Re: Few questions about 8088MPH

Posted on 2016-12-06, 14:47

by

by Scali

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

Thank you reenigne and superfury. That makes a lot more sense. One more thing I am a bit confused on: So when I am in say 80x25 text mode what do I set the resolution of my emulated framebuffer (the one that SDL displays on the screen)? I had it to HORIZONTAL_DISPLAYED * VERTICAL_DISPLAYED (taking …

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Re: Do you prefer "Objectively fast" over "Properly dated"?

Posted on 2016-12-06, 14:36

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

cause the Oak vga was too slow. Yea exactly, it was not just about the CPU and the amount of memory. 'Bargain basement' clones didn't quite cut it, because they'd save money by using cheap Oak/Realtek/Trident VGA etc. You needed a pretty decent VGA card for proper gaming, and those were expensive ( …

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Re: Do you prefer "Objectively fast" over "Properly dated"?

Posted on 2016-12-06, 12:19

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'd very much disagree that most PC gamers had the most kitted out machine possible - they don't now, and they didn't then. Well, firstly, I said they 'had to have' it, not that they actually did. But I know from personal experience that I had to upgrade to a 386SX-16 when Wolfenstein 3D came out, …

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Re: Do you prefer "Objectively fast" over "Properly dated"?

Posted on 2016-12-06, 09:06

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm the complete opposite regarding properly dated systems, especially early on in the lifetime of the IBM PC and compatibles. Gaming existed before the original IBM PC in the form of Arcades, and they were FAR more advanced to what those early PCs could do. And that was the benchmark for many that …

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Re: Giving windows Vista a second chance

Posted on 2016-12-05, 17:24

by

by Scali

in Milliways

in Milliways

Vista was never that bad. Just a big ban wagon effect from cheap oem systems and bad drivers. That is my view on it as well. I had no choice but to have a Vista system at an early stage, for DirectX 10 development. So I ran Vista (the x64 Ultimate version) pretty much from day 1. I also used a …

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Re: Do you prefer "Objectively fast" over "Properly dated"?

Posted on 2016-12-05, 11:43

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

For me, the "properly dated" systems are the most interesting. They allow you to experience games and other software exactly like people did back in the day. Like a time machine. I think it would actually be interesting if people documented this somehow, eg making playthrough videos captured from …

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Re: old video formats for pentium 1

Posted on 2016-12-04, 15:05

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

He's trying to help you by actually pointing out how things really work. That you get good results if you pair a good quality high-end fairly modern video card with an older processor is logical, * since video cards were improved to better handle video when it turned out that the run-of-the-mill …

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Re: PCI vs ISA vs VLB video cards - DOS game compatibility

Posted on 2016-12-04, 11:44

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I remember reading that CPUs with a 40MHz FSB have problems with VLB mobos. What can you tell me? 'It depends'. The early 486 was only available in 25 and 33 MHz versions. So early motherboards would have chipsets designed only up to 33 MHz. Likewise, early VLB cards would only have been designed/ …

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Re: PCI vs ISA vs VLB video cards - DOS game compatibility

Posted on 2016-12-04, 11:36

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I know it is recommended to use ISA sound cards, but would there be potential problems if using a PCI video card over an ISA or VLB based card? What about using other kinds of PCI based cards in the same system? In general it doesn't matter for compatibility. The BIOS abstracts away any differences …

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Re: old video formats for pentium 1

Posted on 2016-12-03, 18:08

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

emosun wrote: ok message received . please stop. thanks I asked you a question: Why do you accuse me of 'not helping'? If you're going to throw accusations around, the polite thing to do is to at least explain what this is all about.

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Re: old video formats for pentium 1

Posted on 2016-12-03, 15:59

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Phantasy is indeed an awesome thing. ;) Let's see what someone did accomplish on Windows 2.03 : BadApple PV ASCII Under Windows 2.03 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ4vn7ejAmI OK, using ASCII art might perhaps not be the most original idea here, but the result is quite nice. I'm really surprised …

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Re: old video formats for pentium 1

Posted on 2016-12-03, 14:57

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

emosun wrote: ok , you aren't helping please stop. thanks Why am I 'not helping'? Because I'm not telling you what you want to hear? I'm telling you how MPEG decoding and video acceleration work. I can't help it if facts conflict with your personal ideas.

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Re: old video formats for pentium 1

Posted on 2016-12-03, 14:00

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

If both gpu's perform the exact same , it means the gpu has no effect on the quality of the video. Yes, but they likely don't. It's just that you can't get better than full framerate/full quality. One GPU may still need 90% of its capacity, while the other does it at 20%. You can't tell from just …

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Re: old video formats for pentium 1

Posted on 2016-12-03, 10:32

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The boards integrated gpu is a 2mb s3 virge which has the same exact results as the 8500. I actually just now took the 8500 out to make sure the virge still performed the same and it does. A Virge is not a Trio64. Like the Radeon 8500, it has quite advanced features for accelerating MPEG video. My …

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Re: old video formats for pentium 1

Posted on 2016-12-02, 14:46

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

It's using a radeon 8500, and the player is wmp 7. Radeon 8500 is not exactly Pentium 1-era is it? :) By the time the Radeon 8500 arrived, a lot of MPEG decoding steps were already done on the video card. In fact, excellent video playback was one of the selling points of ATi cards at the time, with …

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Re: old video formats for pentium 1

Posted on 2016-12-02, 11:39

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well it seems that most video cards that have at least 4 or more mb can playback pretty much anything and the real bottleneck is the pentium 1 itself. Being that the cpu has to do all the work loading and unloading the system ram with information quickly. I disagree. In the Pentum 1-age there were …

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Re: OEM vs Generic/custom builds

Posted on 2016-12-02, 09:03

by

by Scali

in Milliways

in Milliways

As I work in a large enviroment what your describing isn't just from customs, I've seen my fair share of Dells/HP's/Lenovos with the same kind of problems, matter of fact we have an Optiplex 9020 that no matter what couldn't be repaired, we tried mobo, psu, ram, cpu, hard drive, opticial nothing …

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Re: OEM vs Generic/custom builds

Posted on 2016-12-01, 15:16

by

by Scali

in Milliways

in Milliways

And what kind of issues are yall getting with custom builds, mine all just work. On some occasions I had motherboards that just wouldn't work properly. Eg, for my Athlon Thunderbird 1400, I initially had an Abit KT7 Turbo board. But it just wouldn't run stable, no matter what I tried. I returned it …

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Re: OEM vs Generic/custom builds

Posted on 2016-12-01, 15:10

by

by Scali

in Milliways

in Milliways

OEM PC's seem to bring out a hatred in people I never really understood. I suppose you could say there are two types of OEM PCs': good ones and bad ones. I've had a few good ones, for example, I had a Commodore 386SX-16. It had a custom motherboard and a slimline case: http://www.richardlagendijk. …

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Re: Cycle-accurate Floppy Disk emulation(82077AA)?

Posted on 2016-11-29, 13:44

by

by Scali

in PC Emulation

in PC Emulation

Some half-related info: - A cute trick done eg on Atari ST was to use custom disk routines where you'd read one side first, then the other. As a result, the 'clicks' for moving the head from one track to the next sounded twice as fast as normal. - On Amiga, there was no way to read a single sector. …

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