First post, by psychz
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After playing some games in DOSBox, I just had to build an all-around machine for the early nineties era, mainly for games but also for the occasional Windows 3.11 app. "Nothing special" as in, no 233MHz P-MMX and no 3dfx products in there 😜
Specifications:
- Motherboard: Soyo SY-5EAS
(Chipset: ETEQ 6618 [VIA Apollo VPX])
512kb cache
- CPU: Intel Pentium 100MHz
- RAM: 32MB EDO
- HDD: Quantum 6GB
- GPU: Diamond Stealth 64 PCI (S3 Vision964 w/ 4MB VRAM)
- Sound: Labway Yamaha OPL3-SAx PnP card (looks like the Audician 32 Plus?)
- No 3D accelerator (regarding my builds, that's actually a feature!)
- ODD: Some LG cdrw/dvd unit
- NIC: Micronet RTL8139C-based
Could be wrong on this one, but decided to go with an 100MHz Pentium, to have enough power to play games like Terminal Velocity acceptably, but at the same time, not to stray too far from the previous generation as long as compatibility is concerned, even if this means to use cache disablers and slowdown tools.
The setup/notes
This particular case doesn't look early 90ish, however it hosted a P166 MMX with a dead HDD, so I had to "make some changes" over there 😈 The current HDD is set up as 3 different partitions, C: which contains MS-DOS 6.22, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Office 4.3 and some other Windows-based software, along with XingMPEG Player, QuickTime, Delphi 1, WinPlay3, WinTune and other useless junk 😜 , D: which contains DOS apps (PCTools 9, benchmarks etc), and E: which contains DOS games. I also made a basic boot menu for XMS/EMS selection. It's noteworthy that it gets 617kb of free conventional memory when booting with XMS, as almost everything (UniVBE, ms mouse driver, OAKCDROM.SYS, MSCDEX, doskey) are successfully loaded high and the Yamaha initialization tool isn't even a TSR, it appears to unload itself after configuring the card! This sound card seems a bit noisy, but SETUPSA.EXE is much better than Creative's loader for the jumperless SB16s, at least regarding memory footprint. The Stealth 64 PCI looked a bit bad as some GPU chip's legs were broken, but a little solder here and there helped it come to life again. While I haven't set up Windows networking yet (no need to atm), mTCP's FTP server has helped me transfer most of what's finally in there and made moving games and drivers easily. It works nicely with Realtek's packet driver. I've been running stuff like MS Space Simulator, Epic Pinball, Terminal Velocity, Microsoft Fury3 on this box all day long 🤣
Problems I came across:
- The whole "NIC for mTCP" ordeal took me some serious head-scratching, due to the fact that the CPU-to-PCI write buffer BIOS option caused random hangs in Windows with just about every RTL8139-based card I had, in every PCI slot I tested, even without any WFW3.11 NIC-related driver installed. With this setting disabled, apparently the lock-ups went away.
- This one, which was really just me running Windows at 800x600/16.4 million colors 😊 Actually I have yet to stumble upon anything that would need more than 256 colors, and even Fury3, as is the case with many games, itself suggests that it be run at 256 for better performance.
wrote:Its not like components found in trash after 20 years in rain dont still work flawlessly.
:: chemical reaction :: athens in love || reality is absent || spectrality || meteoron || the lie you believe
