kithylin wrote:gdjacobs wrote:I wanted to cover 386 era games Dynamix games such as Deathtrack and Stellar 7, Sierra games, and Ultima 7. Perhaps some Wing Commander and Strike Commander as well. I'll see how fluid DN3D and Quake run with this, but I'm already contemplating an AM2 based DOS/Win98/WinXP build for more demanding titles. Still not sure what to use for a video card on that one, though. What PCIe card would be best for DOS compatibility?
This build could potentially be upgraded with a SS7 board as well, although I predict some overlap in the trend lines occurring with clock speeds too divergent. Really, an upper clock of 166mhz would be ideal, but my ASUS doesn't reliably do 83mhz FSB and 75mhz requires two jumpers to be flipped.
I guess I still don't understand the point of all of this. Personally I've found instead of "trying to slow down fast systems" to just build something period-appropriate instead. Like build an actual 386 or 286 system for the older games and a really fast dos system based on AthlonXP or Pentium4 for the newer ones like quake/doom/duke3d/descent/blood, etc. It's usually much, much more compatible all around with zero issues.
No matter how you slice it, you still need two systems to cover the whole gamut. I settled on:
-486/66: slows down to 286 speeds with cache and turbo manipulation, so covers games from ~1985-1993.
-K6-2/550: slows down to slow 486, covers games from 1991-1997.
The overlap is nice since the K6-2 has the better General MIDI output for those few early 90s games that use GM.
The Test Registers are really useful for covering a wide range of games with one system. Like gdjacobs says, space.
kithylin wrote:Disabling caches and slowing down chips only gets you so far.
Doesn't mean it's not useful. I think the only game I've encountered with the problems you state is WC1. It seems the faster the system (and thus more it's slowed down), the less consistent the framerate in WC1. I.e, when there's not enemies it's perfect, but with lots of enemies it's too slow, or vice versa. That's where, for me, it's better to play on the slowed down 486.