and one more post to have the OPL2 address 😀

xjas wrote:

Wait, now it's 387. Aww crap.

Having a 387 is actually pretty ossom 😀

Scali wrote:

Having a 387 is actually pretty ossom 😀

Yeah it enables the awesome mandelbrot zoomer in crystal dream 2.

elianda wrote:

Yeah it enables the awesome mandelbrot zoomer in crystal dream 2.

Are you sure? I thought that ran on my 386SX as well.
FPUs are far too slow for demo effects on anything below a Pentium.

FPU is used for fast memcpy routines only. Later this was not recommended anymore as it slows down task switching on multi tasking OSes due to the required FPU state save.

elianda wrote:

FPU is used for fast memcpy routines only. Later this was not recommended anymore as it slows down task switching on multi tasking OSes due to the required FPU state save.

But I don't think CD2 uses it, because I'm pretty sure I ran it on my 386SX without FPU, and it worked fine.
Besides, afaik only on Pentium is the fast memcpy with FPU actually faster than rep movsd or other optimized ALU routines.

One the most awesome things you can do on a 386 with a 387 is run VistaPro as that will only run with an FPU present.

I thought I had CD2 on my 486SX/25 back in the day. It was one of the first 'big' demos I discovered on a local BBS and blew me away at the time. Maybe it could use an FPU but didn't require it?

Just looked up what VistaPro was, neat stuff. Might have to give that a try. I actually have a really nice 386 system - it's an ex-scientific workstation with an i386DX/25, 8MB 30-pin SIMMs, Cyrix FastMath 387/33 (@25), and some interesting data acquisition hardware. One of my prouder disposal rescues.

^^ Cards removed from above pic

Might be a good candidate for some oldschool POV-ray & Rend386 action too. I was gonna run my ISA EPROM burner on it but haven't gotten around to that yet.

leileilol wrote:

and one more post to have the OPL2 address 😀

Blew by 388 but that should be 0x388 (904 dec) anyway. 😜