First post, by bloodem
- Rank
- Oldbie
OK, so I've been meaning to make a thread about this for a while.
I have two overkill Win 98 systems (also visible in my signature):
1. Pentium Dual Core E5800 @ 3.8 GHz, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, Audigy 2 ZS, Win XP + 98 dual boot.
2. Core 2 Duo E4700 @ 3.2 GHz, GeForce FX 5900, Audigy 2 ZS, Win XP + 98 dual boot.
Now, for whatever reason, these two work perfectly in Win98 DOS, without Setmul or any other speed throttling - in fact, disabling the l1 cache with Setmul makes them unusable (because the SB16 emulation requires too much CPU power)! Anyway, I tried games that by default fail even on AMD K6-2 systems (not to mention Pentium 2 / 3 systems)...
Some games that I tried and work:
- Jazz Jackrabbit - works great on both systems
- Monkey Island - works great on both systems
- Monkey Island 2 - works great on both systems
- Historik - works great on both systems
- Historik 2 - menu sound has an annoying intermittent buzzing, but game works fine (at least the first levels)
- Prince - works great on both systems
- Prince 2 - works great on both systems
- Gods - a few missing sounds, but other than that also works great
- Lemmings - works great on both systems
- Lion King - works great on both systems
- Loom - works great on both systems
- Dyna - works great on both systems (OPL3/CQM emulation is quite off, though)
- Golden Axe - works great on both systems
- Titus the Fox - works great on both systems
- Wolfenstein - works great on both systems
- Duke Nukem 3D - works great on both systems
- Doom / Doom 2 - works great on the ATI Radeon system, has issues on the GeForce FX system.
Please note that these are not patched games! So... what sorcery is this?! Other than the emulated CQM sound (which sometimes is OK...ish, other times it's pure garbage), I did not find any major issues, and throttling is not needed. Also, I find the General Midi & MT-32 emulation very good.
Anybody know what's going on here? Have I stumbled upon the ultimate time machine PC? 😀 The first thing that comes to mind is the Audigy's SB16 emulation, but still, I don't think it explains how so many games can run on a freakin' Core 2 Duo CPU.
PS: I must say, I'm quite impressed by ATI Radeon's DOS compatibility, I wasn't expecting it to be this good, comparable to the GeForce FX. Did not notice a single issue (such as image corruption, side scrolling stuttering, etc). I'm sure there are games that fail to work with it, but the games I've tested worked fine.
1 x PLCC-68 / 2 x PGA132 / 5 x Skt 3 / 9 x Skt 7 / 12 x SS7 / 1 x Skt 8 / 14 x Slot 1 / 5 x Slot A
5 x Skt 370 / 8 x Skt A / 2 x Skt 478 / 2 x Skt 754 / 3 x Skt 939 / 7 x LGA775 / 1 x LGA1155
Current PC: Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Backup PC: Core i7 7700k