Re: The myth of the vertical retrace interrupt on EGA/VGA
Posted on 2018-04-11, 23:00
This is really cool ~
Re: Anybody ever thought of doing his own SIMMs?
Posted on 2018-04-10, 17:52
There will probably need to be some explicit overrides done in a later step by some smal util that programs the chipset with faster values than BIOS allows if that's even possible.
Re: Anybody ever thought of doing his own SIMMs?
Posted on 2018-04-10, 16:50
Any muxes are going to eat away 10ns of headroom at least, if possible they should be avoided. Some PAL/GAL will most probably not do except at slower speeds (386 level), you absolutely need some CPLD to cope with the speed. DDR is never going to work, you'd have to implement a full blown memory …
Re: Is it safe to attach an old IDE HDD from 1991 to modern pc?
Posted on 2018-04-10, 08:49
I haven't had luck with pre LBA drives on USB and IDE<>SATA converters, but if the mobo has IDE it works.
Re: Asus VL/I-486SV2GX4 + Audician 32 = static sound
Posted on 2018-04-08, 11:14
I run my YMF71x card at 13MHz in my 386 and at 11MHz in my Pentium 1 and C2D machine, I didn't think higher speed would cause problems. I know at 16MHz the card no longer works. Good to hear you got it working. You can test WSS in the SETUPSA utility, pressing W to test WSS (S for SB and F for OPL3 …
Re: Asus VL/I-486SV2GX4 + Audician 32 = static sound
Posted on 2018-04-08, 01:20
There are several driver versions also. The stuff on the CD that the card came with is old and also has terrible softsynth in it. You'll want to use the driver from Yamaha's site (mirror here : http://www.tmeeco.eu/TKAYBSC/Win95.EXE ). Also in windows the SB side is not used, WSS side is instead and …
Re: Asus VL/I-486SV2GX4 + Audician 32 = static sound
Posted on 2018-04-06, 13:34
Does changing DMA channel help ? I have had trouble on some machines with DMA0, while 1 and 3 worked fine.
Re: ThinkPad X200s as a retrogaming laptop?
Posted on 2018-04-06, 08:31
If the screen is anything like my X200tablet then it wouldn't really be very good for gaming, while the IPS panel has nice color and decent contrast it has terrible response time. I'm not sure how well it would work for DOS stuff, the CPU would be at 100% all the time and I have doubts the cooling …
Re: Anybody ever thought of doing his own SIMMs?
Posted on 2018-04-06, 08:26
For PLDless operation there aren't any choices that I have found but once you decide on the PLD route you can do anything as long as oversided modules work. There's also the 5V intolerance on all the faster DRAMs (i.e under 50ns). Digikey has some insanely expensive 5V 2Mbyte 4bit 70ns EDO chips, …
Re: Anybody ever thought of doing his own SIMMs?
Posted on 2018-04-05, 20:36
As I wrote there are plenty of PS/2 SIMMs availiable to harvest the chips from. Of coarse only FPM modules can be used for 30pin conversion. Ok, taking a closer look, 4MB is easily doable, but for 16MB there are no options in that route that I see and those are what I'm most interested in. After …
Re: Anybody ever thought of doing his own SIMMs?
Posted on 2018-04-05, 15:07
I have had thoughts of making some 16MByte 30pin SIMMs and 64MB+ 72pin ones but finding suitable DRAMs has turned out to be difficult. Making a PCB and puttings chips on them doesn't take much effort, I could probably make 1 module every 2..3 minutes or so.
Re: Multiple gameports on Win98?
Posted on 2018-04-03, 05:38
You have no choices there with the gamepad. As far as the sound stuttering etc. goes, it has to do with how analog input works on gameport. A write to gameport restarts 4 timers, the timers expire according to joystick position and the CPU must poll the timers until they expire and count cycles …
Re: Why not recreate the "perfect" 8-bit Sound Blaster clone as a project?
Posted on 2018-03-25, 17:06
Sinc based resampling will produce the cleanest output with minimal distortions, depending on how many taps you'll be using, the more the merrier but at increasingly diminishing advantages. Some sort of tradeoff will eventually be reached as you aren't going to be able to do infinite amount of …
Re: Why not recreate the "perfect" 8-bit Sound Blaster clone as a project?
Posted on 2018-03-25, 15:06
You probably wouldn't need a memory chip, the FPGAs that can hold a NIOS or other softcore will have plenty of RAM in them to implement program and work memory, and since you're pretty much emulating a 8052 or some other similar thing there wasn't much of RAM or ROM to begin with. Simple linear …
Re: Why not recreate the "perfect" 8-bit Sound Blaster clone as a project?
Posted on 2018-03-24, 21:10
It's exactly why I have mentioned "a few 74xx ICs"... Also looked into CPLD + MCU scenario - still possible to get 5V tolerant CPLDs... "Soft" MCU inside of FPGA seems most logical, but requires a lot of LEs AND memory - up to a need of external memory chips. Smaller FPGA + MCU seems more logical, …
Re: Why not recreate the "perfect" 8-bit Sound Blaster clone as a project?
Posted on 2018-03-24, 20:15
Yup, I am !
Re: Why not recreate the "perfect" 8-bit Sound Blaster clone as a project?
Posted on 2018-03-24, 18:47
MCU or CPU is not gonna be enough on its own, you will need at least a CPLD to handle all the address decode and DMA tasks. You'll burn tremendous amount of CPU time by trying to do bus cycles and other things, turning your multihundred MHz thing into single digits stuff barely able to do other …
Re: About removing and replacing barrel batteries..
Posted on 2018-03-23, 11:54
The charging circuit on the mobos (if present at all) is only single current limit resistor, nothing beyond that. There's no overcharge protection or any other things. I haven't had any problems using rechargeable lithium batteries even after multitude of years. For rarely used stuff I install AA …
Re: Sound Blaster 16 Bugs and Deficiencies Summary
Posted on 2018-03-20, 17:59
On my AWE64 the hanging note originates from FM side. Every once in a while during a game a constant tone gets triggered and it stays there until restart or when you mute FM. It seems doing full init on OPL3 doesn't silence it and doing note offs on all notes on all channels on MPU-401 doesn't have …
Re: Question on No-bezel Floppy Drives
Posted on 2018-03-20, 12:05
Some drives have the flap mounted on the metal bits rather than the bezel, finding such a drive is possibly the least painful way to do it. It wouldn't be very hard to get the flap mounted on the metal bits or perhaps even on the chassis of the computer itself. I have found the eject button to be …
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