canthearu wrote:

You do realize that cache hit rates for most software are typically at least in the 90% region. That means that 90% of the time the CPU wants to read or write memory, it will find the memory it wants to access in it's cache or the L2 cache. The The video you linked from LGR showed that adding the L2 cache to the 486 increased performance in the region of at least 50%. Yet you speak as if the difference is a few percent and cache hit rates are negligible.The real reality is that the cache system in computers is hugely important for performance.

Agreed!

The benchmark he showed went from 152 to 200 - or a 31% improvement.
On DOOM it's kinda hard to tell. Definitively more playable I'd say, but I don't think it was a 50% improvement. The difference looks small to me, and if it wasn't for the side by side, it would be even harder to tell for me.

I might look into the memory situation if need be - but so far the system hasn't given me a reason to do so. The games I tried and Windows 3.11 feel very snappy.

On that thought tho - anyone knows of a test utility for the Voodoo 2 in DOS?

Well, I found some demos and used the Glide2x.ovl from the original driver.

I'm happy to report the Voodoo2 still works, after being thrown around for almost 20 years in bins, boxes and generally not being taken care of (I now realize what a sin this was! 🤣)
Amazing, hats off to Creative (It's a 3D Blaster CT6670).

Nice 😀

Got to get around to putting my voodoo2 into my Pentium MMX 200 computer 😀

So, time for another update!

Today I took my 32 GB CF card that I tested yesterday and took the plunge to install Windows 95 with USB support on it. Now my particular version of Windows 95 does not boot from CDROM, and given I have no empty floppies and no way to burn a CD, I had to get a little creative to boot the installer with the full 32GB of FAT32.

I only have MS-DOS 6.22 install disks, so that was ruled out very quickly.

So I downloaded Unetbootin, and installed FreeDOS to the CF card. Also copied FreeDOS' FDISK onto it. Booted it up, deleted the partition and made a FAT 32 (LBA) one. That got rid of FreeDOS, so the CF card went back to the PC for another install of FreeDOS now on FAT32 🤣

Luckily, FreeDOS came with a CDROM driver, so I could boot the Windows 95 installer from there, and luckily it didn't complain about anything.

Spent some time installing the drivers for the ATI Rage, Direct X and the Voodoo2 drivers + OpenGL. Messed with the damn Sound Blaster again for an hour, since now MIDI would play back but not anything else (Windows 3.11 was the other way around) 🤣. Turns out at the end it was wrong DMA settings that Windows chose - fixed that and now it works perfectly.

Now on to the fun part... I noticed in the BIOS there is a "CPU Soft Menu", which allows you to configure CPU speed and whatnot. Some of my games require a Pentium 233 MHZ so I spent some time researching about Pentium MMXs and what the board would support, in case I wanted to upgrade later, and stumbled on this WIKI page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P5_(micro ... cture)#MMX

And there I saw something odd about what my BIOS was displaying - 150 MHZ, 2.8V / 3.3V. According to that page, the Pentium MMX 150 MHZ is a mobile processor, and the CPU voltage did not match up at all, since it should have been 2.45 V for a mobile P150 MMX...

So I opened the case, took the CPU out, and here's what I found:

Yep, a Pentium MMX 233 MHZ 🤣

So the seller sold it as 150 MHZ, but then I remembered the CMOS data was erased since the battery was dead, and the mainboard just defaulted to 150MHZ (makes sense if you think about it..), and that's what he saw as he tried to boot it. He probably just didn't look inside at all.

So, changed the settings for it to be at 233 MHZ, booted up and I started to install Voyager: Elite Force to test (it supports the Voodoo2):

Max settings I could put in there...

🤣