Re: Pentium processor and the 1993/95 ...

Posted on 2015-09-10, 18:54

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I don't understand why K6-2 were release and lasted so long without an internal cache. Considering that the Pentium 2 and Celeron clearly teached how much cache was important, why K6-3 could not be released as next K6 after the 266Mhz version? My guess is that it had to do with two things: 1) AMD …

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Re: Some PCI/ISA/VLB video cards info

Posted on 2015-09-10, 18:23

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I read that the RealMagic is pin-compatible with S3 Trio64+, and it is probably just a relabeled S3 chip. No idea if that's true.

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Re: Pentium processor and the 1993/95 ...

Posted on 2015-09-10, 18:18

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

the Pentium Pro may be more significant technically Does that matter? The Pentium II was basically a Pentium Pro with MMX added, with some small tweaks (mainly to fix the performance issues in 16-bit code). And the PIII was a PII with SSE added and some more small tweaks. They are all known as the …

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Re: Pentium processor and the 1993/95 ...

Posted on 2015-09-10, 17:58

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

A 386 DX doing only memory copy operations will be twice as fast as a 286. As long as the data you are copying are LONG aligned (to the 4 byte boundary), and you are copying data in 32-bit pieces. If any of these fail, the speed will fall back, although I can't tell you exact numbers. The same …

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Re: Pentium processor and the 1993/95 ...

Posted on 2015-09-10, 17:56

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yes, with well chosen comparisons you can prove anything, that's true. Thing is, I didn't think that was the point here. It wasn't. I was talking about practical situations. Back in those days, I was specializing in assembly optimizations, so I was up close and personal with the microarchitectures. …

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Re: Pentium processor and the 1993/95 ...

Posted on 2015-09-10, 14:47

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The pentium was just a normal jump at that time. We're talking 100+% performance at the same clock speed, not exactly a 'normal jump' (don't forget that 100+ MHz 486s did exist, but were released *after* the Pentium. When the Pentium 60/66 were released, the fastest 486 was still the DX2-66). …

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Re: Doom95 under Windows 10

Posted on 2015-09-10, 14:18

by

by Scali

in Windows

in Windows

I bet it has something to do with the fact that Doom95 runs in a 256-colour palette mode. Looks like it's 1/4th width, so it probably puts the 8-bit pixeldata in a 32-bit framebuffer. Either because 256-colour mode is not supported at all by the driver, or because there's a bug. I'll have to test it …

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Re: Windows and portability

Posted on 2015-09-10, 14:10

by

by Scali

in Milliways

in Milliways

Taking this: (Color1 - Color2) * Coefficient + Color3 The issues we have with this are as follows: 1. In the PS2, the coefficient factor could range from [0;2] (fortunately this almost never happens) 2. If Color3 and Color1 are the same source, the equation will be: Color1 * (1+Coefficient) - Color2 …

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Re: Usual RAM sizes back in the 386/486/Pentium years

Posted on 2015-09-10, 13:52

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Minimum for Win7 is 4GB I would say, even at 4GB it's kinda struggling when running several programs. As for Win 8/10 I haven't tried below 8GB myself, but as you say, they seems fine with 2GB, even though cheap tablets are sold with only 1GB. Yes, I have two old Win7 laptops, one with 2 GB, …

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Re: Usual RAM sizes back in the 386/486/Pentium years

Posted on 2015-09-10, 12:55

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Probably in the W98 world ram benefit would certainly be felt after upgrading but I also had some delusions about it. I remember the K62-350 from 64MB to 128MB... or also the same 386SX from 1MB to 4MB... In my experience, Windows 95 runs fine with 8-16 MB, Windows 98SE runs fine with 16+ MB. …

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Re: CPU cycles, how it works?

Posted on 2015-09-10, 12:24

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by Scali

in DOSBox General

in DOSBox General

The problem is the inaccuracy in DOSBox, as explained above. As explained above, we need something to decide about emulation speed in DOSBox and set it. Topbench shows wrong emulation speed and hence is less accurate for this, as explained above. As explained above, there's no way to do that, …

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Re: CPU cycles, how it works?

Posted on 2015-09-10, 12:04

by

by Scali

in DOSBox General

in DOSBox General

Tertz wrote: leileilol wrote: TOPBENCH TOPBENCH is less correct for this. For example, with 3000 cycles it shows speed of 386 33 MHz. TOPBENCH is probably right. The problem is the inaccuracy in DOSBox, as explained above.

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Re: Windows and portability

Posted on 2015-09-10, 11:55

by

by Scali

in Milliways

in Milliways

I meant native as in you can get your project to build on a given platform with a couple of clicks. After all it's what modern game engines are about, isn't it? The problem is not building it, but getting code that actually works properly and performs well on a wide range of systems. Given we were …

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Re: Pentium processor and the 1993/95 ...

Posted on 2015-09-10, 11:04

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Could you provide more details proving the statement? ... Even if AMD made a clone, why then would intel struggle to outperform it? I can't see the images, but basically P3 and Athlon perform about the same at the same clockspeed, with AMD having a slight advantage in FPU-heavy code, but nothing …

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Re: Which CPU-Z version runs on Windows NT 4.0 SP1?

Posted on 2015-09-10, 10:35

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

If you don't specifically need CPU-Z, but just want some basic info from the CPUID instruction, then there are other ways. For example, this opensource project could easily be compiled for NT4 or lower, or even DOS/Win16: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpuinfo/ (there's even some 16-bit code in …

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Re: Pentium processor and the 1993/95 ...

Posted on 2015-09-10, 10:23

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well, 'the greatest', I'm not sure of (386 was also a huge leap, and 286 was not bad either), but the Pentium was indeed a huge leap forward. It mainly had three rather revolutionary changes compared to the 486: 1) It had a 64-bit data bus instead of 32-bit, so it could access memory twice as fast. …

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Re: It's 286 time!

Posted on 2015-09-10, 09:01

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

dr.zeissler wrote: Therefore I think I'll sell the 286/20. I might want it 😀

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Re: PC speaker through sound card

Posted on 2015-09-10, 07:22

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yes, the SB Pro 2 works very nicely. We've used it for the capture of 8088 MPH at the party place. There's a special PC speaker channel in the mixer, so you can control the level relative to the SBP outputs. And of course the volume wheel at the back is a master volume which attenuates everything, …

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Re: Windows10 Compatibility

Posted on 2015-09-09, 21:09

by

by Scali

in DOSBox General

in DOSBox General

It works for me at any rate, I've used it on two of my Windows 10 machines.

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Re: Windows and portability

Posted on 2015-09-09, 16:48

by

by Scali

in Milliways

in Milliways

In other words, D3D could do it, but only with a correct implementation? Of course it can do it, why wouldn't it (this is basic shading/blending stuff, OGL and D3D run on the same hardware, there aren't any huge differences)? It only saturates if you use integers. If you use floating point …

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