Well starting with Wing Commander Secret Missions 2, the game has adjustments for frame skipping and/or frame duration.

They aren't well known (CTRL + / CTRL - and ALT + / ALT -) but give you enough leeway to adjust them perfectly on faster machines and during gameplay.

Great Hierophant is right, in Wing Commander once you face large ships the performance quickly suffers. It's a personal choice, I prefer it slower rather than struggling to kill that last remaining enemy because the game is too fast.

DOSBox solves all of this of course 😀

Now if someone could hack the speed controle of Secret Missions 2 into Wing Commander and Secret Missions - Now that would be something 😀

Great Hierophant wrote:

Does the Win9x patch for Ultima VII impose any kind of sane speed limits on these games?

You mean u7run / u7win? As I recall, you need a comparatively powerful computer to get those to run at a decent speed, so it sort of mitigates the speed issue.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Now if someone could hack the speed controle of Secret Missions 2 into Wing Commander and Secret Missions - Now that would be something 😀

Didn't the version included with Wing Commander: The Kilrathi Saga work differently from the original?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander_% … e_Kilrathi_Saga

Yes but it runs under Windows, doesn't have MIDI music and some other differences. It's also very rare / expensive.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Well starting with Wing Commander Secret Missions 2, the game has adjustments for frame skipping and/or frame duration. […]
Show full quote

Well starting with Wing Commander Secret Missions 2, the game has adjustments for frame skipping and/or frame duration.

They aren't well known (CTRL + / CTRL - and ALT + / ALT -) but give you enough leeway to adjust them perfectly on faster machines and during gameplay.

Great Hierophant is right, in Wing Commander once you face large ships the performance quickly suffers. It's a personal choice, I prefer it slower rather than struggling to kill that last remaining enemy because the game is too fast.

DOSBox solves all of this of course 😀

Now if someone could hack the speed controle of Secret Missions 2 into Wing Commander and Secret Missions - Now that would be something 😀

If a part of what's emulated tracks game speed it could be fixed. Usually you'd look to framerate but dosbox always does refresh rate so that's out. Does sound speed up with game speed? The way it would work would be to track the update rate of x emulation and adjust cycles when it falls outside of acceptable range.

No music is constant. Even on a fast computer!

It can be anything. Find something emulated that's ungoverned, if there, and then it's an easy fix of adding another range check to the autocycles handling.

Stay away from the Kilrathi saga. Different music/sound effects and also it feels a bit different to play to me. A disappointment overall!

Have you guys heard of the FM Towns PC?

Ultima 6 was fully voiced for that platform.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHb3cK5x5UU

The FM Towns is x86-based, but otherwise isn't IBM PC compatible. It's also famous for unique versions of several of the Lucasarts adventures (including the only 256-color version of Zak McKraken).

Up until now I thought Ultima 6 for the FM Towns was Japanese-only. I guess not.

Anyway, not especially relevant to the subject at hand.

Jorpho wrote:

Anyway, not especially relevant to the subject at hand.

🤣 thanks for pointing that out Jorpho 😀

rgart wrote:

Have you guys heard of the FM Towns PC?

Ultima 6 was fully voiced for that platform.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHb3cK5x5UU

There was also a VG console called the Towns Marty. Not sure how closely related it is to the PC,if at all.

sliderider wrote:

rgart wrote:

Have you guys heard of the FM Towns PC?

Ultima 6 was fully voiced for that platform.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHb3cK5x5UU

There was also a VG console called the Towns Marty. Not sure how closely related it is to the PC,if at all.

An fair analogy is as the Amiga CD32 is to the Amiga 4000, so the FM Towns Marty is to the FM Towns.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Ultima 7 is, so far, the only game incompatible with super socket 7 time-machines because it turns on L1 cache when you start the game.

If someone could hack the game to not do this, then my experienced guess 😀 would be either a K6 or non-MMX Pentium with L1 disabled, but L2 enabled 😀 66 MHz FSB should be enough, raise it for more speed.

I had a look into this. It doesn't seem intentional, the game just tries to enter and leave protected mode.
In several occurrences in mainmenu.exe and endgame.exe you will find either the sequence
66 B8 01 00 00 00 0F 22 C0
mov eax, 00000001h
mov cr0, eax
or
66 33 C0 0F 22 C0
xor eax, eax
mov cr0, eax
CR0 is one of the control registers, the lowest bit controls protected mode.
Unfortunately all other bits are cleared, including bit 30 which disables the cache. On a 386 this wouldn't matter since it doesn't have any cache, and on a 486 nobody would disable the cache to run Ultima 7.
For the first sequence a fix would be quite easy, just change the cache disable bit to 1:
66 B8 01 00 00 40 0F 22 C0
Now every time protected mode is entered the cache is disabled.
For the second sequence it is not so easy since "xor eax, eax" is a short way to set eax to zero which uses only 3 bytes. To set eax to 40000000h as necessary to disable cache we would need 6 bytes.
The best way is probably to find a few unused bytes, insert a routine there which sets CR0 to 40000000h, and call this routine everywhere CR0 was set to zero.
Of course you could try changing only the first sequence, but it seems that protected mode is always left shortly after it was entered, I can't really tell what happens in between. Perhaps the change would still have an effect.

Disclaimer: I didn't try this, it is very much possible that this will crash your machine because I forgot something.

I just tried the Ultima VII Windows 9x patch on my Gateway Pentium III 600E machine. The resulting speed seemed equivalent to a 486DX2/66. The scrolling, however, was vastly improved over my real 486DX2/66. Graphics card was a Voodoo 3 300 PCI, sound card was a Sound Blaster 16 PnP. Maybe I will take a video of it running. The WIndows 9x patch is doing a lot of work in real time to make the game work. My system unfortunately is not capable of much in the way of speed adjustment. Perhaps a somewhat slower processor may give a more perfect character speed.

I think there could be some new life in this old patch.

I’ve made a few changes to this machine recently that were worth sharing… I thought.

To keep things interesting I’m switching out the SB Pro 2.0 for a PAS16 - the ‘studio’ variety. This was advertised as new-old-stock and does appear unused despite being sold as a bare card. The lack of original driver disks isn’t trivial with these things in my experience because there are a number of different versions floating around on the interwebs. Using the wrong version can result in anything from the card nearly working but suffering from funky mixer incompatibilities, to completely refusing to initialise. This one works like a dream with the drivers on Vogon Drivers and is a quality piece of hardware once you master the mixer and tame the hiss:

I really do like the PAS16 after some initial bad vibes due to using the wrong drivers. It’s a very capable card and had some very nice DOS / Windows 3.1 software bundled with it. I had one as a kid and remember being disappointed that it didn’t do stereo Sound Blaster emulation (SB 2.0 only), but in hindsight it’s mostly a non-issue - a lot of games from the early 90’s with stereo FX supported the PAS16 natively anyway.

I’m still using a WD90C33 based VGA card in this machine, despite having some other nice VLB cards vying for the job. Where previously this WD has been on the slower end of the spectrum, some experimental jumper switching has brought its performance into line with my S3, ATi, and Cirrus Logic based cards, which is quite acceptable. And when I factor in my requirements for DOS compatibility and decent Windows 3.11 drivers / image quality, then the WD90C33 wins hands down – the clear, vibrant image this thing produces in Windows 3.1 is really something to behold.

I’ve switched out the Winbond IO card for an equivalent NOS example I found cheaply a while back:

For authentic HDD grinding sounds I’ll continue to use a WD Caviar 1270 HDD for DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11, but for anything I want to easily back-up - games, benchmarks, etc - I’ve added an IDE->CF adapter. These things work really well in my experience and eliminate the need for floppys and CDs, which is a huge bonus. Implementing a 4GB Transcend in this machine was quite painful though because my OPTI 495SLC - which I'm very fond of - is BIOS limited to 504MB HDD's. The drive overlay software that came with my new Winbond didn't work at all, and while EZ-Drive seemed to work well, I finally realised that the random floppy and mouse issues I was experiencing was being caused by EZ-Drive meddling with the BIOS.

In the end I went for the Ontrack DDO - also found on VogonDrivers - and although it takes ~6k of upper memory, it works very nicely... with everything except Ultima 7 of course. U7's memory check code drops its bundle when it comes across a DDO cloaking itself, and reports not enough memory to run regardless of how much you have free. So eventually I resorted to creating a boot disk for U7 which bypasses Ontrack, but that of course means that I don't have access to the CF HDD when booted that way. More than any other game I can think of, U7 would probably benefit from running off a CF drive given the amount of HDD thrashing it does, but whatever. As always there are compromises to be made.

And lastly a new Startech AT PSU – it’s pretty hard to get excited about a power supply but I think it’s worth the effort – I have one of these in a couple of my machines now:

I had another 486 in my collection for a while, made with arguably much better parts - 72 pin RAM, BIOS support for large HDD's, etc - but this machine more closely matches my idea of a real 486. The OPTI 495SLC motherboard is classic early 90's inventiveness (can do 386 and 486), the 486SX 33 is a classic Intel marketing scam, and the non-ZIF socket inhibits my upgraders urge to switch it out for a 66MHz, then 133, then a POD. The case is really nicely made too – very solid, stylish, and easy to work with.

Here it is all back in one piece with Windows 3.11 installed, in the processes of being enhanced with some must-have Windows add-ons:

Very nice!

Ultima 7 really is a picky game. Didn't know of any game that has trouble with DDO software 🤣

philscomputerlab wrote:

Ultima 7 really is a picky game. Didn't know of any game that has trouble with DDO software 🤣

If it could be convinced to skip the memory check and load then it would be probably run just fine - maybe a little project for me and my trusty HEX editor one day 😈

badmojo wrote:

a lot of games from the early 90’s with stereo FX supported the PAS16 natively anyway

What they support is PAS (8-bit stereo). Not many games support PAS16/PAS Plus 16-bit SFX directly, I can only think of Human Machine Interfaces Sound Operating System library that had such support. For example, no version of ubiquitous Miles libraries contains a PAS16 driver for SFX.

This is not a problem though since PAS16 SFX part is backward compatible with PAS, unlike the FM part. That's why they have separate PAS and PAS16 FM drivers in Miles libraries. So, I only mention this out of tediousness and pedantry.

bristlehog wrote:

This is not a problem though since PAS16 SFX part is backward compatible with PAS, unlike the FM part. That's why they have separate PAS and PAS16 FM drivers in Miles libraries. So, I only mention this out of tediousness and pedantry.

If we banned tediousness and pedantry then 70% of the posts on this forum would be need to be deleted 🤣

So when a game lists "Pro Audio Spectrum" then it's actually talking about the original PAS?

I've noticed that although some games offer "Pro Audio Spectrum 16" as an option, it then goes on to request the Thunderboard (SB emulation) params (IRQ, DMA, etc).

That's cheating.

badmojo wrote:

So when a game lists "Pro Audio Spectrum" then it's actually talking about the original PAS?

I found this to be the case for most games unfortunately...

Space Quest 4 is a game that supports the PAS16 directly if my memory doesn't let me down. That gives you nice Stereo FM in that game, quite cool. But then, all these great games support the MT-32 which I like even more 😀