Re: Looks like Harekiet is cheating on us with vintage computer forums
Posted on 2015-02-19, 09:53
Well, how about a GOOD clone then? Like the Philips P3105, or the Commodore PC20-III 😀
Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?
Posted on 2015-02-19, 08:00
In fact i think GUS PnP's are a bit more silent than the classic and MAX Ultrasounds, probably due to simpler and more integrated circuit design. That may have something to do with the board revision? I have had some GUS MAX boards rev 1.8, and some rev 2.1. The 1.8 seemed a tad noisy, but 2.1 was …
Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?
Posted on 2015-02-19, 07:58
I think some more universal approach would work out better. An ISA card where you have some CPU or DSP with some RAM that emulates a certain soundcard by firmware. You could set the firmware and could have a GUS, SB16 some MIDI wavetable or maybe even everything at the same time on a single card. …
Re: Looks like Harekiet is cheating on us with vintage computer forums
Posted on 2015-02-19, 07:52
Harekiet wrote: But my 8088 has somewhat died and the forum has been ignored again 😀 Get a REAL 8088 then! None of those Taiwanese terrors. Go for a real IBM 5150/5160! I know a cheap place on Marktplaats 😀
Re: Newly made Gravis Ultrasound compatible cards ... what's the degree of interest?
Posted on 2015-02-18, 22:25
The original GF1 is no longer available I take it? AMD's InterWave is nice, but I've heard people complain about compatibility issues. Apparently the playback rate is not 100% the same, which causes problems with long samples getting out of sync. But still, InterWave is better than no GUS at all :) …
Re: Pentuim 4 (478) need ideas?
Posted on 2015-02-18, 18:47
It's digital v analog signal quality in my mind. You're right in that "bad digital" usually just means signal drops though Well, that's not quite what I mean... Bad digital signal usually means you just don't get anything at all. There's only a very narrow range where the signal is good enough that …
Re: XP-era games that have trouble running on Win7/8
Posted on 2015-02-18, 11:14
Some older games (like Incoming or Darkstone) are broken with Catalysts newer than 13.1. >:( BTW, AMD wanted feedback on their drivers some time ago, I sent them a message about that issue. :lol: AFAIK AMD dropped support for older iterations of DirectX. You can usually fix it by putting an earlier …
Re: Pentuim 4 (478) need ideas?
Posted on 2015-02-18, 08:30
Unfortunately this isn't universally true of cards from this era - TMDS transmitters from this era, especially integrated ones, were notorious for failing to meet spec. The results may not be noticeable in certain configurations, but can include signal dropouts and other connectivity issues. I …
Re: Pentuim 4 (478) need ideas?
Posted on 2015-02-17, 08:00
Are you using DVI or VGA? With DVI there should be no image quality issues, as there is no RAMDAC involved at all. I thought the RAMDAC in the 9x00-series was integrated anyway, so there would not be a whole lot that an OEM can mess up. Mind you, I have one ATi card, I don't recall if it's my …
Re: Turbo switch functionality on high end 486 & early Pentium 1 systems
Posted on 2015-02-15, 21:08
I recall you actually had to switch the PC off, chose your setting and then switch the PC back on (not that we ever did run the PC at 4.77 MHz). Haha, that's bad! I have two 8088 machines with switchable clock speed. Both can be switched on-the-fly either with a keyboard combination or a …
Re: Turbo switch functionality on high end 486 & early Pentium 1 systems
Posted on 2015-02-15, 14:03
Moreover, it's a function of chipset and motherboard implementation. Indeed, the classic turbo switch just switches the clockspeed. On early 8088 machines you could generally switch it back to 4.77 MHz, so you'd get more or less the same speed as the original IBM PC/XT. On 286/386/486, it usually …
Re: Programming... Would appreciate some advice from the experts and ideas for a simple DOS tool.
Posted on 2015-02-13, 10:46
There must be a reason why one is not readily available for DOS. My bets are on difficult Yup, for 640K machines, you can't even mount most floppy images in memory in the first place. So you'll need to do some kind of system that reads/writes sectors to/from HDD on-the-fly. For systems with EMS/XMS …
Re: cutting edge 1993 video/sound
Posted on 2015-02-13, 07:46
I could be mistaken, but I don't believe you need hardware MPEG decoders on a P120 for running 320x240 full screen video. Decoding Video-CD quality MPEG was possible on a P120 in software. The problem was the upscaling though. It helped if your videocard had hardware upscaling/filtering. I remember …
Re: Pentuim 4 (478) need ideas?
Posted on 2015-02-11, 09:45
Okay curiosity: what earlier than GF4 actually did MSAA? AFAIK GF4 was the first from nVidia, but did someone else actually get there first? Afaik the GF3 already had the same thing... I don't really count them as MSAA though. It's more of a hacked SSAA (afaik they only do the texture fetches once, …
Re: cutting edge 1993 video/sound
Posted on 2015-02-11, 07:59
I think that you'll find graphics cards from 1993 all had their flaws. They were either fast in windows or fast in DOS, and some were just so so at both. I guess you could argue that Windows performance isn't very interesting, if you're looking mainly at a box for playing (DOS) games. I know I …
Re: Pentuim 4 (478) need ideas?
Posted on 2015-02-11, 07:55
To note, GeForce 4 does support MSAA and AF (or do you mean that the R300 does those more efficiently?). Yes, that's what I meant. The Radeon 9500/9700 was the first to have efficient MSAA/AF, which you could actually use. GF4 and earlier had very bruteforce implementations that took a huge hit on …
Re: Pentuim 4 (478) need ideas?
Posted on 2015-02-10, 22:30
I'd keep the GeForce 4 over the Radeon 9550 - performance between them really won't be a lot different, and if the 9550 is a "cut down" 64-bit variant it may even be a downgrade. The only thing the 9550 may have a consistent advantage with is DVI compliance, but you'd have to know more about both …
Re: The best way to get Quake up and running
Posted on 2015-02-10, 22:11
I prefer to emulate it in DOSBox for purist reasons. Why emulate at all? WinQuake still works. It's pretty much the same as the DOS version, just running inside a simple DirectX-wrapper. Of course, GLQuake also works, which would still qualify for some values of 'pure', since it is an official ID …
Re: cutting edge 1993 video/sound
Posted on 2015-02-10, 21:50
Not sure about "cutting edge", but, at least for me, Roland MT-32 and Sound Canvas were the devices you would read and dream about when I was a teenager. Why? MT-32 was quite outdated by 1993 standards, and Sound Canvas had decent quality sound, but wasn't quite as flexible as the Gravis UltraSound …
Re: Innovation SSI 2001 re-engineering and/or conclusions
Posted on 2015-02-10, 16:13
I would think the PC's PIT would take care of most basic CIA timing duties. However, if a SID tune relied on 6502 cycle exact code, then converting that code to 8086 machine instructions would prove very problematic. Digital sampling with the SID, like the stuff from Impossible Mission "Another …
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