Re: Modern graphics on a 486

Posted on 2014-10-21, 11:48

by

by idspispopd

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

you do realize that a lot of the games you listed will not profit from either the card you have or any 3D accelerator? As noted prevously, I simply made a list of popular, mostly 3D games, between 1994-1998. I know little about computer gaming, but assumed some games would be software-only, some …

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Re: Hard drive size

Posted on 2014-10-21, 09:17

by

by idspispopd

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

We had the first hard disk in a 286, the XT before it didn't have one, only two floppy drives. (It had a factory option for a HD, but that would have been more expensive.) I think when we upgraded to a 386 we also got a larger hard disk, but I'm not sure of that. It's possible that the first HD was …

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Re: Has anyone tried running an AGP Voodoo 3 alongside another video card?

Posted on 2014-10-20, 09:40

by

by idspispopd

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Voodoo3 performance is nearly the same with AGP or PCI while Geforce cards will have higher performance with AGP. You are right that a Voodoo3 PCI might be difficult to get but in theory that would be the better combination. Depending on your games the PCI Geforce may still be fast enough, I suppose …

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Re: Modern graphics on a 486

Posted on 2014-10-20, 09:27

by

by idspispopd

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

DoomGL is a newer source port so I wouldn't count that as a 1994 game. NT4 doesn't support hardware accelerated Direct3D. I've read you can run software rendered Direct3D, and of course you can get hardware accelerated OpenGL if your card has drivers for that. Matrox MSI only works for first …

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Re: WDC WD90C31 strange benchmark results

Posted on 2014-10-20, 08:53

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by idspispopd

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

My guess is that Tseng cards were more common than Paradise/WD. I remember seeing several DOS programs having options for Tseng video modes, but I don't remember the same about Paradise, and I did use a 90C31 card at the time (WfW 3.11) so I think I should remember. According to http://www.vgamuseum …

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Re: Modern DOS games

Posted on 2014-10-16, 11:21

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by idspispopd

in Milliways

in Milliways

Love the pseudo-textmode and the color palette.

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Re: What would you do with a Dell Dimension 4600?

Posted on 2014-10-16, 08:49

by

by idspispopd

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Anyone know if the GeForce 6 series has major issues with early Direct X games in Windows 98? I will try to get a Geforce4 TI4600 card for the other computer when I get it built. From Vogons Wiki : "GeForce 256 through GeForce FX are fine cards for old games for a number of reasons. Their DOS game …

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Re: Rendition Verite Thread

Posted on 2014-10-15, 14:16

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by idspispopd

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

AFAIK Rage Pro is much faster than Rage IIc and therefore to be preferred. (Have both, didn't try them yet. Don't know if Rage IIc is needed for some games.) Re AGP Rendition rare: I just recently posted about one such card on the Ebay thread, but that one's gone now. Unfortunately there are no …

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Re: Rendition Verite Thread

Posted on 2014-10-14, 22:12

by

by idspispopd

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

You could get yourself an AGP Rendition card and then switch the primary card in the BIOS setup ("Boot from AGP/PCI"), that's what I would do. (I know that they may be hard to find.) According to the drivers: My experience with the Beta 5 drivers is that they were somewhat unstable, even on the …

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Re: What updates do you consider critical for Windows 98 SE?

Posted on 2014-10-14, 21:47

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by idspispopd

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Perhaps you were thinking of the startup error Windows 95 had with K6-2 CPUs running at 350MHz or more?

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Re: need help getting scsi CD drive running in a 286

Posted on 2014-10-10, 14:24

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by idspispopd

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I thought ISA bus mastering is somewhat non-standard anyway? I think there was a thread here about that... Another possibility would be that the drivers uses some opcodes that are not available on 286. (Similar to newer 3d cards not working on 486 systems because of Pentium instructions used in the …

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Re: Building my DOS Box from Scratch Revisited

Posted on 2014-10-10, 09:22

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by idspispopd

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

GF2MX is older than GF4MX which enables you to use older drivers which *may* have better compatibility with older games. GF2MX is more than fast enough for 800x600, it can do more than 50 fps in Q3 at 1024x768x32. I wouldn't worry too much about Jaton, even if the image quality is worse than with …

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Re: Phil's Ultimate VGA Benchmark Database Project

Posted on 2014-10-09, 11:51

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by idspispopd

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Made a long video card benchmark run with my new build-in-progress, AMD 5x86 -133 on Acer AP43 (SIS 496/497). Matrox Athena showed the expected poor DOS performance; however I expected better from V2200. S3 videocards show impressive scores yet I was confused when 64V+ turned out to be slower than …

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Re: Building my DOS Box from Scratch Revisited

Posted on 2014-10-09, 09:26

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by idspispopd

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Sounds good. Some things I'd consider: The K6-2+ at 400MHz=6*66MHz is slower than at 4*100MHz, and it can probably be overclocked a bit with FSB100. Not relevant for most of the games you want to play, but for Thief 2 a PII 400 is recommended. Obviously not possible with an Intel chipset. Since you …

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Re: What retro computing gadget that doesn't exist would you like to have?

Posted on 2014-10-08, 08:12

by

by idspispopd

in Milliways

in Milliways

Wait, it just came into my mind. How about a.... ...a speed-adjustable Windows version that is fully, perfectly, and completely backward compatible with virtually any DOS and Windows 9x applications? Why do we build vintage system, if not for the lack of backward compatibility with older apps, …

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Re: A way to repurpose older PCs for educational uses

Posted on 2014-10-06, 11:40

by

by idspispopd

in Milliways

in Milliways

I also think the machines should run XP fine. There is certainly something amiss, my guess would be that XP disable DMA for the hard disk (experienced that one several times). A missing driver for the X1300 would also explain a lot. Hard to say without inspecting the machines personally.

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Re: Extremely slow VIA Nehemiah CPU

Posted on 2014-10-06, 09:41

by

by idspispopd

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

smeezekitty wrote: I wonder if there is a way to make a patch to fake EncodePointer atleast. Pretty stupid for a program to fail to run for something as useless as "EncodePointer" I though that's what KernelEx is for. According to the release notes EncodePointer was added four years ago.

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Re: Question about quake

Posted on 2014-10-01, 14:55

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by idspispopd

in DOS

in DOS

Does http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/quake/cover-art help?

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Re: Choosing an VGA adapter dilema

Posted on 2014-10-01, 13:35

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by idspispopd

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Stojke wrote: I have an Matrox Ultima 4MB and its dos performance is worse than using a sound card as an VGA adapter 😀 Matrox Ultima is indeed slow in DOS, later cards starting from Mystique and Millennium are really fast.

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Re: Efficiency clock per clock

Posted on 2014-10-01, 13:31

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by idspispopd

in Milliways

in Milliways

Even an Atom can be faster than Coppermine at the same clock if your benchmark/app benefits from higher memory bandwidth or SSE2 (or even SSE3). And that's the classic Atom, not the out-of-order Bay-Trail or similar models. Of course it depends on how you consider multithreaded performance. Tom's …

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