Re: Impact of video cards on DOS games

Posted on 2020-03-19, 13:16

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I've got the feeling that VGA compatibility since a while is nolonger important beyond getting through the Windows installation. But even for that, and Linux, VBE 3 is all it needs. Makes me wonder why and howlong they still bother to include a full CRTC in silicon. However, If BIOS goes away in …

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Re: dos 7.10 on an xt?

Posted on 2020-03-19, 13:03

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yeah, 7.x needs 386 or higher to function. I can sort of confirm that. Firt saw this issue in the 90s with one my father's boot disks. He had a 386DX40 with Win95 RTM, while I had a 286 with DOS 6.2. When I booted his DOS 7.0 diskette, a message appeared, saying, that it required a 386 or better …

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Re: CuteMouse not working properly

Posted on 2020-03-18, 01:18

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I think the same. CuteMouse is surely nice to have, but some older programs may prefer, say, MS-Mouse 6.24BZ (Win 2.x) or MS-Mouse 9.0. The latter is a memory hog but solved latency issues and jerky mouse movement. It also added features, like graphical mouse cursors and such. In the past, I used to …

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Re: 86box to substitute for my broken 486

Posted on 2020-03-16, 16:01

by

by Jo22

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

Good luck! :) I seriously hope that you can find one. The early Pentium systems were high-end at the time and of higher production quality maybe. Personally, I think its getting harder and harder to find working components from that era. We're likely reaching the point at which all vintage hardware …

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Re: Is there a way to load DOS games into high memory?

Posted on 2020-03-15, 23:52

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Is there a way to load DOS games into high memory? Yes, if you mean the range of 640KB to 1MB (aka adapter space, adapter's segment, Upper Memory Area/UMA). Problem is, the term for that region varried. Both in time and space (country). Originally, in English countries, that space was called "high …

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Re: Backing up all the goodies from the 90's ?

Posted on 2020-03-14, 15:59

by

by Jo22

in Milliways

in Milliways

Hi, I don't know for sure. Maybe archive.org will still be there. Maybe CDs and pen drives and future media will survive in time capsules. Or as bookware inside of books that are stored in libraries. Maybe stuff gets archived on micro films, too. You know, about every nation saves documents somehow …

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Re: Is this build possible?

Posted on 2020-03-13, 19:58

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

For switching between the graphics cards, is there a way to avoid having to go around the back of the machine and "manually" switch the VGA cable between the two cards? Hello, yes, there are KVM switches that can be used for this. Originally, these devices were meant to operate two PCs with a …

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Re: 2D graphics benchmark

Posted on 2020-03-13, 17:10

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

As "idspispopd" pointed out for "DOS related" drawing of primitives... it's bus & memory speed that counts - "filling 2D polygons" was done by the cpu(excluding specialized dos-executables which took advantage of some "obscure" hardware). That's right, DOS games usually don't use GDI-like functions …

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Re: I don't understand all the hate for the Nvidia FX series

Posted on 2020-03-12, 15:21

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Geforce FX ? Haha. :rofl: Sorry, this brings back so many memories! Personally, I mostly think of the Geforce 5200 then. Its driver were quite buggy, but it had 2D engine still and could do Aero Glass In Vista/7. (Edit: It was also very sought after for OS X 10.4/5 on Power Macs, because it could do …

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Re: Connecting 2 soundcards to one speaker

Posted on 2020-03-12, 09:19

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

^ Do that. Don't connect multiple outputs directly to each other. For line-level outs, it's... probably... okay... most of the time... since the outputs normally have a 100R resistor or such in series with the output, to protect it from shorts, but if you have card A driving a full positive signal …

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Re: Amstrad 1512 - CGA(ish?) to VGA

Posted on 2020-03-10, 23:39

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Maybe there is a way to detect these inverted signals and automatically switch to this special mode - but this was my first dabbling with an FPGA and someone else's code, so I am unable to tell right now if it's really possible :) Hello, good evening! :) If inverting is all it needs, an 4000 (4009 …

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Re: Amiga 1080 Monitor Cables

Posted on 2020-03-10, 23:15

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Obvously ground-pin 1 is the shields for the RGB, and pin 2 is the shield for the SYNC and... um, actually why was there two for that one? Hello! It's just a wild guess, but maybe they used two different ground to keep things more separated. One ground for RGB signals, the other one for the Sync (+ …

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Re: What is it with Win95/98 killing my CF cards?

Posted on 2020-03-10, 02:24

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Oh, and there's something that's harmful to any flash medium.. time stamps. Windows NT and *nix loves to use them. Not sure about Win9x, though. Definitely something to check out..

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Re: Biostar 8433uud V3 mouse not working on com ports

Posted on 2020-03-10, 02:15

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I think the same. Also, you can check your serial/parallel ports easily by using, say, CheckIt! v3 and CheckIt! v4. With and without a loop adapter. Without anything connected, it will write to/read from the chips internally and display the results on screen.

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Re: Mediavision Thunderboard repair advice

Posted on 2020-03-10, 02:10

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Congrats! I'm glad you made it! 😁

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Re: What is it with Win95/98 killing my CF cards?

Posted on 2020-03-10, 02:04

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Good CF cards can only handle a max of 1,000,000 cycles but typically start to fail around 500k. As derSammler and douglar mentioned, you need to limit how often windows is writing to them or else the typical 3 year life span (for a camera as example) will be cut super short. I don't disagree, but …

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Re: Bootdisk MS-DOS 6.22

Posted on 2020-03-10, 01:52

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yes have a need for 6.22 and yes c:\ is Fat32 8gb but I did create a partition(d:) for a 2gb Fat16 drive with the files I need to test but 6.22 didnt pick that up. Hm. Perhaps the problem is there because D: is an Extended Partition. And Extended Partition is not independant, it is attached/glued …

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Re: What is it with Win95/98 killing my CF cards?

Posted on 2020-03-09, 21:35

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Im at a total loss, and down a few $$ in CF cards that just refuse to cooperate anymore in retro machines. Any ideas? Hi, any chance the CF cards were no-name models ? If so, they could be fake, ie. they have less capacity than they claim to have. And when you exceed the real capacity, they …

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Re: SVGA minimum RAM?

Posted on 2020-03-09, 11:07

by

by Jo22

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

However all of these modes were proprietary implemented and in 1989 the VESA consortium standardized an API to use Super VGA modes in a generic way. With one special exception (speaking under correction :sweatdrop: ). The 800x600 mode in 16c (the SVGA mode, per se) uses the default VGA palette, so …

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Re: Misinformation about PC specs in the 90's (e.g. "they were terrible! The CPUs ran at 2 MHz or something!")

Posted on 2020-03-09, 10:18

by

by Jo22

in Milliways

in Milliways

[..] for properly representing how things went back then instead of the idealized fantasy too often mentioned on these forums... Well, there's the problem. There's no universal "truth" really. Anything is relative and everyone has his point of view. Also, science constantly changes and facts get …

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