Re: Games that specifically need a 486 (not faster/not slower) to run properly

Posted on 2024-10-02, 22:06

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I have been playing the game pyrotechnica recently, it's an early 3d space ship game kind of like descent. Anyways, it's 3d graphics make it way too demanding to play on a 386 where it plays like a slideshow... However on my pentium 75, or higher spec machines, the game appears to run well with a …

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Re: Larger Hard Drives on a Gateway 2000 4DX2-66V

Posted on 2024-09-18, 18:08

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have a 386 with an early version of the Phoenix Bios and it would not work with the startech cf adapter. I could see it as a HDD if I booted with a boot disk, but I could only read the file tree and not run files on it, nor could I boot from it. However, once I got the XTide bios added to that …

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Re: Anyone have a Wang PC 350?

Posted on 2024-09-17, 01:02

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hi, the wang microsystem series uses common 5pin keyboards and regular 8 or 16 bit graphiccards. mda/cga/vga Yes phoenix bios, but must have the wsetup or wwsetup.exe to enter the bios-options. Normaly ibm compatible must hit the del-key. If I bought one with no HDD, would I put wsetup on a boot …

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Re: UNISOUND - Universal ISA PnP Sound Card Driver for DOS v0.81b

Posted on 2024-09-10, 22:23

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

This program is fantastic and I use it with everything I run dos on.

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Re: GUS Max not playing all instruments, but has full ram?

Posted on 2024-08-24, 18:50

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I seem to have fixed this issue by simply switching the irqs of the cards, so the GUS is now 5 and the opti is 7 instead of vice versa. Do you mean to say you had another soundcard with an OPTi chip in the system besides the GUS MAX? I did not see that mentioned anywhere before in your post... The …

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Re: GUS Max not playing all instruments, but has full ram?

Posted on 2024-08-22, 01:05

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I added an opti pnp soundblaster card to the machine so I can at least get non-skipping music in the epic games and otherwise have an alternative to the GUS and SBOS when I want that. The good news is that I correctly set things up and things were working just how I wanted with the opti being a …

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Anyone have a Wang PC 350?

Posted on 2024-08-17, 02:02

by

by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I don't have one but I'm very intrigued by them. They were 386s made by Wang Labs shortly before they went bankrupt in the early 1990s. Anyways, my questions. Can these use conventional ps/2 keyboards? I read something about how they use a special Wang "vs" keyboard but wasn't sure if that was an …

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Re: GUS Max not playing all instruments, but has full ram?

Posted on 2024-08-10, 00:14

by

by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

weedeewee wrote on 2024-08-09, 19:54: Well if I read the pdf correctly then 55 would be clkin/2 53 would be clkin/3 and 51 would be clkin/4 I gave each of these a shot but there was no improvement to the audio drop out issue. Thanks though.

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Re: GUS Max not playing all instruments, but has full ram?

Posted on 2024-08-09, 19:34

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Looking for the chipset might give some clues Looking at your first thread, and going with the 386 board there. It seems to be an opti 82c381/2 chipset This leads to https://theretroweb.com/chipsets/366#docs which has a pdf for download which on page 7 and beyond, lists some register information …

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Re: GUS Max not playing all instruments, but has full ram?

Posted on 2024-08-09, 18:20

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Hmm I don't know. I have no documentation for this board and haven't been able to find it on the retroweb. In any case, the current bios doesn't say anything about flashing or upgrading within the GUI.

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Re: GUS Max not playing all instruments, but has full ram?

Posted on 2024-08-09, 17:17

by

by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I have managed to fix this, but not in a good way! What fixed the audio drop outs was changing a setting in my bios to run the CPU "slow" rather than "fast" (fast is the default, so this option is kinda like a turbo button I guess). So running the CPU slow fixed the audio, but since we're talking …

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Re: Hour long recording of various dos game OPL music with Gravis Ultrasound Max SBOS soundblaster emulation

Posted on 2024-08-09, 02:04

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I have made another video comparing the musical output of SBOS 3.82 and MAXSBOS, two different versions of SBOS. They sound quite different, and in my opinion, the later released MAXSBOS is not a worthwhile upgrade! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y118o8UgCTU

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Re: Pocket 386, the brother of Hand386 and Book8088, the story so far ...

Posted on 2024-08-08, 01:52

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Cool. Thanks. Is there any cache that can be enabled or anything else that can be adjusted on the stock PC to nudge it up a bit? By the way, I heard the game Xargon has a bug with the keyboard on this machine. Something like you move an arrow key to move the player and then the input sticks as if …

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Re: Pocket 386, the brother of Hand386 and Book8088, the story so far ...

Posted on 2024-08-07, 16:23

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Could someone run 3dbench and tell me what the score is? I just want to compare the number to what I get with existing 386/486 computers I have.

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Re: GUS Max not playing all instruments, but has full ram?

Posted on 2024-08-07, 01:04

by

by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I've got this option for atclk in the bios. Any idea if this might relate to isa bus speed or what I'd write in it? I have the option to change the 55h value, but I'd need to type something in manually, there's no selection of choices. Filename PXL_20240807_005854687_exported_99_1722992490064.jpg …

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Re: GUS Max not playing all instruments, but has full ram?

Posted on 2024-08-07, 00:47

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I found a reference to someone else having GUS playback skipping notes. Seems as some suggested it could be related to ISA bus speed, which I haven't been able to figure out a way to adjust on my motherboard From here: https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2016/10/reasons-for-owning-gravis-ultrasound …

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Hour long recording of various dos game OPL music with Gravis Ultrasound Max SBOS soundblaster emulation

Posted on 2024-08-06, 20:34

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

It seems to me that the GUS's SBOS software is not well documented these days. For instance, if you search for recordings of music played by SBOS you will not find any! So here I am to remedy this with an hour long chunk of SBOS music from many popular games (Wolf 3d, Keen, Blake Stone, Jill, Major …

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Re: GUS Max not playing all instruments, but has full ram?

Posted on 2024-08-06, 13:07

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I haven't fixed my issue yet, but I did discover and solve another issue. If you have the Gus irq and recording irq set to the same value in the ultrasound variable , this seems to cause a few idiosyncratic problems in games when using sbos. Namely, in skyroads the music and sfx will play but the …

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Re: GUS Max not playing all instruments, but has full ram?

Posted on 2024-07-31, 20:54

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by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

As I did not see it mentioned whether you tried it: did you try changing (increasing) the wait states for the ISA bus in the BIOS settings? And did you try any setting with just DMA channels 0 and 1? Thanks for trying to help 🙂 I do not see any settings in this pc's bios to make adjustments to the …

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Re: GUS Max not playing all instruments, but has full ram?

Posted on 2024-07-31, 01:00

by

by dukeofurl

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I tried playing the Jazz and OMF music, as well as unrelated mod files with Impulse Tracker and ran into similar playback issues as the epic games. If I were to describe the state of things right now, it seems music that uses the official gus standard samples (Doom, Boppin, GUS midi player, Raptor, …

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