Re: 3D Accelerator Comparison Thread

Posted on 2010-11-18, 07:23

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I'm almost certain my Creative Vanta board was TNT2 based. Wasn't "Vanta" the name given to PCI versions of the TNT2 M64? I think the card i owned was called a "Creative 3D Blaster TNT2 Vanta"... Or Maybe "Creative Graphics Blaster TNT2 Vanta"... I can't quite remember but i'm sure it was 32mb and …

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Re: 486DX2 build

Posted on 2010-11-17, 21:33

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

That's interesting... I might have to check that out, thanks 😁

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Re: 486DX2 build

Posted on 2010-11-17, 20:10

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

imho what it's missing though is a Gravis Ultrasound card and some Roland MT32 synth capability Someone else said this to me as well but I can't find any of these locally and on ebay the cheapest GUS is $100, most are like $170 or more. Can't find any MT32's for less than $200. A bit too expensive …

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Re: Giant socket A/462 heatsink

Posted on 2010-11-17, 20:07

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I used to have one of those Zalman peacock-style heatsinks (the centre one)on an Athlon XP 1800+ Palomino. It was pretty quiet and kept things reasonably cool although there were definitely better performing heatsinks out there.

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Re: 486DX2 build

Posted on 2010-11-17, 12:30

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Awesome. The Sony CDU33A is a 2x speed drive, I think. I've got a 2x speed drive, but it's an IDE drive! Made by NEC, model CDR-260. Those old proprietary cables must be quite rare now. I reckon the only way you can realistically get one now is to find a discarded 386 or older 486 PC, and remove …

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Re: 486DX2 build

Posted on 2010-11-17, 12:00

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

You're probably right, I have a whole pile of SB16/Vibra16 cards here with various interfaces on them and I probably got confused as to which one I actually used. The one in the photo is the one in the PC though. I actually have a Sony CDU33A which I believe is a proprietary drive, so I'm planning …

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Re: 486DX2 build

Posted on 2010-11-17, 08:14

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Yes they are both connected with the same cable... I haven't tried with a separate cable for each. I will try it out on the weekend when I get some time to fiddle with it. Have you checked your jumper settings? The card I'm using lets you disable the secondary IDE port via jumpers. As for the price …

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486DX2 build

Posted on 2010-11-17, 05:40

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

After a bit of fiddling around and scrounging for parts I've finally got a working dos box :) I decided to go for a 486DX2. The 486 is interesting for a couple of reasons- the 486DX was the first Intel CPU to include a maths coprocessor (aka Floating Point Unit) inside the CPU. The 486SX did not …

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Re: The Other 3D Chips (screens incl)

Posted on 2010-11-12, 05:23

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by DonutKing

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Some cool info in this thread. Kind of a bit newer than most of what is being discussed but does anybody remember the Xabre series of cards? I owned the Xabre 400 for a while... they were terrible, they could barely outperform a Geforce 2, and had terrible texture filtering so games were a soupy …

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Re: Old 486 CMOS Battery Low

Posted on 2010-11-10, 04:16

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by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yep that's a standard motherboard battery. I'd still recommend an external battery though as they are much easier to replace.

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Re: Old 486 CMOS Battery Low

Posted on 2010-11-10, 03:10

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

If you are handy with a soldering iron you can desolder the battery from the motherboard. I recently had a 486 board with the same type of battery and had to remove it: http://i301.photobucket.com/albums/nn63/dk486/dosbox/IMG_0160-640.jpg http://i301.photobucket.com/albums/nn63/dk486/dosbox/IMG_0166 …

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Re: Dos 6 conventional memory tricks

Posted on 2010-11-08, 19:46

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Well I just bumped into my first compatibility problem. I was using UIDEJR.SYS for my CDROM driver. Return to Zork would freeze up whenever it tried to play digital sound after the intro movie. You could still move the mouse and I found that if you ejected and reinserted the CD it would pick up …

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Re: Dos 6 conventional memory tricks

Posted on 2010-11-06, 00:18

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I haven't run into any problems using DOSMAX yet, and I've been trying out quite a few different games on this box. If I don't use DOSMAX I still have 616kb of free conventional memory, which is still plenty. So DOSMAX is only saving me ~10kb. I might actually leave it off for now since the benefit …

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Re: Gigabyte GA-5AX SS7 overclock to 105 FSB using P55C?

Posted on 2010-11-04, 21:39

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

What a shame, as during my FSB scaling tests without L1 cache I found that the 6x86 chips are the fastest Socket 7 cpus you can get... Yes, the K6/6x86 always did well in synthetic benchmarks... I suspect that 3Dbench, being rather primitive low resolution 3d graphics isn't FPU intensive, as …

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Re: Gigabyte GA-5AX SS7 overclock to 105 FSB using P55C?

Posted on 2010-11-04, 20:19

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I believe Quake was one of these games that used Intel instructions to peform better. Other cpus like the K6 and Cyrix would struggle with these type of applications. Not just Quake but other 3d games as well. Its due to the lower floating point performance of the AMD/Cyrix CPUs- they were focused …

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Re: Gigabyte GA-5AX SS7 overclock to 105 FSB using P55C?

Posted on 2010-11-04, 07:52

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yes those CPU's should be fine. Here is an interesting site detailing the different K6-2 models. http://www.cpu-central.com/Articles.asp?article_id=96&decor_int=23 The AFR denotes socket 7, 2.2 volts, 70 degrees C max temp. There are some 66MHz bus versions which you probably don't want, they are …

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Re: Gigabyte GA-5AX SS7 overclock to 105 FSB using P55C?

Posted on 2010-11-04, 01:07

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'd be interested to see a Quake timedemo for a K6-2 to compare to the above results. The K6-2 had a weak FPU for its time especially if you weren't using 3DNow which quake doesn't AFAIK. FPU performance is quite important for 3d games like Quake. I wouldn't be surprised if the Pentium MMX is equal …

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Re: Found some hardware today

Posted on 2010-11-03, 21:44

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by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Good haul :) Yes you are right that I/O card predates IDE, its for MFM stlye drives, also known as ST-506 type that required two ribbon cables. That M525 motherboard looks interesting- are there cache chips on the motherboard and are they real? A lot of PC-Chips boards had fake cache. I was reading …

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Re: Dos 6 conventional memory tricks

Posted on 2010-11-03, 20:32

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Yes UMBPCI won't do me much good on an EISA 486 board. I'm tempted to try QEMM and see how it compares to these tweaks.... I have a 386DX board here so maybe when I've finished with this 486 I'll try and get that going with DOS5 and QEMM 😀

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Re: compact flash ide adapters

Posted on 2010-11-03, 00:06

by

by DonutKing

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Has anyone tried using a CF-> IDE adapter with Dynamic Drive Overlay to give >504MB support on old motherboards that don't support drives larger than this?

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