Can an ISA sound card be incompatible with a certain CPU?

Posted on 2022-08-30, 15:32

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by ShovelKnight

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I have encountered a very strange issue. Basically, I spent a stupid amount of time trying to get my Aztech Waverider 32+ working correctly in my main DOS PC, and I was only able to get it working by replacing the CPU. The PC configuration is as follows: - Motherboard: GA-6BXC (i440BX) - CPU: VIA C3 …

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Re: Retro confessions. What are yours?

Posted on 2020-12-13, 23:34

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by ShovelKnight

in Milliways

in Milliways

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2020-12-13, 12:16: And people complaining about modern software should be forced to do their work on a Windows 9x machine. (BWAHAHA.) I do some of my actual paid work on a Windows 98 machine (but mostly in DOS mode) 😉

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Re: What display do you use for gaming ?

Posted on 2020-12-02, 13:58

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by ShovelKnight

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Iiyama B1780SD (5:4, 17-inch) which has a 75Hz panel and supports DOS 70Hz video modes without any stuttering. I bought a B-stock unit with 1 stuck subpixel (returned by the previous customer) on eBay for 25 euro.

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Re: Handheld PC's: What happened to them?

Posted on 2020-11-27, 11:00

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by ShovelKnight

in Milliways

in Milliways

I loved my Palm Vx and (later) Tungsten T3 but I mostly used them to read books and play simple games.

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Re: Apple's T2: Vulnerable and Unfixable

Posted on 2020-11-26, 23:26

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by ShovelKnight

in Milliways

in Milliways

Soldered RAM and storage is getting common for the cheap laptops, crap chiclet keyboards are around, and TPMs are rolled out to prosumer machines like Lenovo Yogas or HP Envy/Spectres as well, and who knows what issues they might have. Ironically, it's the most expensive and desirable laptops that …

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Re: What is the loudest hard drive you have???

Posted on 2020-11-25, 19:24

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by ShovelKnight

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Seagate Ironwolf HDDs in my NAS/home server since they're the only spinning rust media I have.

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Re: MS-6905 slotket V2.3 works fine, V2 only at 100MHz

Posted on 2020-11-25, 10:18

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by ShovelKnight

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I don't have any Intel Socket 370 CPUs, but my MS-6905 V2 works perfectly with VIA C3 CPUs at 133 MHz FSB.

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Re: Apple's T2: Vulnerable and Unfixable

Posted on 2020-11-25, 10:05

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by ShovelKnight

in Milliways

in Milliways

*sigh* does it always have to be this passive aggressiveness when it comes to apple users? YOU are imagining things. I REALLY want to know the responses of Apple fans/user for this security issue. As I would for fans/users of any other hardware platform. It concerns me about as much as Intel …

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Re: Windows 98 and DOS Question

Posted on 2020-11-24, 16:44

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by ShovelKnight

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I don't remember any huge issues with running DOS programs in Windows 98's DOS 7.1. I think there were a couple of games where built-in copy protection couldn't calculate the checksum of a FAT32 partition or something like that, but this was not a difficult problem to solve (nudge nudge wink wink). …

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Re: english, the planetary language

Posted on 2020-11-24, 12:28

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by ShovelKnight

in Milliways

in Milliways

Errius wrote on 2020-11-24, 11:58: How did British engineers working on European projects do things? (e.g. Eurotunnel, Concorde, Sepcat Jaguar, Panavia Tornado) Did they use Metric or Imperial? Metric, obviously.

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Re: english, the planetary language

Posted on 2020-11-24, 10:19

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by ShovelKnight

in Milliways

in Milliways

I don't mind the imperial measuring system on its own: after all, people used it for hundreds of years and somehow managed to build houses, bridges etc. Imperial screws, on the other hand, are a satanic invention. This is especially true for British products since Britain has (or had?) about a dozen …

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Re: english, the planetary language

Posted on 2020-11-23, 13:11

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by ShovelKnight

in Milliways

in Milliways

We're quite lucky that it's English that is the modern lingua franca. It's rather simple as far as languages go (its slightly tricky phonetics notwithstanding). If it was a language with non-rudimentary conjugation, declension etc., our life would be much more difficult. The truth is that English …

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Re: Do I really need a floppy drive?

Posted on 2020-11-22, 21:54

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by ShovelKnight

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Of course, you don't need a real floppy drive to solve that, a Gotek works just as well, if not better, Yes. I keep several empty blank images on my Gotek (with FlashFloppy firmware) for this very reason. I have a real floppy drive in this machine as well, mostly because I like the floppy boot seek …

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Re: english, the planetary language

Posted on 2020-11-22, 20:31

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by ShovelKnight

in Milliways

in Milliways

We're quite lucky that it's English that is the modern lingua franca. It's rather simple as far as languages go (its slightly tricky phonetics notwithstanding). If it was a language with non-rudimentary conjugation, declension etc., our life would be much more difficult.

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Re: Retro confessions. What are yours?

Posted on 2020-11-20, 22:16

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by ShovelKnight

in Milliways

in Milliways

I have no nostalgia for the Atari ST. It was always an inferior platform with terrible sound, with mediocre games and mediocre ports of Amiga games. Maybe it was worse if you only wanted to play games, but it was a better machine for getting work done. Amiga with its crappy PAL/NTSC video modes and …

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Re: Apple is getting off Intel CPU’s ?

Posted on 2020-11-11, 07:45

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by ShovelKnight

in Milliways

in Milliways

AnandTech published their analysis of Apple's CPU microarchitecture and performance: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive TL;DR . A14 (the 5W iPhone chip) has CPU cores that are faster than any x86 core except Ryzen 5950X. M1, which obviously has more headroom, should …

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Re: Apple is getting off Intel CPU’s ?

Posted on 2020-11-11, 00:19

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by ShovelKnight

in Milliways

in Milliways

No, I actually think that's inexcusable in 2020. However, they only transitioned low-end models today — I'm pretty sure they will release a more powerful SoC (M1X? M2?) which will be used in their more powerful laptops and will come with more RAM.

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Re: Retro confessions. What are yours?

Posted on 2020-11-10, 10:55

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by ShovelKnight

in Milliways

in Milliways

Some people are probably going to hate me, but I think Amiga's failure was well deserved. Commodore wanted to make the system cheaper to use for a home user and made some technical decisions that really hurt it in the long run (like sticking to NTSC and PAL video modes). The OS was impressive for …

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Re: Socket 370 VIA C3 Retro DOS PC

Posted on 2020-11-10, 09:35

by

by ShovelKnight

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Found some of my scribbles... Enabling FastVid on VIA Epia 800 boosts the frame rate in Quake DOS from 16.5 to 26.6 fps in my case, and enabling memory interleave in BIOS gives additional 2.3 fps boost for 28.9 fps total (timedemo demo1). After overclocking to 1 GHz, the frame rate further improves …

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Re: Socket 370 VIA C3 Retro DOS PC

Posted on 2020-11-10, 09:22

by

by ShovelKnight

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

That's interesting, I can get close to 30 fps in Quake 1 DOS with the same integrated GPU on my VIA Epia 800 (C3 Ezra) overclocked to 1 GHz. Don't remember the exact numbers, but they were about 27-28 fps (with fastvid). If I can find my notes, I will give you exact numbers.

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