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Reply 60 of 143, by cyclone3d

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j^aws wrote:
cyclone3d wrote:

True.. but we are talking about DOS/Win98... so PCI-E is a moot point. You won't have any drivers for any PCI-E video cards in Win9x.

I'm also not sure exactly why we would need an uber fast CPU for DOS/Win9x.. but that doesn't stop me from wishing I had a faster PICMG or PIAGP setup than I already have. Just for fun!

The PICMG CPU boards I posted links to both use the ITE8888 bridge chip so they should have full ISA compatibility.

Firstly, PICMG 1.3 boards with ISA slots exist. And some PCI-E GPUs do have Win98 drivers. However, in
such a setup, you'd use a fast PCI GPU for Win98 duties and the PCI-E GPU for WinXP duties. You can also supplement DOS duties with an ISA video card, too.

Link to said PICMG 1.3 backplane with ISA slot(s)? I would guess that the backplane would have to host the PCI to ISA bridge as well?

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Reply 61 of 143, by ruthan

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cyclone3d wrote:

True.. but we are talking about DOS/Win98... so PCI-E is a moot point. You won't have any drivers for any PCI-E video cards in Win9x.
I'm also not sure exactly why we would need an uber fast CPU for DOS/Win9x.. but that doesn't stop me from wishing I had a faster PICMG or PIAGP setup than I already have. Just for fun!

I think that different people are interested in different things.. but dont see too much point to mess which this strange form factor for slow machine with ISA / PCI only when you can get normal ATX MB for it.

Me, Rayer and others want as fast as possible DOS machines. My X58 Six Core Xeon on 4 GHz is working fine, even with PCI Sound card everywhere from DOS to Win10/Linux/MacOS and even Z370 Core i7 8700K is working in DOS, except sound.. With properly coded games (good coder i aware that machines would get faster..) not have problems with fast cpu, some games need patching (pascal crt runtime errror 200 or add some nop,nop waits), for others working well slowdowners as Setmul and Slowdos.. sound compatibility is much bigger problem.
But look at my sound card compatibility sheet:
https://docs.zoho.com/sheet/published.do?rid= … 9e034&mode=html
With X58 and Yamaha + Aureal V2 combo is was able to reach 95+ % of Dos compatiblity in suite of 165 dos games, where is most of big titles, games from late 80s and early 90s, even Ultima0 is still working. Of course you need invest time to find way in which setting is some game working, at first there is lots of rebooting (pretty fast on new machines.. and now you just look to my sheet for proven settings..), but its solvable.. once you found working combination, you need only note it, make simple start batch etc..

BTW not working PCI-E cards in Win9x or DOS is urban legend, up to Geforce 7 and Ati X850 drivers are there (maybe this latest Win98 are best for compatibility, but still working pretty well with most of the games and have zillions period right machines has its problems too), there are PCI Vooodoo 3/5 / Gerorce too, if dont want to use them. I personally using MBs with primary gpu slot selection, so i can select bios profile / videocard per OS.. only limiting factor is number of slots.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 62 of 143, by j^aws

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cyclone3d wrote:
j^aws wrote:
cyclone3d wrote:

True.. but we are talking about DOS/Win98... so PCI-E is a moot point. You won't have any drivers for any PCI-E video cards in Win9x.

I'm also not sure exactly why we would need an uber fast CPU for DOS/Win9x.. but that doesn't stop me from wishing I had a faster PICMG or PIAGP setup than I already have. Just for fun!

The PICMG CPU boards I posted links to both use the ITE8888 bridge chip so they should have full ISA compatibility.

Firstly, PICMG 1.3 boards with ISA slots exist. And some PCI-E GPUs do have Win98 drivers. However, in
such a setup, you'd use a fast PCI GPU for Win98 duties and the PCI-E GPU for WinXP duties. You can also supplement DOS duties with an ISA video card, too.

Link to said PICMG 1.3 backplane with ISA slot(s)? I would guess that the backplane would have to host the PCI to ISA bridge as well?

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Axiomtek FAB100. My interest in one is building a DAW, rather than an all encompassing PC.

Reply 63 of 143, by ruthan

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If i found right thing its not expensive as i tough..
https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Axi ... m%2fjuWg==
130 Euro.. its fine, its ATX too, only case would be hassle.. or at least i dont now nothing about good cases for such stuff. I dont have problem with big cases, i actually like them, more room to operace and add some stuff inside pc, i would only prefer some tower than some classic rack case orientation..

I dont mind, if someone find something with and much more PCI-E long slots (only 1 or 2 ISA / and 2 PCI slots are enough for me), it would be even better.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 64 of 143, by cyclone3d

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ruthan wrote:
If i found right thing its not expensive as i tough.. https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Axiomtek/FAB100?qs=XynAqUfUlD2G80klm%2 […]
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If i found right thing its not expensive as i tough..
https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Axi ... m%2fjuWg==
130 Euro.. its fine, its ATX too, only case would be hassle.. or at least i dont now nothing about good cases for such stuff. I dont have problem with big cases, i actually like them, more room to operace and add some stuff inside pc, i would only prefer some tower than some classic rack case orientation..

I dont mind, if someone find something with and much more PCI-E long slots (only 1 or 2 ISA / and 2 PCI slots are enough for me), it would be even better.

Awesome. And it has the ITE8888 bridge. I will have to get one of those at some point as I already have a couple PICMG 1.3 LGA775 CPU boards that I got for like $40 total a while back. Also have an LGA1155 PCIMG 1.3 board. Forget how much I paid for it, but is was really cheap.

As for more PCI-E x16 slots.. not going to happen. The most you are going to get is 2x slots that run at x8 because the chipsets used don't have enough PCI-e lanes to handle more than that.

And as far as I can tell, that backplane is the only PICMG 1.3 backplane available that has ISA slots. Not coming up with any others when searching.

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Reply 65 of 143, by j^aws

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cyclone3d wrote:

And as far as I can tell, that backplane is the only PICMG 1.3 backplane available that has ISA slots. Not coming up with any others when searching.

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Here's another PICMG 1.3 with ISA: Aaeon BP-214SH-P3E2I6

Reply 66 of 143, by cyclone3d

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j^aws wrote:
cyclone3d wrote:

And as far as I can tell, that backplane is the only PICMG 1.3 backplane available that has ISA slots. Not coming up with any others when searching.

pgal_160328_y0ujaw.jpg

Here's another PICMG 1.3 with ISA: Aaeon BP-214SH-P3E2I6

How are you finding these?

Any more you can dig up?

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Reply 67 of 143, by j^aws

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cyclone3d wrote:
j^aws wrote:
cyclone3d wrote:

And as far as I can tell, that backplane is the only PICMG 1.3 backplane available that has ISA slots. Not coming up with any others when searching.

pgal_160328_y0ujaw.jpg

Here's another PICMG 1.3 with ISA: Aaeon BP-214SH-P3E2I6

How are you finding these?

Any more you can dig up?

I made some searches a while ago when I was looking at PIAGP boards, and remembered them. I think there was another board from Advantech, but can't quite remember.

Reply 68 of 143, by ruthan

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cyclone3d wrote:

As for more PCI-E x16 slots.. not going to happen. The most you are going to get is 2x slots that run at x8 because the chipsets used don't have enough PCI-e lanes to handle more than that.

I dont thing that count of PCI-E x16 slots (long ones) is problem, all modern desktop CPU have still only 16 PCI-E lines, but there are lots of 3xPCI-E long and 3/4 PCI-E slots MBs. If you are using additional card, PCI-E slot is simply downgraded to 8x/4x etc. Except very last GPUs, performance difference between 8x and 16x is very, very small - so for example even Triple SLI still worked with them - in x8+2* 4x setup.
Even PCI-E 1x is fast enough for DOS / Win98 video cards.

Im not really sure how it counts for different PCI-E versions, if PCI-E gen1 videocard at 4x speed really eats 4x Gen3 lines, or less. Because 1xGeb3 (1 GB/s)=2xGen2=4xGen1 (250 MB/s) speed.

There is advantages of my Xeon and other ethusians and server intel CPUs there are 36/40/44x lines, i dunno if there are also socket v1366 / v2011v3 CPU boards for such systems, but i would make sense.. maybe why to have industry MB with lots of slots.. without proper industry CPU.

Update:
I looked on 2 CPU boards, which cyclone3D linked they look fine, is even mentioned that PS/2 port supports Y cable for keyboard and mouse at the same time, second have nice block diagram, where you can see how bridge are connected.. There are using classic intel chipsets, so - advantage is there is nothing extra to make them super expensive and incompatible where classic desktop MBs with same chipsets are fine. It look nice, we need only test if sound cards in DOS are really working.. and we have 2 chances for success: PCI ones and ISA ones.

I also wonder if they are using classic Intel Bios / UEFI or something special and too much modified, of course i doubt that there would be nice desktop stuff as.. faster memory speed, overclocking and Bios profiles.. but if it could have UEFI everything is possible. There seems to be also classic Realtek HD sound cards, but you will need some special header kit for it.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 69 of 143, by LSS10999

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It's the chipset that has to retain at least PC/PCI or DDMA in order to get DMA from IT8888 bridge (even when using the bridge card), so I don't think you'll be able to get ISA DMA with IT8888 from a PICMG 1.3 CPU board, since those boards are all going to be ICH6 or later which can only use LPC for DMA and only on a limited amount of I/O ranges.

This holds true for earlier PICMG revisions, too. On ICH6 or later PICMG 1.0 CPU boards, some manufacturers would explicitly state that the board does not support ISA DMA, if the CPU board is interchangeable with CPU boards using ICH5 or earlier on the same backplane model (and the backplane could provide ISA DMA either natively or through a bridge card).

On new chipsets, you still need LPC DMA, but I don't think there are any backplane/CPU board pair with LPC-ISA bridges.

Reply 71 of 143, by cyclone3d

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j^aws wrote:

^^ Best bet for ISA DMA are PCIAGP backplanes, as they still retain IT8888 bridge chips with ICH5 or older southbridges available on compatible SBCs.

In which case, this SBC, which supports up to Pentium D would be the fastest available as far as I know:
http://www.attro.com/download/datasheet/SAGP-8654EVG.pdf

However, if might work with C2D.. I have a desktop board based on the 865/ich5 combo that supports C2D.

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Reply 72 of 143, by ruthan

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LSS10999 wrote:

It's the chipset that has to retain at least PC/PCI or DDMA in order to get DMA from IT8888 bridge (even when using the bridge card), so I don't think you'll be able to get ISA DMA with IT8888 from a PICMG 1.3 CPU board, since those boards are all going to be ICH6 or later which can only use LPC for DMA and only on a limited amount of I/O ranges.

This holds true for earlier PICMG revisions, too. On ICH6 or later PICMG 1.0 CPU boards, some manufacturers would explicitly state that the board does not support ISA DMA, if the CPU board is interchangeable with CPU boards using ICH5 or earlier on the same backplane model (and the backplane could provide ISA DMA either natively or through a bridge card).

On new chipsets, you still need LPC DMA, but I don't think there are any backplane/CPU board pair with LPC-ISA bridges.

j^aws wrote:

^^ Best bet for ISA DMA are PCIAGP backplanes, as they still retain IT8888 bridge chips with ICH5 or older southbridges available on compatible SBCs.

So make sense to use these for:
1) as alternative to very overprised and sold out Core 2 Duo + ISA MBs, which i already posted and are in first post.
2) If really need lots of slots, some musicians wants to use lots of cards, maybe some could need them for work too.
3) Rayer is still able to use at least PCI sound cards on P67 chipset and i will probably work on other P/H/Q/Z 6x/7x chipsets too... and you can have lots of slots with such machines with this concept.

But is nothing for me, if its only about chipset not "magic" bridge / back plane / Bios solution.. But i heard a lot wrong assumptions and urban legends, before.. i still would like to test even more modern ISA / PCI cards, you newer know for sure.. before we will sure that is dead end.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 73 of 143, by digger

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RayeR wrote:

On other side, the power of current CPUs is still not enough for smooth Dosbox emulation as Dosbox runs very ineffective compared to native (or almost native like NTVDM, DOSEMU...)

cyclone3d wrote:

http://arstech.com/install/index.php?app=ecom … show&ref=usb2.0

There is also a special version of DOSBOX (source available) from the company that makes/sells them so it can be ported to newer versions of DOSBOX.

I think it would be more interesting if someone wrote an open source VirtualBox extension pack that would expose a virtualized/emulated ISA bus in guest VMs and bridge it to such a USB to ISA adapter on the host machine. That way, it would be possible to run DOS games without having to emulate a CPU (as DOSBox would), while still being able to make them work with ISA sound cards, even on a modern machine. This would make it possible to run even the later heavier DOS games at native speed on modern systems with full sound support, regardless of the motherboard chipset. All that would be needed is a modern x86 CPU that has support for hardware-assisted virtualization (AMD-V or Intel VT-x) and an IOMMU. This way, both 16-bit and 32-bit DOS game code would run natively on the host CPU from inside a VM (even on a 64-bit host OS) and sound support would work even for those few games that don't support DOS extenders, since a hypervisor works on an even lower level.

As for VGA support, the virtualized graphics adapters that you can choose in VirtualBox all seem to have fairly decent VESA VBE support. But if necessary or desired, a PCI graphics card could be passed through to the VM as well. There was even someone who opened a topic here on Vogons about passing through a Voodoo card to a VM in VirtualBox. But I digress.

I've tried dabbling with writing custom VirtualBox extension packs, but the documentation for it is quite limited and I'm not very experienced with C++ development.

I guess the same could be done with another hypervisor, such as KVM or Hyper-V, but the advantage of VirtualBox is that it is open source and that it can run on all common desktop operating systems.

NOTE: I'm talking about custom developed extension packs, not the official Oracle VM VirtualBox Extension Pack.

Reply 74 of 143, by RayeR

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>digger
Yes sure, It should be possible to emulate ALL THE PC features in VM but nobody of currnet VM authors care about emulating old soundcards HW because they aims to virtualize linux/windows and other modern OS. It should be possible to write an extension if
1) There is VM with well documented API/Opensource, maybe QEMU... It's also necessary for porting extension to future VM versions.
2) There are skilled programers with enough motivation and TIME to do it - I think this is the biggest problem of old DOS times community. I wonder how other old computers communities are so creative and active, like tons of HW gadgets and expansion boards for C64 and Amiga, it's incredible what they can do with their machines (I mean. e.g. new CPU, 3DFx, MPEG1/2/3 decoders extensions)... On the PC scene I can see only few things, like Tiido's soundcard is a bright ray in the darkness. I understand that 8-bit/Amiga guys have one big advantage - their's HW is unified and simpler than PC. They almos reversed or get all needed documentations. They have only few different firmwares. PC platform has so many variants and incompatabilities that complicates it. But there must be also something else...

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Reply 75 of 143, by ruthan

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In long term its solution, in short term, i dont believe in it..

Because its very long time so Virtual box is available and only missing thing for Windows 98 is write good 3D acceleration driver, same with Dos SB drivers.

QEMU is mess, its very ambitious, it would be ultimate piece of SW which could fix all HW incompatibilities (x86 on ARM/PowerPC.. PowerPC on x86 etc.).. but its incomplete, slow and buggy.. for year and i dont see too much progress.
At least on Windows if im not wrong is there not good GUI frontend for 5+ years. QEMU is would be solution for Mac emulation too, but its the same no 3D video and sound driver for Motorola a PowerPC machines. At least some Xbox 360 emulators tried to use QEMU too but it wasnt success, same as some Android emulator, which even on x86 Android device arent able run Windows 98 / XP on useful level.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 76 of 143, by digger

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ruthan wrote:
In long term its solution, in short term, i dont believe in it.. […]
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In long term its solution, in short term, i dont believe in it..

Because its very long time so Virtual box is available and only missing thing for Windows 98 is write good 3D acceleration driver, same with Dos SB drivers.

QEMU is mess, its very ambitious, it would be ultimate piece of SW which could fix all HW incompatibilities (x86 on ARM/PowerPC.. PowerPC on x86 etc.).. but its incomplete, slow and buggy.. for year and i dont see too much progress.
At least on Windows if im not wrong is there not good GUI frontend for 5+ years. QEMU is would be solution for Mac emulation too, but its the same no 3D video and sound driver for Motorola a PowerPC machines. At least some Xbox 360 emulators tried to use QEMU too but it wasnt success, same as some Android emulator, which even on x86 Android device arent able run Windows 98 / XP on useful level.

Don't underestimate the current capabilities and the new interesting stuff happening with QEMU. In fact, kjliew recently managed to hack 3Dfx Glide pass-through support into QEMU. See this thread: Topic 60950

Since QEMU and DOSBox are both licensed under GPLv2, code can be shared between both projects with no problems. In fact, I believe this has already happened on occasion. However, I would still very much like to see the superior sound card emulation code from DOSBox to be ported over to QEMU. QEMU already supports Sound Blaster 16 and GUS emulation, and it may well be based on older DOSBox code, but as far as I know, it's outdated now, compared to the latest code in DOSBox trunk. I'd especially like to see the recent high quality OPL2 and OPL3 emulation code ported over to QEMU.

That, combined with the Glide pass-through support, would make QEMU a very compelling solution for running DOS/4GW and Win9x games on modern Intel and AMD systems.

As for the lack of a proper cross-platform user-friendly GUI for QEMU, especially on Windows and macOS, I absolutely agree with you. In fact, I think that's the last remaining real advantage that VirtualBox still has going for it over QEMU at this point, at least for non-Linux hosts. And I consider a proper and easy (un)installer to be part of such a user-friendly GUI. But for someone with proper GUI programming skills, this shouldn't be too hard a problem to solve. Perhaps we could work on a cross-platform web-based UI for QEMU. And lacking any other solution, we could even just steal the VirtualBox qt5-based GUI and port that to a cross-platform QEMU distribution. VirtualBox is also GPLv2-licensed, so why not? 😀

Yes, VirtualBox also still has the other advantage of having an integrated hypervisor, allowing it to offer hardware-assisted virtualization even on operating systems that don't include their own hypervisor, such as older versions of macOS, Windows 7 and 32-bit and/or cheaper editions of Windows 10 that don't include Hyper-V and therefore don't offer WHPX. But for Windows users with an Intel CPU, the Intel HAXM hypervisor offers an open source alternative to WHPX, which QEMU also supports. Also, this is becoming less of an issue, since the number of people running any host OS without an integrated hypervisor is dropping fairly quickly these days. And QEMU has supported KVM in Linux for a long time, and as of QEMU 2.12, it now also supports WHPX on Windows 10 and Hypervisor.framework on macOS.

So I'm trying to think what remaining advantages VirtualBox still offers over QEMU, but other than a fairly easy to use and consistent cross-platform GUI and installer, I can't really think of anything. But perhaps I'm forgetting something obvious here?

Long story short: if someone (we perhaps?) would port the most recent sound hardware emulation code from DOSBox to QEMU and if we were then to combine that with the kjliew's 3Dfx Glide pass-through patch, then I believe we will indeed have a very compelling retro game virtualization platform for running DOS/4GW and Win9x games on modern Intel and AMD systems.

Reply 77 of 143, by hyoenmadan

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digger wrote:

I think it would be more interesting if someone wrote an open source VirtualBox extension pack that would expose a virtualized/emulated ISA bus in guest VMs and bridge it to such a USB to ISA adapter on the host machine. That way, it would be possible to run DOS games without having to emulate a CPU (as DOSBox would), while still being able to make them work with ISA sound cards, even on a modern machine.

Problem with this approvach is the same as with USB to Floppy adapters. The bridge chip needs to have a way to expose ISA DMA, such as a packet interface for example, which can be used by VM software, and can work reliably on top of USB.
Just as with USB to Floppy interaces which don't expose all the features of a standard 8272A-Compatible FDC... As far a i know, no USB to ISA bridge supports that as for today, so it can only be used for cards which do IRQ and MMIO only, as communication hardware and mechatronic interfaces, which are the main market for these adapters.

Reply 78 of 143, by ruthan

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Problem, all those things is that evolution is unpredicable, it was probably possible make it 5 years ago.. but unless somebody really do heavily lifting you cant count on it.. BTW GLide was already working for PCem is this new Qemu implentation any better? There are additional problems with pass through it needs PCI bus, new MBs doesnt have it and i dunno if they are working with PCI-E to PCI bridges and if Voodoo is working with it.. it not working even with newer PCI MB at least not for DOS Glide.. and for Windows Glide there are already very good SW solutions as nGlide..
Update: Ok it seems not be pass-throught for Voodoo, but pass-throught for video cards with some Glide Wrapper..

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 79 of 143, by ruthan

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I found out that Gigabyte is still making some MB with PCI slot, at least few Z270 and 1 Z370 MB, i added them to first post.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.