VOGONS


First post, by rarcher

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Afternoon everyone. So like my inquiry in the sound card area, I am debating getting a dedicated VESA or ISA graphics card for my IBM valuepoint. The current onboard video is running 2mb as an S3 Vision 864. It is a'ok for my needs right now but for running a game like Star Trek A Final Unity the 3Dish animations like during the ship combat times or the like it runs a bit more chunky then I prefer even on the lowest settings. Its playable otherwise but it made me think that if there was a good 'jack of all trade' sort of ISA/VESA card I could get which would be better for 2D/Early 3D Dos/Win 3.1 games I wouldnt be against it.

Looking things over it seems most of my options that come up as suggestions are usually S3's which is fine I'm not married to the idea of one brand or another exactly long as it'll do what I generally want. But like the sound cards suggested in other threads those recommended that I find are usually 1MB options and getting the upgrade chips with 2mb are almost impossible. And those that do have 2mb are running 150-200+ US Dollars. So my questions here are multi-pointed.

1) What is a good 'jack of all trade' ISA/VESA video card you would suggest? and if it was only 1MB would that run generally better then my onboard 2mb?
2) Like in the sound card thread where I mentioned them making this http://www.pcmidi.eu/mk8330.html I also wondered if there was any similar projects that made such for ISA/VESA graphics cards? I saw one I think on here for a newer Voodoo 2 or 3 I think but those were PCI and I can't support that.

So any suggestions folks could give me and provided pointers to suiting what I need?

Reply 2 of 6, by imi

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you didn't mention what system you have exactly, but you'd probably benefit from a CPU upgrade more than anything, with a S3 864 you're already bus limited anyways.
maybe that game just isn't destined for this system ^^

Reply 3 of 6, by rarcher

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imi wrote on 2022-08-19, 04:26:

you didn't mention what system you have exactly, but you'd probably benefit from a CPU upgrade more than anything, with a S3 864 you're already bus limited anyways.
maybe that game just isn't destined for this system ^^

Sorry its an IBM Valuepoint Performance its a 486DX2 66mhz with the capability to upgrade to the DX4 or 5x86s from AMD/Cyrix I got a 5x86 133 AMD on the way that should be here tomorrow. I confirmed the board will support it with the jumpers set. I currently got 128mb of ram in it, and 128k of L2 Cache (still hunting for the 256k upgrade!), a 2gb IDE HDD and the other aforementioned sound blaster visa 16s and the onboard 2mb S3 864

Reply 4 of 6, by BinaryDemon

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I’d look into this but you might be hurting your performance with 128mb ram (mostly on Win9x, Dos / Win3.x might not notice). I don’t think most socket3 boards could cache that much.

I’d bet that S3 864 is your best video option as well.

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!

Reply 5 of 6, by kixs

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Do the CPU upgrade.

VLB S3 864 is pretty much top of the line card for DOS (2MB will be only faster in Windows, around 80+% speed increase and no increase under DOS).

Lower the mem to 16 or 32MB max. If you can get it upgrade the cache to 256KB.

Use CF card with CF-IDE adapter to get the fastest I/O HDD speed.

Requests are also possible... /msg kixs

Reply 6 of 6, by rasz_pl

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rarcher wrote on 2022-08-19, 12:01:

128mb

10x too much, depending on VESA card implementation and bios this much ram might be colliding with VBE 2.0 LFB

Open Source AT&T Globalyst/NCR/FIC 486-GAC-2 proprietary Cache Module reproduction