moved to my old K6-2's case... which moved to an ATX case) - I plan on replacing that, it looks wrong

So far I installed the following:

• Compaq DOS 3.31 - manages partitions up to ~500MB - it does take a while to calculate the free space though
• Windows 2.0
• Borland Sidekick Plus 1.0a
• Norton Utiities 4.5
• Norton Commander 1.0
• 4DOS 8 - The only recent software on the list because I could not locate an old 2.0 copy of 4DOS, and it works remarkably well swapping to the disk

Now I plan on adding the games and Windows 2.x software and I should be good to go!

Received my new addition: IBM PS/ValuePoint 433DX/Si. Vacuumed it. Then replaced the FDD (had to throw out spare #1 so ditched 2 FDDs). Formatted the HDD and installed MS-DOS 6.22 I then proceeded playing Warlords II Deluxe on my 466DX2: save games do not work. So I am reinstalling the game. The LapLink FastLynx apparently broke something yesterday. 😀

That 8088 is cool! 😀 Cool CRTs as well!

It turns out SMARTDRV and IBM PS/ValuePoints are not compatible. I had an issue a few years ago running Novell NetWare Server on one of them: the PC froze up. Same happened today with the 466DX2 and SMARTDRV. 😵

Switched to Warlords II: really fast and no issues. I only play the original five scenarios anyway. 😀

alexanrs wrote:

Today I spent a good chunk of my morning messing around with my XT clone =) I'm trying to keep it somewhat period correct softwa […]
Show full quote

Today I spent a good chunk of my morning messing around with my XT clone =)
I'm trying to keep it somewhat period correct software-wise. It is a late 10MHz 8088 motherboard (1989 copyright) + CGA clone from eastern Europe.
8><CUT
[*]4DOS 8 - The only recent software on the list because I could not locate an old 2.0 copy of 4DOS, and it works remarkably well swapping to the disk[/list]
Now I plan on adding the games and Windows 2.x software and I should be good to go!

You can download version 2.21 here:
http://www.4dos.info/v4dos.htm#03

Yeah, but it is the shareware version... I'd rather cheat period correctness than have the shell nag me about registration and adding delays =(