eL_PuSHeR wrote:

VomitOnLino wrote:

32Mb of RAM (DOS can't adress more RAM - afaik)

Nope. I think you can address 64MB of EMS using a third-party utility like QEMM and even more than that using XMS or protected mode (XMS, top-down allocation strategy).

Ah okay. Another thing learned - thank you! 😀

VomitOnLino wrote:

P1 133Mhz downclocked to 100Mhz for compatibility reasons […]
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P1 133Mhz downclocked to 100Mhz for compatibility reasons

+Some Noname VooDoo 1 card with 4MB

Soundblaster 16 ISA ASP w/o Plug&Play (with volume Dial on back 😁)
+Yamaha DB50XG daughter board

40GB Hdd that I painfully chopped up into 2GB chunks.

Running Dos 6.22 / Win95 dualboot

Let me ask you a couple of questions, please.

What compatibility reasons did you have for downclocking. If you look into my concurrent thread, you'll se that I am wondering about which minimum clock I have to hit. So any experience you have to offer would be welcome.

Is there a reason not to pick a Voodoo2?

Do you need to load anything at all for that yamaha thing, or does it work completely without software?

Do you have any important reason for dos 6.22? Is there anything that doesn't run under win9x dos, but in dos6.22? Cause I plan to bypass the "cd-rom in d:" problem by just having a huge 40 GB drive c:

Greetings
ux-3

Voodoo1 might run some really old Glide games better than a Voodoo2. Not sure about that though. But not all Voodoos work with the earliest Glide games.

Daughtercards just magically work through the host card's MPU-401 port. Nothing to configure or install. The Yamaha DB50XG is a fantastic daughtercard, offering quite amazing MIDI. Probably nearly the best you can get for DOS games. I myself just picked up a Roland SCD-15 for DOS duties. Hard to find these daughtercards anymore....

Not sure that Dos 6.22 offers any advantages over DOS 7 (9x) for compatibiltiy. 6.22 will probably have problems itself with really old DOS games. But, DOS 6.22 was the last separate MS-DOS. Though yeah I think 95's or 98's DOS is more than adequate.

Let me ask you a couple of questions, please.

What compatibility reasons did you have for downclocking. If you look into my concurrent thread, you'll se that I am wondering about which minimum clock I have to hit. So any experience you have to offer would be welcome.

Greetings
ux-3[/quote]

Well I have noticed that some older games tend to get fussy if you reach a certain MHZ limit I just chose 100Mhz because its still fast enough for the newer stuff "Descent" "Hi-Octane" "Quake" and the likes, but not so fast that I get random runtime errors etc, also the LAPC-I doesn't like fast CPU clocks too much, you get synch problems. And with 100Mhz and disabling the cache via a tool "Wing Commander 1+2" and such run just perfect - so it's just a sweet spot for me.

VomitOnLino wrote:

And with 100Mhz and disabling the cache via a tool "Wing Commander 1+2" and such run just perfect - so it's just a sweet spot for me.

Thats good news. Part of my 50 MHz urge stems from wing commander...
You said there is a tool to disable the cache. I know about the bios, but can it be done via software? If so, which software does it in DOS?

Greetings
Ux-3

Voodoo1 might run some really old Glide games better than a Voodoo2

My experience has shown that with the right environment variables a V2 can fake a V1 quite nicely.

Carrera wrote:

My experience has shown that with the right environment variables a V2 can fake a V1 quite nicely.

Care to share? 😀

Greetings
ux-3

I would have to dig around, but if you search the web for voodoo2 and environment variables you'll find all kinds of ways of "dumbing down" a V2 to act like a V1.
EuroFighter 2000 has lost of tips.

Its funny to see people get carried away with "obsolete" hardware hehehe. 😜

All hardware is obsolete. The only hardware that isn't are the ones that are being designed in labs.

Good point!

I've got a few PCs set up for this kind of reason - my basic machine for old games is:

Gigabyte GA5AX motherboard
768MN PC133 [runs at 100MHz but can be overclocked]
K6/2 450
SB 16 + Yamaha SW60XG or SB AWE64 or EWS6WXL
[depending on how I feel - I often rebuild here and there]
Twin Voodoo 2s so I can run in SLI mode
S3 Trio "D/3X for basic graphics [like Quake in DOS mode]
6Gb Quantum Fireball
48x IBM CD ROM [think its a Toshiba]

This setup is great for:
Vinyl Goddess of Mars
Pitfall
Warcraft 1
Worms 2
Duke Nukem 3D
Quake
Heretic, Hexen, Doom
and it runs Dark Seed reasonably well with the right set up

I'd recommend you get a basic motherboard and processor combination, with ISA, AGP and PCI, and then get a collection of cards to experiment with.

Pentiums can be slow for some games you may want to try, that's why I use a K6/2 - the K6/3 is even better. These fit many Socket 7 boards.

Good luck.

I got my on 2000 XP AMD computer back. ISA soundblaster and everything on Win98/DOS. 😀

Wow - 2000xp and isa - what's the motherboard?

Let me guess - it's based on the VIA KT133A chipset 😀

Bingo!
Last board I could find that had an ISA slot.
Now if I can only figure out the best DOS drivers for the sound card (both the onboard and the ISA)...

I would be cautious about using advanced motherboards with a single ISA slot or two for Sound Blaster-style sound cards. These cards will only work in these motherboards if the motherboard supports "distributed DMA", a sort of emulation of the old-style DMA controllers using the bus-mastering capabilities of the PCI bus. Naturally, boards with ISA bus slots should support the old-style DMA, but as not every card requires DMA I can't guarantee that the board maker didn't cut a corner or two.

My old VIA KT133A-based board (Epox 8KTA3+ PRO) did support all kinds of old sound cards on its single ISA slot.
The onboard sound chip was also very cool, it emulated a SB Pro without the need for DOS drivers 😁 (Just enable the legacy sound option in BIOS, select the resources, boot into DOS, set up the BLASTER environment variable, done!).

My board is a clone of the Epox 8KTA3+.
I needed DOS drivers to get it to work and they were real memory hogs.
What DOS games do you use it on?

Maybe your board has a different soundchip, that would be bad luck. 😒 Unfortunately my Epox 8KTA3+ PRO has died from too much abuse, so I can't test it anymore, but my girlfriend still has the non-PRO version of the same board at home, I will check the settings when I have time.

I remember there was some init program for DOS, but it wasn't really necessary, since it only checked the BIOS configuration and set the BLASTER variable accordingly, which also could be done without the program if you knew the settings.

Also, the emulation only worked if you enabled the "Legacy Sound" option in the BIOS and selected the resources for IRQ, DMA, and base adresses. The emulation was so good that Win95 got fooled and installed the standard 8bit Soundblaster driver. Under Linux the card also worked with OSS Soundblaster modules. The drawback of this was that as long as the emulation was enabled in the BIOS, you were stuck with 8bit stereo sound and the modern capabilities of the chip (16bit, 48khz, fullduplex) could not be used at the same time.

I used it with all DOS games which didn't support the GUS I had installed in the ISA slot.