Re: win95 or 98 for high end 486?

Posted on 2015-05-27, 10:15

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

My main problem running Win98SE on my 486 was that I only had 16 MB of memory. Win95 worked quite a bit better with those memory requirements. When you have 64 MB however, I don't think memory will be an issue anymore. I've run Win98SE just fine on Pentiums with 64 MB. In fact, even WinNT4 should …

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Re: DOSBox-X branch

Posted on 2015-05-26, 15:01

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by Scali

in DOSBox Patches

in DOSBox Patches

With the decoders I've written, I've used borders of 10% on each side, giving 768x240 which is a pretty close match to image area you've mentioned (720*910/858 ~= 764). It'd be a nice thing for emulators to have image size and position controls like real monitors as well, but I doubt such controls …

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Re: DOSBox-X branch

Posted on 2015-05-26, 14:48

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by Scali

in DOSBox Patches

in DOSBox Patches

I would suggest a generalized implementation that chooses the part of the screen to output with an SDL rect, and the target rectangle with another SDL rect. The rectangle would be chosen according to user preferences on how to crop/zoom and simulation of CRT monitor positioning controls. DOSBox …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2015-05-22, 18:25

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

shock__ wrote: About 8bit access ... not going to dig too deep into that. Especially since the idea might seem nice, but isn't the 8088 demoscene similar to the C64 one in being extremely restrictive about new/custom hardware? There isn't any 8088 demoscene, it's just us, so we can do whatever we …

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Re: Windows 8 beats XP in performance

Posted on 2015-05-22, 07:56

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by Scali

in Milliways

in Milliways

I'd like to add that Windows 8.x is actually quite nice for simpler systems. I have this old Core2 Duo 1.5 GHz laptop with 2 GB (from 2007). It originally came with Vista, but I upgraded it to Windows 7 x64. It was getting rather slow, and the drive got full. So I figured I'd try Windows 8.1 x64 on …

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Re: DOSBox-X branch

Posted on 2015-05-21, 18:08

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by Scali

in DOSBox Patches

in DOSBox Patches

It'd be a nice thing for emulators to have image size and position controls like real monitors as well, but I doubt such controls would be accepted into DOSBox SVN. Please take a look at at old post of mine for suggestions on dealing with overscan borders on non-4:3 displays. Ah right... I was only …

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Re: Windows 8 beats XP in performance

Posted on 2015-05-21, 17:35

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by Scali

in Milliways

in Milliways

I understood that many complaints about Vista were a result of systems being branded "Vista ready" when they in fact lacked the graphics hardware to adequately handle another big factor is Vista came out before 1gb+ of RAM was common. Microsoft shot themselves in the foot by making the minimum 512 …

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Re: Windows 8 beats XP in performance

Posted on 2015-05-21, 15:21

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by Scali

in Milliways

in Milliways

If you look into benchmarks like Frybench or AIDA64 there is no difference in performance. XP-32, XP-64 and all Windows 6.x perform more or less the same. These benchmarks measure hardware performance though and not OS performance ;) I disagree. With modern OSes there is no direct path to the …

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Re: Windows 8 beats XP in performance

Posted on 2015-05-21, 15:19

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by Scali

in Milliways

in Milliways

Yes, just like a marathon dosnt measure your endurance but the quality of your shoes :D No, not at all... But such older games/graphics benchmarks are not taxing on the CPU whatsoever, and you're mainly measuring the path between GPU and CPU. Vista and newer Windows have a different driver model …

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Re: Windows 8 beats XP in performance

Posted on 2015-05-21, 14:24

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by Scali

in Milliways

in Milliways

Skyscraper wrote: Its easy to see how much faster Windows 6.X compared to the old bloated slow Windows XP, just check the 3dmark 2001 thread and the Doom 3 thread... wait a min... 😜 In which cases you are not measuring the OS performance but rather the display driver performance.

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Re: Windows 8 beats XP in performance

Posted on 2015-05-21, 14:02

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by Scali

in Milliways

in Milliways

AFAIK The bloat in Windows Vista and 7 kinda nullified the speed gains through better hardware support. That's just a common myth. More features don't necessarily make a system slower. It's like saying Photoshop gets slower the more images you have on your harddrive, even though you never touch any …

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Re: Windows 8 beats XP in performance

Posted on 2015-05-21, 09:52

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by Scali

in Milliways

in Milliways

I think the thing to point out is that in the XP-days, hardware was very different from today. We were only just ramping up from one core to two, and memory ranged from 256MB to 1GB normally. Vista and later OSes were designed for systems with multiple cores, and much more memory. For example, Vista …

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Re: DOSBox-X branch

Posted on 2015-05-21, 07:30

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by Scali

in DOSBox Patches

in DOSBox Patches

I can confirm on an S3 Virge that it's possible to extend the overscan border out and replace the blanking area. Ah, that's interesting, so you actually have control over the size of the border. CGA doesn't have that. Also on the S3, setting the blanking start/end values beyond the total count …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2015-05-20, 14:55

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

None of the 386 systems support PnP, but that doesn't matter - you can use any PnP cards with OS-based PnP initialization routine for that (for example, DOS-based proprietary initialization program/driver). Okay, then that would not be anything to worry about on 8088. We may just need to write a …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2015-05-20, 14:28

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Also ... do any 8088 based systems support PnP? No idea, I don't know how PnP on ISA works exactly. I mainly have experience with GF1-based GUSes, where you just have a commandline tool which initializes the card to the proper values. I assume it just writes the config data to some special …

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Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?

Posted on 2015-05-20, 13:31

by

by Scali

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Not sure if this was asked before yet... but how difficult would it be to add support for 8-bit ISA slots? From what I know, the GUS needs 16-bit IO for some things to work, which is why the original GUS doesn't work in anything lower than a 286 with 16-bit ISA slots. But... XT-IDE cards solve …

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Re: Sound cards? Do they make that much of a difference?

Posted on 2015-05-20, 12:29

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by Scali

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

To add to jesolo's story: The evolution is basically this (ignoring less popular sound cards, and card-specific features such as tone-control, reverb/chorus etc, just the 'milestones' as how games generally look at them as well): 1) Adlib: Yamaha OPL2 synthesizer chip 2) Sound Blaster original, …

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Re: DOSBox-X branch

Posted on 2015-05-20, 09:52

by

by Scali

in DOSBox Patches

in DOSBox Patches

That's also what I had in mind! I always thought that what DOSBox was missing (and what modern LCDs and TVs are hiding from you on VGA inputs) are the overscan border that you used to be able to see on VGA monitors. Also that DOSBox's focus on the active picture area isn't very helpful when you're …

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Re: DOSBox-X branch

Posted on 2015-05-20, 07:16

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by Scali

in DOSBox Patches

in DOSBox Patches

So I've been thinking of an implementation that withholds rasterization until an event happens that affects the raster, whether that's just the start of a new VGA frame or any change to DAC, AC, and some CRTC registers happen, or if VGA memory writes happen within a small window around the raster …

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Re: DOSBox-X branch

Posted on 2015-05-19, 20:57

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by Scali

in DOSBox Patches

in DOSBox Patches

Ah, now I understand. Given the variety of I/O delays in EGA and VGA cards, I wonder if such a thing ever was feasible on real PC hardware. On EGA/VGA it's pretty much impossible to synchronize such effects, because the videocard runs asynchronous to the rest of the system, from its own crystal. On …

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