gerwin wrote:

You may be talking about something different. I meant to say that at full processor speed the SB16 emulation was fine. Then disabling L1 cache on such a fast system gives a 486 like system speed, which is useful in DOS. It is with L1 disabled that the SB16 emulation became garbled.

Which PCI sound card were you talking about? I tried both the SB Live and the Ensoniq PCI using the DOS SB TSR emulation from my testing even on a P4 and it produced the same stuttering effect although it happens every now and then it not the entire time.

SaxxonPike wrote:

I've been running DOS machines for about a year on the P4 platform and will be writing up everything about my experiences. The m […]
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I've been running DOS machines for about a year on the P4 platform and will be writing up everything about my experiences. The most difficult task is finding a sound card that is compatible with the DMA on the motherboard. I have purchased and tested many. The only ones I got fully working were SB 16 and up, or a couple Aztech clones. Even the Audician can't do it on my boards, which is a shame.

I have purchased the "845GL with ISA" board from AliExpress (the 1 slot version) and a couple of the P7LI/C-AL boards from both there and eBay. EBay was cheaper.

I need to talk with the seller of the last one because they were selling the P7LI-AL (not the C variant) and based on some fuzzy pictures it has the SB-LINK connector.

I can't get the boards to go above 533 FSB, and some cannot go above 400. Still, the options for these still go up to close to 3ghz, which is fine for games that scale well with faster CPUs such as Build engine games.

Caches can be disabled on both boards. Both boards also allow disabling PNP for certain resources so you can set your sound card to a specific IRQ.

More to be written later. Please let me know what you still need to figure out. I'll answer as best I can.

I haven't tried the SB-LINK. Didn't that only exist on certain motherboards? Let me know how the SB-LINK compares to the SB TR emulation on PCI sound cards. Was the SB-LINK only found on PCI sound cards or did they also have ISA sound cards with it? Was this a special cable or just a CD-rom audio connector like cable? If you get this to work let me know what motherboards support the SB-LINK in your tests. I'm wondering if someone could create a PCI or PCIe SB-LINK interface for modern motherboards if this somehow did work in the legacy ones.

SB-LINK was a double row, six pin 0.1" header on both the card and the motherboard. The ribbon cable was straight through. It only existed on PCI cards, as the purpose was to provide a sideband for ISA specific resources which PCI didn't handle gracefully.

Likely the best source for the cable these days is through Arduino shops as the cables are often used for programming them.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/371

gdjacobs wrote:

SB-LINK was a double row, six pin 0.1" header on both the card and the motherboard. The ribbon cable was straight through. It on […]
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SB-LINK was a double row, six pin 0.1" header on both the card and the motherboard. The ribbon cable was straight through. It only existed on PCI cards, as the purpose was to provide a sideband for ISA specific resources which PCI didn't handle gracefully.

Likely the best source for the cable these days is through Arduino shops as the cables are often used for programming them.
https://www.adafruit.com/product/371

Interesting this link will be useful for those wanting to test those out since this cable probably wouldn't be included on most used SB PCI cards.

Have you personally tested the performance of SB PCI sounds using the SB-LINK and did it work without using the SB TSR program? If so then someone creating a PCI and PCIe version of the SB-LINK could bring back legacy SB compatibility to modern systems. Saw someone create a Tandy card emulator so I guess anything could be possible.

95DosBox wrote:

Have you personally tested the performance of SB PCI sounds using the SB-LINK and did it work without using the SB TSR program?

Creative only made the AWE64 PCI series cards with a PC/PCI header, and I'm not sure what was required as far as drivers. The header was more commonly used by Yamaha, ESS, and others. I understand PC/PCI and DDMA usually required the card to be initialized with a driver utility, but nothing remained resident. Ensoniq/SB Live, ESS' TDMA, and Yamaha's DSDMA all required a resident driver as they handled soundblaster compatibility via software. Therefore, in the case of ESS, Yamaha, and others, either PC/PCI or DDMA were the most desirable options as they maximized compatibility and had no resident driver taking up valuable RAM.

I haven't tried the SB-LINK. Didn't that only exist on certain motherboards? Let me know how the SB-LINK compares to the SB TR emulation on PCI sound cards. Was the SB-LINK only found on PCI sound cards or did they also have ISA sound cards with it? Was this a special cable or just a CD-rom audio connector like cable? If you get this to work let me know what motherboards support the SB-LINK in your tests. I'm wondering if someone could create a PCI or PCIe SB-LINK interface for modern motherboards if this somehow did work in the legacy ones.

The SB-LINK header passes some signals from the ISA bus that are not present on the PCI bus to whatever card needs it. These signals are not provided by modern south bridges, so one couldn't modify a new board to have these signals. ICH5 is the latest Intel one I know of with the requisite pins. Of course, the 775i65g from Asrock could *theoretically* be modded to have a header, and that supports Core 2.

It's the best option for PCI sound cards by far. Way better than a TSR. Unfortunately, not many boards have it at all. It is a standard 3x2 pin connection with similar properties to an IDE cable.

I wrote this post on PC/PCI (SB-LINK) recently, and will update it with new info as I get it:

https://blog.purplepa.ws/motherboards-with-pc-pci/

gdjacobs wrote:

95DosBox wrote:

Have you personally tested the performance of SB PCI sounds using the SB-LINK and did it work without using the SB TSR program?

Creative only made the AWE64 PCI series cards with a PC/PCI header, and I'm not sure what was required as far as drivers. The header was more commonly used by Yamaha, ESS, and others. I understand PC/PCI and DDMA usually required the card to be initialized with a driver utility, but nothing remained resident. Ensoniq/SB Live, ESS' TDMA, and Yamaha's DSDMA all required a resident driver as they handled soundblaster compatibility via software. Therefore, in the case of ESS, Yamaha, and others, either PC/PCI or DDMA were the most desirable options as they maximized compatibility and had no resident driver taking up valuable RAM.

You might be onto something there. So if these other cards such as ESS and Yamaha could be emulated for DOS SB support then emulating these cards might be a better way with a modern PCIe SB-LINK card. I don't have any of these brands you named so how authentic their SB emulation is to the real McCoy is a mystery. But if you or anyone has tested these with the SB-LINK I'm interested in the make and model of the sound card and motherboard with SB-LINK they tested on. It might be worth researching to find the best one for some kind of customized PCIe SB-LINK card and emulating that sound card for all in one solution.

SaxxonPike wrote:

The SB-LINK header passes some signals from the ISA bus that are not present on the PCI bus to whatever card needs it. These sig […]
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The SB-LINK header passes some signals from the ISA bus that are not present on the PCI bus to whatever card needs it. These signals are not provided by modern south bridges, so one couldn't modify a new board to have these signals. ICH5 is the latest Intel one I know of with the requisite pins. Of course, the 775i65g from Asrock could *theoretically* be modded to have a header, and that supports Core 2.

It's the best option for PCI sound cards by far. Way better than a TSR. Unfortunately, not many boards have it at all. It is a standard 3x2 pin connection with similar properties to an IDE cable.

I wrote this post on PC/PCI (SB-LINK) recently, and will update it with new info as I get it:

https://ilovepa.ws/2017/06/27/motherboards-with-pc-pci/

Nice post. I've bookmarked it for now. I couldn't locate the elusive D model you mentioned but I wonder why this card didn't receive shelf space. I don't recall seeing it at Fry's at the time when the transition of ISA to PCI cards were battling it out. So this is a ugly duckling sound card that probably did not get much reception or was in limited quantities due to poor sales. I only saw the Ensoniq and SB PCI 64 as being dominant along side the AWE64 in stores. This was when Monster 3D was still a big name in 3D gaming.

What are some motherboards with the SB-Link header? Maybe we could come up with a separate thread for people with these motherboards to do more DOS testing. As far as I can recall even the P4 I had didn't have it and I think this SB-LINK might only exist on motherboards that didn't have any ISA slots? What are your thoughts?

95DosBox wrote:

Nice post. I've bookmarked it for now. I couldn't locate the elusive D model you mentioned but I wonder why this card didn't receive shelf space. I don't recall seeing it at Fry's at the time when the transition of ISA to PCI cards were battling it out. So this is a ugly duckling sound card that probably did not get much reception or was in limited quantities due to poor sales. I only saw the Ensoniq and SB PCI 64 as being dominant along side the AWE64 in stores. This was when Monster 3D was still a big name in 3D gaming.

What are some motherboards with the SB-Link header? Maybe we could come up with a separate thread for people with these motherboards to do more DOS testing. As far as I can recall even the P4 I had didn't have it and I think this SB-LINK might only exist on motherboards that didn't have any ISA slots? What are your thoughts?

The Sound Blaster AWE64D is, to my knowledge, an OEM model. I anticipate the market in 1996 wasn't ready to outright drop DOS compatibility like that. Games were still coming out for the platform, after all, and Windows hadn't quite reached the level of compatibility they needed to in order to sway customers.

The post I shared with you about PC/PCI (aka SB-LINK) has a list of cards and motherboards I know that have these headers. Pretty much every board that has this header also has an ISA slot. So it wasn't particularly useful at all if you already had an ISA card. OEMs, however, are going to prefer the cheapest card they can get their hands on.

Getting back to the original post, I've collected all of my Pentium 4 retro-capable adventures here:
https://ilovepa.ws/2017/07/29/pentium-4-dos-gaming/

There are no 'secrets'. It's literally, 'we haven't done a whole lot of research because making things compatible suuuuucks'. But as pre-P4 parts become scarce, I think this will be good information to have.

The way I understood it; Creative labs could not get a SB16 software emulation ready. Put their bets on the AWE64D with SB-Link instead, then urged motherboard makers to support the SB-Link interface. Around that time they sued and then bought Ensoniq. Ensoniq had their AudioPCI with legacy software emulation. Creative modified that software for their SB-Live! and forgot about the AWE64D. The SB-Live! being based on what they bought with their E-MU deal.

I don't remember where i got the details, but it is obvious that the Creative-Labs PCI-soundcards were originally based on bought chipsets and emulation software.

95DosBox wrote:

If this really works then it would be interesting to test on a Z68 with PCI slot and test a SB ISA card in it.

No, a bridge adapter again will only provide DMA on 8xx chipsets, which support it through a bridge. On later ones you will have the same situation as with USB adapters. Same with the SB-Link connector that's been mentioned; it doesn't exist, and would not work, and newer chipsets.

There were some USB to ISA slot adapters which got me curious but the question is will these work in DOS? If so without drivers then the ISA SB should work.

You won't get DMA at all. It's possible to play sounds without DMA, I've heard, but I don't think many games will like it.

This was the only external solution that could work with getting an SB ISA card to work with a laptop. But that seems more affordable to try as I think those might be around $150 range.

A socket 775 with single ISA slot for sound card is still a better option than a socket 478 if it truly does work. It would have SATA and IDE connectors making it more useful and possibly some dual core CPUs.

All 865s should have SATA regardless of socket (though I wouldn't be surprised to find some old boards omitted the connectors). Support for dual-core is a function of the BIOS, so is possible.

For the most part the P4 should be powerful enough to handle every DOS game.

Correct; it's powerful enough to handle everything sensible. That's why I use it. I actually have an 875 (essentially the same as 865) but no ISA slots. The 800 MHz FSB (and matching memory) I think is really necessarily to the speed.

It's that between P4 to Z68 chipset for finding the most powerful 98SE system that works with video and audio gaming.

That's your pet idea but not what I intended this thread to be for; I suppose you can understand that.

Now we have gotten back to it with SaxxonPike's posts; I've read his stuff and he has contributed some new information. I asked if a P4 could be underclocked with a lower FSB than designed, and he did that with 533 -> 400 (which should get his 3.06 to run at 2.3); not ideal but may be necessary since I'm not likely to have or get a CPU without 800 FSB.

I'm aware of sound card compatibility issues and know that the first ISA card tried may not be adequate. Any data on that is useful but it would be nice to list the model of PCI/ISA bridge for each board also. The genuine Creative Labs cards (16+) seem to be universally compatible, but are likely not the cheapest choice.

I haven't heard of this 'red tint' problem and I don't have it; are you sure it's not the monitor or VGA cable rather than the graphics card? Also how did you determine or measure video 'speed' in DOS? I could write a test program that simply blits a screen as fast as possible to come up with a maximum data rate, but I'm not sure how that would compare to a real game.

koverhbarc wrote:

Now we have gotten back to it with SaxxonPike's posts; I've read his stuff and he has contributed some new information. I asked if a P4 could be underclocked with a lower FSB than designed, and he did that with 533 -> 400 (which should get his 3.06 to run at 2.3); not ideal but may be necessary since I'm not likely to have or get a CPU without 800 FSB.

I'm aware of sound card compatibility issues and know that the first ISA card tried may not be adequate. Any data on that is useful but it would be nice to list the model of PCI/ISA bridge for each board also. The genuine Creative Labs cards (16+) seem to be universally compatible, but are likely not the cheapest choice.

I haven't heard of this 'red tint' problem and I don't have it; are you sure it's not the monitor or VGA cable rather than the graphics card? Also how did you determine or measure video 'speed' in DOS? I could write a test program that simply blits a screen as fast as possible to come up with a maximum data rate, but I'm not sure how that would compare to a real game.

- As for the underclock, keep in mind I was able to select the FSB on the motherboard with a jumper. Most other motherboards I've used are auto select.

- I will add the ISA bridge chipset models to the article I wrote.

- The red tint problem only happens on LCDs, I'm told.

- I was testing video speed incompletely; there will be a new testing method that will be more thorough. Tables to come soon..

Is it weird that I never had a need to use that SB-LINK cable/header with any of my PCI cards?

Granted, I'm talking Sound Blaster Live! and Aureal Vortex2 here, more modern cards that don't seem to have the header (or I'm just completely overlooking it) and simply emulate an SB16 or Pro via TSR.

Of course, the whole goal of my retro P4 build was to retain an ISA slot for an actual AWE32 so I don't need to emulate in the first place, and it succeeds at that (TSR for General MIDI support on EMU8000 aside).

It seems an external PCI to ISA bridge will work as desired on a Intel 8xx (ICH5 and older) chipset as long as one knows how to initialize the bridge and configure the respective chipset registers as shown in the videos. Apparently, for the skilled, such cards could function even on the most powerful 865 motherboard ever seen, the Conroe865PE.

The SB-Link connector... well, aside from 440BX motherboards I hardly ever come by anything else that has it. At least the PC-PCI support on up to ICH5 allowed board manufacturers to add fully functional ISA slots on them.

I currently have a running hybrid rig using Axiomtek IMB200. It can support up to Pentium D 960 (3.6GHz, FSB 800) and has two fully functional ISA slots that work out of box. Apparently with a Radeon HD 4650 AGP it can run a very wide range of OSes and software, from DOS to Windows 7, with decent performance.

It does have a few stability issues (AFAIR I had to use a FSB 533 CPU to "bootstrap" the board when I run it for the first time, or after a CMOS reset, though the issue seems to have fixed on its own recently), and also the fact that the board can only support up to what the manual said it could (up to Pentium D 3.6GHz which is the 960). I tried using an Extreme Edition (PD 965EE 3.73GHz/FSB 1066) and it didn't work as intended, even after applying a BSEL mod that should set it to FSB 800 (in both cases, ended up setting to a non-working 33MHz system bus that immediately freezes, implying the board isn't honoring BSEL for some reasons). Other issues would be with other hardware and not related to the motherboard itself, like a potential flaw in the VGA BIOS of the AGP Radeon HD series, or intermittent network connection drops which I believe it could be driver-related. Neither were major in overall.

While I don't really know about it, I found this board very similar to IMB200, DFI G7S620-N. It looked almost identical to IMB200 from images, with similar features such as support for up to Pentium D and ISA slots, but with two GBE network controllers compared to IMB200's one GBE plus one FE network controllers. This board was also mentioned in this forum as someone managed to mod the BIOS to support Core 2 on that board but only 100MHz system bus supported (similar situation on AIMB-865).

Both IMB200 and G7S620-N (if available) can be good options for one intended to build a retro rig around up to Pentium D... though it remains challenging to support any CPU past that on any board with a 865 chipset...

Huh, an LGA775 board that takes Pentium Ds while packing two ISA slots? Had I known about that thing, my 98SE/XP build would've turned out differently since I had a Pentium D 820 pulled from a dead computer.

Oh well, a Pentium 4 EE 3.2 GHz is nothing to complain about for that purpose, being adequate for early/mid-2000s games and often far too fast for 1990s games without a quick THROTTLE.EXE induced underclock.

koverhbarc wrote:

I had done as much looking on the web as I could before making this thread - obviously I didn't include all the information I had, but I figured anyone that could respond usefully would already know some of it. If I want to acquire the best gaming machine I may as well go all the way and get ISA, so I don't have to deal with the limitations that all PCI cards are going to have. And the reason they've become expensive is that there is demand for them ...

I knew I'd get some responses from AMD diehards that just want to bash P4, but it's really the only satisfactory choice here. I asked some specific questions in my post for a reason: I've already figured out which features I want and which I could compromise on, and I just want some options to look at and information to make the decision which will likely have to be final. NamelessPlayer mentioned a PCI/ISA bridge, but as stated I could find none of those things available - if I did I'd just throw it on one of the cheap new ASRock boards, and there we go.

I have been using DOS for 30 years in all, 13 years on a P4 (though without sound support - well, I didn't get any sound card til 1994, so less than 10 years with it!). Besides sound the only things stopping me from still using DOS as my primary non-Internet OS is the lack of FAT32 and LFN support, which are now indispensible - FAT32 is easy to get, but no _legal_ DOS has real (integrated) LFN support.

I know your pain - my PIII450 was the last one to have ISA slots and it was with a heavy heart that I had to let go of my AWE64 to switch to the SB Live! which had very poor DOS support and MIDI sounded awful - not to mention the drivers used too much conventional memory meaning it was very hard to get certain games to run. Right now, that card is sitting in a P166.

To be honest, only a handful of games really needs such high speeds, though. Sure, some like Quake benefit from it but for every game that benefits, there's a dozen that actually run too fast to be playable.

koverhbarc wrote:

Correct; it's powerful enough to handle everything sensible. That's why I use it. I actually have an 875 (essentially the same a […]
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Correct; it's powerful enough to handle everything sensible. That's why I use it. I actually have an 875 (essentially the same as 865) but no ISA slots. The 800 MHz FSB (and matching memory) I think is really necessarily to the speed.

Now we have gotten back to it with SaxxonPike's posts; I've read his stuff and he has contributed some new information. I asked if a P4 could be underclocked with a lower FSB than designed, and he did that with 533 -> 400 (which should get his 3.06 to run at 2.3); not ideal but may be necessary since I'm not likely to have or get a CPU without 800 FSB.

I'm aware of sound card compatibility issues and know that the first ISA card tried may not be adequate. Any data on that is useful but it would be nice to list the model of PCI/ISA bridge for each board also. The genuine Creative Labs cards (16+) seem to be universally compatible, but are likely not the cheapest choice.

I haven't heard of this 'red tint' problem and I don't have it; are you sure it's not the monitor or VGA cable rather than the graphics card? Also how did you determine or measure video 'speed' in DOS? I could write a test program that simply blits a screen as fast as possible to come up with a maximum data rate, but I'm not sure how that would compare to a real game.

The original P4 CPU I had was a 3.06GHz. The Intel Retail heatsink and fans were loud back in the day. It was the first to break the 3GHZ barrier. However over time somehow either the fan failed and the CPU overheated. This caused all sorts of glitches and crashes. Later I switched to a 2.8GHz cheaper CPU. Once I upgraded to a Quadcore I didn't look back. However needing to try out some old DOS Games and trying to make the P4 completely fanless I was able to underclock the CPU to 1.2GHz. Unfortunately I bought another CPU Heatsink and it is not enough to cool it down for more than 30 minutes. I had a better Heatsink that cooled down the 3.06GHz and will have to locate it and try this with the fan removed. I think it should be able to cool down a 1.2GHz P4 and make the entire system fanless.

How did you achieve that underclocking? Was it by using a 2400/800 on a 400 FSB? Maximum power consumption is only linear in frequency (to first order) so I'm not surprised it would still overheat (~30W). I would be interested in getting it fanless, too, because of the noise, but I don't think it practical.

LSS10999 wrote:

It seems an external PCI to ISA bridge will work as desired on a Intel 8xx (ICH5 and older) chipset as long as one knows how to initialize the bridge and configure the respective chipset registers as shown in the videos. Apparently, for the skilled, such cards could function even on the most powerful 865 motherboard ever seen, the Conroe865PE.

It sure will. Now does anyone have a bridge to sell me? 😀

koverhbarc wrote:

Another feature I'd consider essential for DOS gaming is support for a real PC speaker, not just an on-board beeper, but that's never mentioned in descriptions and I'd assume industrial boards are least likely to have it.

I don't really get what a real PC speaker is back then, but it has always been possible to use a magnetic-driven speaker in place of the piezoelectric buzzers that are commonly used.

A while ago I replaced my systems' speakers with some 4-ohm, 3-watt speakers. They expose the same connections as buzzers (with + and - pads), just you'll have to solder the connector wires yourself as most just sell the speakers themselves.

In regards of system beeps they don't really make a difference, but should sound better in places that actually utilizes them to some deeper extent (though I haven't really tested). Also, compared to buzzers they can be relatively larger heavier and will need to find appropriate places to place and support them inside the case, and depending on the voltage the board passes to the speaker, the power and impedance levels of the speaker itself, and the facing direction of the speaker inside the case, the volume may vary.

As for Blood 1600x1200 - it seems to me that a regular P4 wouldn't help at all. I've tried this game on P4/ISA (a 845 based Robo-8712VLA board with a 2.8/533 Northwood CPU and 2x1GB of DDR running at 333MHz), Tualatin/VIA (1.4@1.5, CL2 SDRAM) and SocketA/KT133A and I could make it work on all three, though often with issues. I was going for working GUS sound and Blood+GUS proved very-very picky about the mobo. Even though most other software seemed to work well with, for example, an Abit KT7A it gave garbled music and no SFX with Blood. Strangely a KT7A-RAID works just fine even though it's not too different. Perhaps even BIOS versions play a role, the one I have in the -RAID board recognizes Palomino CPUs simply as "Athlon"s while the vanilla KT7A board reported "Athlon XP" so it seems a more recent (and worse for my intents) BIOS.

As for the P4, if 865 systems work the same I would say P4 won't help with Blood at all because a BX is simply faster, or more reliably fast with Blood. I could ramp it up to 1024x768 with a 933 CuMi and though it wasn't perfect it was playable. At 800x600 it was brilliant. And here comes the catch: the P4 has an erratic performance compared to a P3 (or an Athlon). It usually runs well (not really better than a Tualatin though, which didn't bring much improvement compared to a BX+CuMi anyway) but at certain places its performance plummets well under 20fps while it has just hovered around 60 a few seconds earlier. Those generously applied transparent textures are such places. If there's a window or a fence, there goes performance.

I know it'll sound like general P4 bashing but it's true that Netburst is a picky architecture that can't really stomach legacy software that hasn't been tailored for its needs. Many things can give you massive penalties due to its long pipeline and the uOP cache that tries to replace most of P3's multiple decoders.

Quake is fine with P4, though. Unfortunately I can't really measure it against the others (though it would be nice to see a clock-to-clock comparison between P3/Athlon/P4) because my P4 mobo lacks an AGP slot so my only options are the chipset Intel GFX and PCI cards. Of course it may slow down Blood too but it absolutely can't explain its erratic behavior which I attribute to the Netburst architecture.

I know it's possible to run Blood (or other Build games) 1600x1200 on a P4, because I am right now! Except for no sound under DOS, it's perfect and never drops below 20 frames. I have right now a 3.0/800 Northwood and dual-channel DDR400. If you can only barely get 1024x768 on your fastest P3, well it's clear which is better - by the way, if you get tearing/flickering at high resolutions, use Ken's NOLFB and it will improve. Whether you need it presumably depends on your graphics hardware, etc. Have you tried 1600x1200 on anything?

Don't blame the chipset if you can't get a GUS working - the GUS has issues left and right and I'm really not sure why anyone would choose it for gaming. The sound code in Build games is not exactly rock-solid, either, especially DN3D. Nonetheless if it works, it works and would certainly be an improvement over what I can get under NTVDM.

I think the bad reputation of Netburst is basically nonsense, and attributable to the large contingent of geeks that want to believe anything bad about Intel or good about AMD - Intel wasn't that incompetent, and while benchmarks relative to Athlons varied, I can't believe there's any real-world test on which my P4 would lose to a Tualatin. In fact, Northwood blew the pants off AMD so bad they they had to bring out their 64-bit gimmick we're all still suffering from.

LSS10999 wrote:

I don't really get what a real PC speaker is back then, but it has always been possible to use a magnetic-driven speaker in place of the piezoelectric buzzers that are commonly used.

A while ago I replaced my systems' speakers with some 4-ohm, 3-watt speakers. They expose the same connections as buzzers (with + and - pads), just you'll have to solder the connector wires yourself as most just sell the speakers themselves.

I'd been wondering about doing this, but I don't want any possibility of ruining the board; I assume desoldering the buzzer is required first.

Since you've done it, does there need to be a DC path between + and -, or does there not? And I'm a bit surprised you can drive a 4 ohm speaker, I assumed it would be 600. I have many 8 ohm 'hobbyist' speakers, and one at least is quite loud enough - maybe too loud, since PC speaker games had no volume control ability nor does the speaker itself - although I suppose you could add one in the path if you're going to be changing it anyway!

Now J

koverhbarc wrote:

I know it's possible to run Blood (or other Build games) 1600x1200 on a P4, because I am right now! Except for no sound under DOS, it's perfect and never drops below 20 frames. I have right now a 3.0/800 Northwood and dual-channel DDR400. If you can only barely get 1024x768 on your fastest P3, well it's clear which is better - by the way, if you get tearing/flickering at high resolutions, use Ken's NOLFB and it will improve. Whether you need it presumably depends on your graphics hardware, etc. Have you tried 1600x1200 on anything?

Now you made me very curious. Your experience didn't overlap mine so I spent this morning checking things out with my P4 setups (okay, parts). First I built something you did, a 865-based dual channel ddr400 config with a 3000/800 Northwood. And I found that Blood ran really well in 1600x1200 so the problems must have been on my end.

Then I put my ISA P4 setup together and it puzzled me again. First I gave it a 3066/133 CPU not to leave it with a clock rate handicap. Then I tried Blood with its built-in VGA to avoid the PCI bottleneck. Or so I thought. It didn't let me go higher than 1280x1024 but confirmed my earlier observation about its erratic behavior which I experienced with some PCI VGA IIRC. Frame rate dropped below 10 close to a glass window again and it wasn't even that great without it.

My next bet was a better VGA so I took my trusty PCI Asus V3000 - plenty of vmodes including 1600x1200, all non-interlaced, just what I neded - and tried it. To my surprise it worked much better, frame rate hovering around 30, without the low dips at transparent objects! So it was a video related issue, after all. Which I dont understand btw because it does nothing but receives data from the CPU and stores it in its own memory - nothing that would change the least by the content of the frame. I file it away for later.

Then came the sound. The GUS slowed it cown considerably, making it less playable, frame rate fell to the low twenties. I think it hogs PCI bandwidth from the video card and I should get an AGP/ISA one to check it. Quake 320x200 benchmark fell from 350 to 266fps which is a good indicator of the amount of missing bus time.

SB16 does better, Blood 1600x1200 is in the high twenties and quake 320x200 timedemo gives me 330.

Why would I use GUS for gaming? Because I like Blood's music the best on this card. And because I primarily build scene demo rigs, not gaming ones. This is why I love video cards with a wide variety of vmodes and of course GUS.

One more thing you mentioned and I want to try: Tualatin+nolfb. Not because it flickers (it doesn't) but because its LFB seems unaffected by fastvid so it isn't even faster than the BX CuMi I mentioned. A000 segment seems faster though, as reflected in my quake 320x200 vs 640x480 results.

(Edit... A PCI Radeon was even worse than the 845 chipset gfx. Riva128 ftw so far... And I'm puzzled again about the cause. If it was the built in VGA then it could be some caching issue. But a dedicated VGA can be just as bad or even worse. Does it read back data from the frame buffer? Because the VGA does really no rendering just frame data output...)