I'm putting together a 486 ISA only system, and using a 1MB Cirrus Logic 5429 card. Would that card be sufficient to run games like Phantasmagoria 1, Gabriel Knight 2... those early/mid 90's full motion video games? This would be under Dos. CPU is currently a DX33 but I have a Cyrix 586/120 and if that won't work I'm just going to drop in a DX/4 100. Thanks,
I don't have a 486 PC myself, but I do recall someone tried to do something similar back in 1996.
A fellow I knew back then asked me if his Packard Bell would be good enough to play FMV games. I went to his place and he had a Legend 20CD - 486DX2-66, 8mb RAM, no L2 cache, 1mb Cirrus Logic 5428 integrated video, PB branded Aztech Sound Galaxy, Panasonic CR-532-B 2x CD-ROM, 450mb Conner HDD, ISA slot riser card. I brought with me the only FMV game I had back then, Creature Shock; it worked, but the mouse cursor would stutter quite a bit and froze for a few seconds every time a new video played. The guy then took out a Cirrus Logic 5429 ISA video card, I installed it in one of the ISA slots and gave it a shot. Game performance got a lot worse - it was like a quick slide show with lots of pausing.
After that, I told the guy he had two choices: buy a new Pentium PC or upgrade his current Packard Bell; he chose to upgrade. CPU was already maxed out, so we got an additional 8mb system RAM, 512k L2 cache, Mitsumi 4x IDE CD-ROM, and an extra 1mb of video RAM for the 5428. Took out the 5429, added all the upgrades, and tried Creature Shock again. In short, it worked great; very smooth, very quick mouse response, and only a very brief pause when a new video played. We were both very happy with the results.
I don't know if this will help, but at least it gives you an idea of what to expect with your 486 ISA PC.
Ooohh, the pain......
I knew some folks who bought a Pentium Overdrive 83 MHz for a Packard Bell with the same loadout.
The 486 build has 256k cache installed, and the board is the Asus 486SV2 but there is no VLB slots. I have 16mb 30pin ram that's going into it, and I'm going to try and use a DX4-100, so I'm hopin gmy experience is a little better then that guys. Most of the Sierra FMV games required a VLB card, but I just wanted to see if anyone had luck with an ISA card. Thanks for the replies. 😀
The 486SV2 looks like it will only support 5V CPUs though, so you maybe won't be able to use a DX4-100 without any interposer/voltage converter in it.
wrote:I knew some folks who bought a Pentium Overdrive 83 MHz for a Packard Bell with the same loadout.
Didn't the 486 Packard bells have L2cache issues with the POD
Use at least a 4X CD-ROM drive. I played a lot of this type of thing on a 2X CD-ROM drive and it was bad news.
"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium
Agreed on a fast-ish CDROM, depending on the game. I seem to remember having a great time playing things such as Rebel Assault in my original proprietary Creative Labs compatible CDROM (2x), and then some sort of 'fighting monsters in tunnels' game came along which needed more. Worked wonderfully for about five seconds. Paused. Paused some more. Worked fine for the next five seconds, etc..
wrote:wrote:I knew some folks who bought a Pentium Overdrive 83 MHz for a Packard Bell with the same loadout.
Didn't the 486 Packard bells have L2cache issues with the POD
They never installed any L2 in the machine.
Bringing to life to this old thread since I finally have some time on my hands and can get the 486 going again. I'm waiting for an ATX to AT adapter to show up this week, but in the mean time to answer some of the above questions in hopes some of you can let me know if the 5429 Card will be good enough for the Sierra FMV games... I'm going to be using a AMD 486 DX2 5V chip I grabbed last year from REPC, the Cirrus Logic 5429 1MB ISA card, and Asus ISA-486SV2 board, SB 2740, 1GB CF-Card, and an LG 52x CD drive as that's the lowest I can find that still actually works great. OS will be 3.11 with Dos 5... or 6.22.
It's not relevant whether a game is FMV or not. If you draw e.g. 30 fps to the frame buffer from a FMV or by 3d-rendering it, the required bandwidth is the same.
But overall, I think your system is too slow for these games. They run in 640x480 with 256 colors, so assuming they run with 25 fps, you need a bandwidth to the frame buffer of about 8 MB/s, which is beyond what most ISA cards can do.
derSammler wrote on 2020-04-10, 18:07:It's not relevant whether a game is FMV or not. If you draw e.g. 30 fps to the frame buffer from a FMV or by 3d-rendering it, the required bandwidth is the same.
But overall, I think your system is too slow for these games. They run in 640x480 with 256 colors, so assuming they run with 25 fps, you need a bandwidth to the frame buffer of about 8 MB/s, which is beyond what most ISA cards can do.
That stinks... so either I stick with a P75 build to keep the speed down, or have to source a VLB board with a VLB card.
