Started cleaning up the 486's hard disk installations last night, and experimenting with DAW's, and putting that new CPU, RAM, and L2 Cache to good use.
TESTING PERFORMANCE
- Quake now runs almost like Duke Nukem 3D did as a DX2-66 with 64MB of RAM and no L2 Cache, rendering is quite speedy with minimal frame drop making the game a joy to play
- Duke Nukem 3D feels super smooth and clear now regardless of which O/S or Hard Disk I run it under
- Postal Plus Raw & Uncut runs on this thing under 95 okayish, better than my PC-330 did 10 years ago, but I still have to remove a tiny bit of screen real-estate to smooth it out
- AfterDark screensavers no longer hang and seem to animate and run at full speed, maybe a little faster now, Flying Toasters Pro under 95 with full detail is smooth and quick now
- Diablo feels like when I was running it on my P233MMX back in 2002. Load times for the dungeo and town are fast, and battles are a piece of cake. Need to try Battle.Net next
- Doom 95 is better than I remember it
- Atari 2600 Emulation runs at full speed now (now that's some good tweaking), except maybe Pitfall II but that game needs some caveats to work on any emulator TBH
- Retro City Rampage 486 feels like GTA 2 now, both the Beta Win31x version AND the DOS version
DAW STUFF
- I upgraded the driver for the HDD controller under Windows 95, it was noticeably missing and using a generic driver, so I put the Winbond VL-EIDE driver on there found through much web surfing, Windows 95's load time has gone down considerably (<20 seconds), transferring files over the network is a LOT faster (about 14MB takes about 2 minutes - which is very fast for a 486), and disk performance is just a lot better
- I adjusted the Buffer settings in QuartzAudioMaster Freeware, now it no longer throws that error for "your PC is too slow" - we'll see once I put 4 tracks of WAV audio in it though, I'm testing using empty tracks for now
- I installed N-Track studio and tried it out, seems that looks to be better performance than QAM and Might be worth getting it activated so I can use that full time, it stutters more disk-wise than Quartz Todes though
- I ran my guitar through it, the tone the AWE64 has is pretty good coming from running my Blackstar IDCORE 10 through it direct to Line-In in stereo
OTHER STUFF
- I need to make my website public and put the drivers I used on this thing up, it was a royal b**** finding all that crap, and I don't know how long places like "Metropoli" are going to be up
- My next experiments will involve Windows 98 SE, Linux, Windows 2000 Pro with some real tickery to get XP Apps to run, and a sick experiment involving Five Nights at Freddy's (because I can)
- I might take FreeDOS for a spin because I quite well like supporting free software, and I like what FreeDOS has to offer
- Looking for some good Linux distributions to try out on this thing - especially since I have god high-res pictures of my hardware so putting any dependancies in the Kernel or at least getting the RAMDACs right for X11 or whatever it's called now will be possible.
- May try some OS/2 fun as well, not sure I want to use 40 Floppies....
The other two computers only have a few things to do now
- 286 = install Expanded RAM card
- 8088 = V20 and 8087, I'll be doing that during the summer because it generates less heat than the other two do