Naaa.... 286's are not useless. I played so many good games on my parents 286 in the late 1980's.
Monkey Island, 4D Sports driving, Stuntcar Racer, Indyana Jones and the last crusade, Duke Nukem 2 and many more.
And all with 640k of Ram, no soundcard and EGA GFX.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

From what I have read, what the 386 cannot do but which can do the 286 are very specific things, but which are of interest to a close circle of enthusiasts.

Pretty much that. Personally, I chose not to mess with 286 or something lower. Since you can emulate 286 experience on 386DX just by switching off the cache and replacing the oscillator. Heck, you can emulate "XTish" experience to some degree.

You can do that on much more recent hardware (upto PIII era) easly. And in software you can emulate pretty much everything upto 1997 on a modern PC with software with very good accuracy. One thing you can't emulate is the sensation of working on an actual, period correct, 30 years old hardware.

yeah kinda... isn't the whole point of what we're doing trying to avoid having to emulate things? 🤣

sure, if you can only have so many machines it makes a lot of sense to step down the speed to get more out of it, but that doesn't make anything slower useless automatically.

And... if i find a 286 to 386 upgrade??? i’m obtaining a 32 bit capable, protected mode and all the “cherries”?

Sounds like another "if you want to do it, do it" thread. If there are games that need something faster than 8086 but slower than 386 maybe someone should just list them...and then anyone can decide if those games are worth building/buying a 286 system for themselves.

Personally if a game runs too fast on a slow-386 (which is what I get with a K6+ and setmul), I just use DosBOX.

HanJammer wrote:

You can do that on much more recent hardware (upto PIII era) easly. And in software you can emulate pretty much everything upto 1997 on a modern PC with software with very good accuracy. One thing you can't emulate is the sensation of working on an actual, period correct, 30 years old hardware.

It's also more difficult to find solutions that emulate hardware when you move away from the mainstream. A PAS is pretty much the best sound option for mid generation Sierra titles, and I'm not aware of any solutions that emulate it.

gdjacobs wrote:

HanJammer wrote:

You can do that on much more recent hardware (upto PIII era) easly. And in software you can emulate pretty much everything upto 1997 on a modern PC with software with very good accuracy. One thing you can't emulate is the sensation of working on an actual, period correct, 30 years old hardware.

It's also more difficult to find solutions that emulate hardware when you move away from the mainstream. A PAS is pretty much the best sound option for mid generation Sierra titles, and I'm not aware of any solutions that emulate it.

someone should patch those sierra bois to run on a CT1330A SB Pro...

maxtherabbit wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

HanJammer wrote:

You can do that on much more recent hardware (upto PIII era) easly. And in software you can emulate pretty much everything upto 1997 on a modern PC with software with very good accuracy. One thing you can't emulate is the sensation of working on an actual, period correct, 30 years old hardware.

It's also more difficult to find solutions that emulate hardware when you move away from the mainstream. A PAS is pretty much the best sound option for mid generation Sierra titles, and I'm not aware of any solutions that emulate it.

someone should patch those sierra bois to run on a CT1330A SB Pro...

As an "old" PAS16 user I'm surprised that still no emulation projects for the PAS line exist up to this very day.
Back in the day, PAS was such a troublefree sound standard by comparison.
In fact, it made many users forget about Sound Blaster. If needed, sure ,there *was* an optional emulation facility for that -
for what looked like a totally out-dated standard (Sound Blaster; PAS had a SB 1.5/2 compatible Thunderboard chipset). 😀

yeah I had a PAS16 in the 90s as well. Great card. I was thinking more of the dual OPL2 on the original PAS though, which doesn't work on a PAS16

maxtherabbit wrote:

yeah I had a PAS16 in the 90s as well. Great card. I was thinking more of the dual OPL2 on the original PAS though, which doesn't work on a PAS16

Indeed, Sierra supported stereo SFX on PAS which is a neat perk (although I haven't examined how much impact it has).

What is PAS?

AlessandroB wrote:

What is PAS?

Pro Audio Spectrum. It was arguably the better sound card that lost the battle for PC audio standard against the Sound Blaster.

I sincerely hope someone does an Open Source, SnarkBarker-like clone of PAS one day so we all can build one. There is no such project at the moment, is there?

appiah4 wrote:

AlessandroB wrote:

What is PAS?

Pro Audio Spectrum. It was arguably the better sound card that lost the battle for PC audio standard against the Sound Blaster.

I sincerely hope someone does an Open Source, SnarkBarker-like clone of PAS one day so we all can build one. There is no such project at the moment, is there?

Snark Barker / SB1.0 uses off the shelf (still easly available) parts.

In case of PAS there are propertiary mediavision chips that will not be easly available. NuXT uses Faraday chipset (which was semi-popular in the XT times) and obtaining it is a bit problematic these days, so even if somebody will make PAS16 PCBs - obtaining parts for it will be a problem... Not to mention soldering all these SMD ICs, caps and resistors would be a big pain (Snark Barker is THT only, PAS16 relies on SMD) making it's audience very limited.

PS: Guy at 3dfx.pl currently works on clone Voodoo 4 4500 card, so I'm not saying it won't be possible, just saying it may be much easier to find original card than set of chips.

HanJammer wrote:

Snark Barker / SB1.0 uses off the shelf (still easly available) parts. […]
Show full quote

appiah4 wrote:

AlessandroB wrote:

What is PAS?

Pro Audio Spectrum. It was arguably the better sound card that lost the battle for PC audio standard against the Sound Blaster.

I sincerely hope someone does an Open Source, SnarkBarker-like clone of PAS one day so we all can build one. There is no such project at the moment, is there?

Snark Barker / SB1.0 uses off the shelf (still easly available) parts.

In case of PAS there are propertiary mediavision chips that will not be easly available. NuXT uses Faraday chipset (which was semi-popular in the XT times) and obtaining it is a bit problematic these days, so even if somebody will make PAS16 PCBs - obtaining parts for it will be a problem... Not to mention soldering all these SMD ICs, caps and resistors would be a big pain (Snark Barker is THT only, PAS16 relies on SMD) making it's audience very limited.

PS: Guy at 3dfx.pl currently works on clone Voodoo 4 4500 card, so I'm not saying it won't be possible, just saying it may be much easier to find original card than set of chips.

Yes, but I'm sure a low cost FPGA could be used for handling the proprietary IC functions?

HanJammer wrote:

Snark Barker / SB1.0 uses off the shelf (still easly available) parts.

In case of PAS there are propertiary mediavision chips that will not be easly available.

Since when is/was the DSP of the Sounblaster an off-the-shelf part? It's proprietary just like the MediaVision chips. Reverse-engineering is the key. Snark Barker reimplements the DSP using an Atmel 89S51.

Snark Barker only exists because there's a dump available of some SB clone's MCU content, the MCU itself is off the shelf (though ones on SBs have mask ROM rather that being programmed but that doesn't impact functionality) on all the SB flavors that aren't fully integrated like Vibra16 and AWE32 cards.

Which is no argument against reverse-engineering a PAS. You can even just look at sound drivers only to see how they use the card and reimplement the chip using an FPGA. That's how many clone-chips are done these days, incl. whole systems like the C64 or Amiga.

derSammler wrote:

Since when is/was the DSP of the Sounblaster an off-the-shelf part?

It's an Intel 8051. It's only proprietary because the firmware is burned into it (mask ROM). People have extracted the firmware from the SB DSPs.
But you can get 8051s that can be flashed with ROM, and that's what the Atmel 89S51 is.
So that makes it off-the-shelf.

Scali wrote:

It's only proprietary because the firmware is burned into it

That's the point, isn't it? It's completely irrelevant *why* it's proprietary. And again, it's just no argument why cloning a PAS isn't possible.

derSammler wrote:

That's the point, isn't it? It's completely irrelevant *why* it's proprietary.

No, I think it is.
Because 8051s are off-the-shelf parts, only the firmware is proprietary, and once you have extracted the firmware (which people have), you can flash it into other off-the-shelf 8051s (or make a clean-room reimplementation).
The PAS is different, as it has its own ASICs. They are not standard chips with firmware in them. They are custom chips.
So you'd have to reverse-engineer the whole ASICs and reimplement them in whatever technology is suitable (perhaps FPGA). That's an entirely different ballgame. Software vs hardware.

Not to say that cloning a PAS isn't possible, just saying it's not comparable to cloning an SB. It's more complicated.