kithylin wrote:

That's mostly irrelevant to my situation. Even if I did get that running, the music and sound wouldn't be the same. Part of the entire reason to play Descent 2 (and these other games) in DOS is their usage of my AWE64 video card and the superior sound it produces, when running older games.

So even if I could run any of these games in windows (or even in an emulator) I wouldn't ever desire to do so, as they would use inferior autio in that setup, and most likely run significantly slower vs on a real system in real dos mode.

Actually, they do supply alternative renderings of the soundtrack. And I have no idea why you think it would be slower. Just sayin'.

idspispopd wrote:

S3 cards are fine. You probably have to some additional utilities: s3vbe20 (unless your card's BIOS already includes VBE 2.0), probably s3spdup and if you want to overclock the card mclk.

I don't know if an equivalent for fastvid might be useful, I couldn't find any, though. (Athlon CPUs do have MTRRs.)

I have a registered version of SCITECH Display Doctor that can enable VESA modes for a wide variety of video cards. The problem will be discovering which ones are fastest @ VESA Modes for now :> It'll probably be a while until I can get my paws on a voodoo2.

Jorpho wrote:

Actually, they do supply alternative renderings of the soundtrack. And I have no idea why you think it would be slower. Just sayin'.

One example: I have two laptops here, a 1.0 ghz dual core AMD C-50 based low-end laptop / netbook (produced in spring 2011). I installed my GOG.com version of Carmageddon I bought off the GOG website (Which runs Carmageddon in DOSBOX Emulation layer software). On this laptop, the non-3D-accelerated (normal, not voodoo version) runs 1-3 FPS in dos box and is utterly unplayable, virtually a slide show.

The other version my Older Compaq Armada 1750 laptop which as a Pentium-II @ 400 Mhz and runs DOS 6.22 + Windows 3.11, I've copied the game over there and run it in native mode dos, and the non-3D version (not glide version) runs normal speed and is fast (compared to how the other laptop does it) and playable and smooth. On a 1999 - 2000 era laptop.

So yes, Emulators are significantly slower than "The real thing", unless you happen to have a fast enough system to run the emulator without slowing down. And in my testing here with these two model laptops, a slower, significantly older machine running DOS is faster than a low-end modern machine running emulation.

The whole thing boils down to enjoying the games how they were originally designed to run on original hardware natively. Emulation will never be as good as the real thing on the real hardware, no matter how well it's done.

DXX-Rebirth is not emulation. It is a re-implementation of the original source code.

(Also, are you disabling BBCode in your posts..?)

Oh.. apparently it's on by default and I didn't realize it, some how.. 😮

Thanks for that.. fixed all my older posts.

Okay so.. I decided to go and spend the majority of yesterday benchmarking all of my video cards I have here, PCI and AGP.

A few notes about this before I link to the results. The system it was tested in remained the same for all cards. 650 Mhz Slot-A AMD Athlon overclocked to 805 Mhz. The "score" is the resulting "VESA Memory" speed in KB/sec shown from SpeedSys MS-DOS benchmark. An -EXAMPLE- of a SpeedSys result is here: http://i.imgur.com/C0exvYZ.jpg

Also the "REQ SDD" column is if it requires Scitech Display Doctor VESA software to activate VESA modes or not. Some cards don't need it and have support via their BIOS (The later ones).

Results: http://www.outfoxed.net/misc/vesa.txt

The end result, now for the first time in.. as long as I can ever remember computers using this "Fastest" card I found.. I can use 800x600 & 1024x768 VESA modes @ 60+ FPS and it's smooth and playable. I know the games are above 60 FPS because in VESA mode I get tearing when I turn around now. Compared to the "slide-show effect" VESA modes used to be with any of the other cards I was using.

Oh.. apparently it's on by default and I didn't realize it, some how.. 😮

Thanks for that.. fixed all my older posts.

Okay so.. I decided to go and spend the majority of yesterday benchmarking all of my video cards I have here, PCI and AGP.

A few notes about this before I link to the results. The system it was tested in remained the same for all cards. 650 Mhz Slot-A AMD Athlon overclocked to 805 Mhz. The "score" is the resulting "VESA Memory" speed in KB/sec shown from SpeedSys MS-DOS benchmark. An -EXAMPLE- of a SpeedSys result is here: http://i.imgur.com/C0exvYZ.jpg

Also the "REQ SDD" column is if it requires Scitech Display Doctor VESA software to activate VESA modes or not. Some cards don't need it and have support via their BIOS (The later ones).

Results: http://www.outfoxed.net/misc/vesa.txt

The end result, now for the first time in.. as long as I can ever remember using a computer with dos, by using this "Fastest" card I found.. I can use 800x600 & 1024x768 VESA modes @ 60+ FPS and it's smooth and playable. I know the games are above 60 FPS because in VESA mode I get tearing when I turn around now. Compared to the "slide-show effect" VESA modes used to be with any of the other cards I was using.

And here all this time I thought it just needed significant CPU to run VESA modes smoothly. I might test later with this VESA-fast video card and see what games run like with a 90 Mhz Pentium and this card, just to see. Now I'm curious if the video card makes the difference more than the cpu 😄 If so maybe I won't need to upgrade the processor in this system any further.

Why is the PCI Rage II-C faster than the AGP version? 😮

jwt27 wrote:

Why is the PCI Rage II-C faster than the AGP version? 😮

I don't understand that myself, as it makes no logical sense, but it is. I can photo results from both and show you, but that's the results that came up with SpeedSys. I've tried turning on/off every AGP setting in bios (or heck every performance setting everywhere) and it makes almost no difference, I was able to gain about +10 KB/sec at one point but the AGP version never went up nearly as high as the PCI one does. I never thought much of these PCI ATI cards before testing. I thought they were just some generic VGA card that was nothing special. I'm looking at them in a different view now.. maybe I'll have to go find some of the Rage Pro PCI versions later. Most places sell them cheap because they think they're useless.

Have you tried enabling Fastvid before running SpeedSys? I just checked with my Voodoo3 AGP and it scores 46,706KB/s without and 248,938KB/s with FV enabled. That is 5.3 times faster!

Besides, even the card is fast, is it compatible with all games? This chart says it's not.

jwt27 wrote:

Have you tried enabling Fastvid before running SpeedSys? I just checked with my Voodoo3 AGP and it scores 46,706KB/s without and 248,938KB/s with FV enabled. That is 5.3 times faster!

Besides, even the card is fast, is it compatible with all games? This chart says it's not.

I haven't tried FastVid, I'll try that in a little bit. Also I haven't seen any issues yet with any games I've tried this Rage IIc PCI on. Although admittedly I've only tried Descent1 (640x480), Descent II (800x600), Duke3D (800x600), and Quake I (1024x768). In these games however (With Display Doctor loaded) there's zero problems / issues and it's fast.

Also, I'm not sure what to think about that chart.. a lot of those "problems" listed are solved by loading Vesa TSR software like display doctor, it looks like they're just testing the cards as-is with whatever is default in the card's bios.

All I know is I can play VESA modes in dos smoothly now and I couldn't before, so... I'm happy. I just thought I'd release my findings for others to see, I don't claim them to be accurate / correct. It's just what I saw in the program. Also I did not load "FastVid" or any other software before testing, just booted to a DOS 6.22 floppy with no config.sys and no autoexec.bat and ran the program.

Edit: Also.. your claimed KB/sec is shown in SpeedSys? I've never seen any video card in any computer I've ever run SpeedSys on come up that high before, with or without fastvid.

Edit #2: I've found and downloaded a copy of FastVid. I've run it on the AGP card first, then re-ran SpeedSys and it has zero to no effect, the AGP Rage IIc still comes up @ 14,127 KB/sec. There's a couple issues with FastVid anyway. According to the documentation that comes with it, it's only for intel processors, and has little to no effect on AMD processors. Also seems we can't use EMM386 if we want to also use FastVid. Disabling EMM386 would prevent me from loading most of the device drivers my dos system needs in to high memory so.. I can't use FastVid anyway, even if it did work.

kithylin wrote:

jwt27 wrote:

Have you tried enabling Fastvid before running SpeedSys? I just checked with my Voodoo3 AGP and it scores 46,706KB/s without and 248,938KB/s with FV enabled. That is 5.3 times faster!

Besides, even the card is fast, is it compatible with all games? This chart says it's not.

I haven't tried FastVid, I'll try that in a little bit. Also I haven't seen any issues yet with any games I've tried this Rage IIc PCI on. Although admittedly I've only tried Descent1 (640x480), Descent II (800x600), Duke3D (800x600), and Quake I (1024x768). In these games however (With Display Doctor loaded) there's zero problems / issues and it's fast.

Also, I'm not sure what to think about that chart.. a lot of those "problems" listed are solved by loading Vesa TSR software like display doctor, it looks like they're just testing the cards as-is with whatever is default in the card's bios.

True, UNIVBE does increase compatibility, but I'd rather have a card with full VBE 3.0 compatibility in BIOS instead of a TSR eating conventional memory. The Voodoo3 has just that, it's pretty fast, and supports Glide, so that makes it my favourite DOS card 😀

kithylin wrote:

Edit: Also.. your claimed KB/sec is shown in SpeedSys? I've never seen any video card in any computer I've ever run SpeedSys on come up that high before, with or without fastvid.

That's what it says in SpeedSys, yes.

kithylin wrote:

Edit #2: I've found and downloaded a copy of FastVid. I've run it on the AGP card first, then re-ran SpeedSys and it has zero to no effect, the AGP Rage IIc still comes up @ 14,127 KB/sec. There's a couple issues with FastVid anyway. According to the documentation that comes with it, it's only for intel processors, and has little to no effect on AMD processors. Also seems we can't use EMM386 if we want to also use FastVid. Disabling EMM386 would prevent me from loading most of the device drivers my dos system needs in to high memory so.. I can't use FastVid anyway, even if it did work.

Yes, this trick works only on Intel chipsets. There's another, similar program, I can't remember its name right now, that might work on AMD chips. Not sure though.
And EMM386 is not a big loss, nowadays we have UMBPCI for that 😀

Okay well, after you mentioned your results, I pulled out my Pentium-III Slot-1 system based on the i440BX chipset (Also 616 Mhz just like yours.. 550 Mhz Pentium-III Katami, with a minor overclock to 112 Mhz Bus from 100) since you had such good results with yours.

I don't have any voodoo hardware yet, so I just have to make do with whatever I have here until I can get my paws on some later.

I put the Rage IIc AGP card in it and before doing anything it came up as showing 23,388 KB/sec in SpeedSys (Already an improvement over the AMD System). I then ran and loaded FastVid, and now it shows 69,918 KB/sec in SpeedSys, with FastVid loaded.

I guess AMD is inferior / slow for MS-DOS gaming and looks like I'll probably abandon this AMD Slot-A rig and move over to the Pentium-III for retro-gaming. Thanks for the input and giving me the idea to test the other system.

Edit #1: Also, what is this UMBPCI you speak of. Does this work the same as EMM386 in providing access to the upper memory area, but is compatible with FastVid ?

kithylin wrote:

Okay well, after you mentioned your results, I pulled out my Pentium-III Slot-1 system based on the i440BX chipset (Also 616 Mhz […]
Show full quote

Okay well, after you mentioned your results, I pulled out my Pentium-III Slot-1 system based on the i440BX chipset (Also 616 Mhz just like yours.. 550 Mhz Pentium-III Katami, with a minor overclock to 112 Mhz Bus from 100) since you had such good results with yours.

I don't have any voodoo hardware yet, so I just have to make do with whatever I have here until I can get my paws on some later.

I put the Rage IIc AGP card in it and before doing anything it came up as showing 23,388 KB/sec in SpeedSys (Already an improvement over the AMD System). I then ran and loaded FastVid, and now it shows 69,918 KB/sec in SpeedSys, with FastVid loaded.

I guess AMD is inferior / slow for MS-DOS gaming and looks like I'll probably abandon this AMD Slot-A rig and move over to the Pentium-III for retro-gaming. Thanks for the input and giving me the idea to test the other system.

Edit #1: Also, what is this UMBPCI you speak of. Does this work the same as EMM386 in providing access to the upper memory area, but is compatible with FastVid ?

Glad I could help 😀

UMBPCI provides UMBs, yes, and that's it. It does not provide EMS like EMM386, but there are other tools for that.
On a 440BX system you need to specify the UMB range manually, or you might get problems accessing your floppy drive (something to do with ISA DMA not working in a certain range).

1DEVICE=C:\DOS\BIN\UMBPCI.SYS /I=E000-EFFF
2DEVICE=C:\DOS\BIN\XMGR.SYS /W /N128

That should give you 61K of UMBs, without using any conventional memory.

edit:
UMBPCI can be found here: http://www.uwe-sieber.de/umbpci_e.html
And here is XMGR (which I would recommend, but HIMEM will work as well): http://johnson.tmfc.net/dos/driver.html

another edit: I added a link to my config files in my signature if you need a better example 😀

I tested real fast on the AMD system (I don't have a proper DOS setup, set-up correctly on the Pentium-III machine, but FastVid appears to work perfectly fine with himem.sys and EMM386 loaded, I don't see any issues or problems with it.

That may change when I get stuff set-up and configured on the Pentium-III machine though. I don't have time to go through the setup tonight, I don't think.

Also I think I'll go through and re-test everything on the P3 machine. I put the ATI Rage Pro Turbo AGP card in the P-III real fast and with FastVid it comes up with 86,885 KB/sec. So.. looks like I need to re-test with fastvid on that platform instead. I already know I'm going to abandon the AMD rig now though.

I must point out though that FastVid is not compatible with every game. Yes, there's a downside to everything... Jazz Jackrabbit for example displays graphical glitches with Fastvid 011.
However, most of the problematic games, at least the ones I came across, are older 2D games, which do not benefit much from Fastvid anyway. But still, I wouldn't recommend loading Fastvid in your autoexec.bat by default.

I wouldn't worry about older games on a 440BX machine, surely the main purpose is to play later SVGA DOS games?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I wouldn't worry about older games on a 440BX machine, surely the main purpose is to play later SVGA DOS games?

Yes it is. I have my 66 Mhz 486-Dx2 for playing older games, my 440BX system will be for playing SVGA MS-DOS games fast. Later it will have some sort of voodoo card for it .. later. Some day..... For now, I'll just be content using SVGA / VESA modes as fast as possible.

I'll probably be re-testing all of my video cards later tonight on the Pentium-III system and re-indexing them, both with and without FastVid. I already tested one AGP card and saw it's about +5.7x faster than this ATI Rage IIc PCI card I thought was good previously.

EDIT: Revised list here showing video card performance on both platforms now. Intel's clearly superior.. and I didn't realize this until informed about it (would of saved me a lot of time.. oh well).

With the intel platform I tested each card with and without FastVid. FastVid doesn't do anything / doesn't work on AMD platform so I didn't test with it there. So the results on the AMD platform are just the cards with no software enhancements.

This isn't just for the forums: I mainly spent the time to do this myself for my own knowledge. If I'm going to build a dos machine I wanted to know which video card is the fastest for what I'm intending to do so I can use it instead of a slower one. I just decided to share my results with the public.. maybe someone will find some useful info in this some day.

These are only video cards I've 'harvested' out of donated machines, or computers I saved from the waste bin, or machines I saved from the landfill by finding em tossed to the curb.

http://www.outfoxed.net/misc/vesa-new.txt

Edit #2: Oh and the "Score" is the resulting VESA Memory KB/sec displayed by SpeedSys. And the "REQ SDD" at the bottom is if the cards require Scitech Display Doctor to activate VESA modes or marked "NO" if they have support in the card's BIOS for the required VESA modes without software.

Edit #3: I scored a Voodoo3 3000 AGP card from a local used store cheap, yay!