Re: Curiosity: VLB on a non-x86 motherboard?

Posted on 2017-09-10, 20:30

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

As I said, it was all about costs. You couldn't sell PCs in this market and say: throw out everything you have, use our ultra fast proprietary bus. Thanks, but I meant something different here (no money on the mind). PCI and EISA were advanced designs that were at least imagined to be used on …

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Re: Curiosity: VLB on a non-x86 motherboard?

Posted on 2017-09-10, 17:03

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Am I the only one who is impressed that a RISC board has plain ISA ? Both PCI and EISA were semiprofessional and well standardized, but ISA was historically an x86/PC-AT creation. IRQ lines, ROMS with 8086 code, hardcoded port addresses, etc.

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Re: Compaq Presario CDS 510 won't enter BIOS

Posted on 2017-09-09, 15:43

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Compact Flash cards (especially the smaller ones with 128-2GB capacity) are not very common anymore, and they tend to cost more compared to SD cards. You're right. Gratefully, there are SD2CF card adapters. They are essentially the same as SD-IDE adapters. What I liked about (old) CF cards is their …

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Re: CVX-2 : covox adapter

Posted on 2017-09-09, 08:57

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Great news! Thank you very much! 😁

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Re: SD/CF to ide CHS setup

Posted on 2017-09-09, 08:30

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Please do elaborate on the "OSes like Win95 or OS/2 try to read the partition/drive geometry directly." [..] Uh, I'm not good at explaining things; I'm afraid. :sweatdrop: But I'll try: Windows 95 uses its own IDE protected-mode disk driver, esdi_506.pdr. It is a cousin of the FastDisk component in …

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Re: SD/CF to ide CHS setup

Posted on 2017-09-08, 14:34

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hello jaZz_KCS! That's understandable, laptops are a bit finicky at times when it comes to fixed disks. I tried myself to convince my Compaq Contura to use CF cards, but the auto-detection didn't like any of them. In that case, an overlay software is sure an alternative that's worth a try! :) …

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Re: Recent games made for MS-DOS

Posted on 2017-09-08, 09:06

by

by Jo22

in Milliways

in Milliways

Fun little list of latest DOS games by year. http://www.doshaven.eu/ Thanks for that link, I'm trying Ascii Sector right now! :) Btw, why are there no little more sophisticated games ? ASCII is neat, but all that 320x200 stuff is depressing. Does anyone know of recent DOS games (adventures, puzzles …

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Re: The more rare Pentium ii PCs

Posted on 2017-09-08, 08:50

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

0101000000110101 wrote: Jesus, USB 3.0 has been out for THAT long? You can call me Jos(h)ua, but yes.

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Re: SD/CF to ide CHS setup

Posted on 2017-09-08, 05:00

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Cool, thanks, I'm just downloading WhatIDE, as well. ^^ By the way, this thread reminds me of a slightly older thread (IDE disk-on-module + 386)..

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Re: will you run windows95 on a highend 386?

Posted on 2017-09-07, 11:32

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

@kixs On paper, yes.. But to be honest, in its early years, the Pentium was not affordable for many users. Back in the day I've seen quite a few low-end systems that were forcibly upgraded to Win95 RTM. 386SX, 4MB RAM, 80MB HDD.. The Win95 hype made it possible. 386 will run Win95, but not much more …

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Re: will you run windows95 on a highend 386?

Posted on 2017-09-07, 10:02

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

jheronimus wrote: I probably wouldn't run Windows games on anything pre-Pentium MMX to begin with -> A P166 MMX was my first Windows XP rig. 386/486 is more period-correct for Win95, I believe. 😉

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Re: List of gaems that benefit from SMARTDRV?

Posted on 2017-09-07, 07:06

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Windows/WfW 3.11 automatically disables SMARTDRV if you turn on "32-bit File Access", since that particular vxd handles disk caching in Windows..... and much faster since its a protected mode driver. Windows 3.10 lacks this option. True. With both FastDisk+32-bit File Access enabled, WfW almost …

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Re: Good quality floppy disks?

Posted on 2017-09-06, 21:52

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Aside from convenience, people have stated they use a floppy emulator because floppy disks are simply not reliable. I remember this being the case but further reading suggests it is just a matter of QA - that during the twilight era of floppy drives companies just churned out garbage. I think the …

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Re: WIP: Videoton VT160 286/EGA rig

Posted on 2017-09-06, 21:01

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

a 286 cpu does get quite hot 😎 Sure, it's a hot one, after all! 😁 (Later 286 generations did survive without heatsinks, though.)

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Re: DirectDraw=software rendering only? Direct3D=hardware rendering only?

Posted on 2017-09-06, 20:51

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

No, because 2D cards from the DOS era had no such functionality. They were simple framebuffers. Right, except for TIGA and 8514/A graphics cards maybe. They were programmable. But to be fair, these were quite exotic and costed a fortune.. ;) There was attempt with VBE/AF but ... it became …

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Re: DirectDraw=software rendering only? Direct3D=hardware rendering only?

Posted on 2017-09-06, 08:52

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I viewed DirectDraw as basically the way win95 (and many later versions of Windows) handled functions matching how you described VESA. Well, DDraw shares at least one similarity to VESA VBE - DirectDraw also allows access to the "framebuffer". And overlays on the primary surface, too . But in …

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Re: DirectDraw=software rendering only? Direct3D=hardware rendering only?

Posted on 2017-09-05, 18:08

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

It's related to the Windows version / driver model. All versions (1 to 9) of DirectX do support hardware-accelerated DirectDraw, if the graphics hardware supports it. Generally speaking, this includes all Windows-Accelerators since the early 90s. Such as 2D graphics cards like, for example, Trio 32/ …

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PC-MOS/386 released under GPL

Posted on 2017-09-05, 07:36

by

by Jo22

in Milliways

in Milliways

Just noticed. https://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/ … leased-gpl-v3-0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-MOS/386 PC/MOS 386 was a neat multitasking/multi-user OS! Any PC/MOS users at vogons ? Edit: Picture added.

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Re: Mid-1990s SETUP.EXE files

Posted on 2017-09-04, 04:37

by

by Jo22

in Windows

in Windows

pseudo3d wrote: So for instance, the main EXE is "SIMTOWER.EX_" and compressed Try expand.exe from Windows 3.11. Windows NT also has expand, but uses a different compression.

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Re: List of gaems that benefit from SMARTDRV?

Posted on 2017-09-03, 16:46

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

SmartDrive can be counter-productive on slow systems. Especially if you've got a fast HDD or a flash medium already. I think SmartDrive makes sense for single-speed CD-ROM drives, though. 150KB/s are barely enough for CD-ROM games with FMVs.

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