elcrys wrote on 2022-01-24, 16:35:

As was discussed, with P4-M 2.0 you are stuck with 12x multiplier (low/battery state) on a desktop board.
For my CPU it's 16x and I used SetFSB for OC. BCM BC845DL has clock generator CY28323PVC and it has proper dividers for AGP/PCI up to 200 MHz in steps 66/100/133/166/200. FSB on 166 MHz seemed stable which equals to 2.6 GHz @ 1.2V. Luckily the only thing you can change in BIOS regarding OC is memory divider (here I set 1:1), so memory OC wasn't a problem even for 2 - 2 - 2 - 6 timings.

Ah, yes, of course! The low multiplier... forgot about that. Definitely an interesting way to cut power... But this is an experiment for another day perhaps.

Realised I have a CMI8738 soundcard sitting idle... in theory this gives you a wide range, Adlib, OPL3, SBPro, SB16 and some EAX and surround features in early XP gaming. In practice, it makes some people super angry (like really annoyed, but wearing a cape) because the one they had wouldn't do what they wanted. However data on the fails tends to be sparse as to what exact drivers were in use and whether it was set to SBpro or SB16 emulation (You get two chances!) and whether their southbridge was properly supporting DDMA, and/or which modes of that they were supporting. Buuuut, if we take care with all that, maybe we can get closer to theory.. some helpful threads..
Cmedia CMI8738 - maybe its Biggest Secret
PCI sound cards and Chipsets from various manufacturers...
RemapCMI - Tool for emulating DOS audio ports on C-Media CMI8x38 soundcards

For those who're even without PCI there's actually a PCIe version around too, but I don't know how many of the tricks apply to it.

Tempting to try this solution for the following reasons, cheapness and obtain-ability very good, they were sold during P4 era and randomly obtained P4s have a chance of already having one or one onboard, theoretical chance of it being an "ideal" solution if DDMA works, it'll annoy ppl who spent 3 figures on a genuine soundblaster 🤣

Edit2: Derp, my Turtle Beach Riviera is also a CMI8738 card, not quite a nothing card because name halo-y, but a nothing Turtle Beach. The drivers and implementation are meant to be solid though, so it will help split those hairs needed to figure whether it's motherboard or soundcard implementation screwing things up, if things are uply screwed.
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In other news... turns out I have 2 examples of Celeron 346 and they are worth a whole $2 each.... the Intel motherboard I have supports 800FSB... "BuT yOu CaN't OvErClOcK aN iNtEl MoThErBoArD" they say..... shows what "they" know.... pad and socket mods muhuhahahaaaa... I have found references to HardOCP getting 5ghz out of a 346 on air at under 1.5V on the stock cooler... unfortunately I don't have a direct link and haven't been able to weasel the deets out of archive.org yet.... anyway, I don't wanna go that crazy, "only" to 4.6Ghz... and a 667 option if we can make the chipset do it... ditto a 400 option if we can do that too. Probably I will be using SoftFSB or something first to avoid having the CPU/Mobo in and out a dozen times for adjustments.
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Edit: rumors of being a baller king with a P4 mobile may have been greatly exaggerated, where I thought it was living I found a Celeron Mobile... which had only got deep sleep and "yup, that's really as fast as it goes" settings... though I have to check up on the dismembered corpse of another dead notebook to see if that had one.

I'm trapped with PCI/AGP on my P4s with just AudioPCIs and Lives here. I don't think the Nuke windows driver supports Win9x in any forks either (would be really fun to see that driver ported to DOS in the same vein as AudioPCI's OPL->ECW TSR filling the OPL gap the hard way, maybe that hardcore opl3 emulator could be a speed harness itself)

I have a terratec card I think it is the "fun" card. I found it in a core duo system. I think I only found xp drivers but they actually worked in windows 98. It might be too new a version,. It I guess I can try if it works on my otherwise lack luster Pentium m system (actually it was in there all the time I just never knew about its potential hidden secrets).

Made a test with the card above, not knowing what drivers to use I picked up these DOS drivers from Phil's site: C-Media CMI8738 PCI

It looks to me like they initiated correctly.

I tested quake 1 demo. I get sound, but it some horrible repeating tones. Was gonna try carmageddon demo as well but it crashed at autodetect. Getting any sound at all is good I guess!

Maybe there are better drivers, I'm really just guessing.

Joakim wrote on 2022-01-26, 22:04:

Made a test with the card above, not knowing what drivers to use I picked up these DOS drivers from Phil's site: C-Media CMI8738 […]
Show full quote

Made a test with the card above, not knowing what drivers to use I picked up these DOS drivers from Phil's site: C-Media CMI8738 PCI

It looks to me like they initiated correctly.

I tested quake 1 demo. I get sound, but it some horrible repeating tones. Was gonna try carmageddon demo as well but it crashed at autodetect. Getting any sound at all is good I guess!

Maybe there are better drivers, I'm really just guessing.

Checked the Vogons Driver Library ?

http://www.vogonsdrivers.com

Might be one there.

Over the last week I've been toying around with a P4 Northwood 2.4 on an intel 845 board using a GeForce 4 ti4200 128mb and a Vortex 2 with Dream Blaster X2 for sound. I want to limit myself to 2 dos/w9x machines, the other being a P3 550 / Voodoo 3 / AWE64 & Orpheus combo.

The idea of the P4 system is to run as many of the later era SVGA software (where possible) mode DOS games with high really nice framerates - things like the build engine games, descent 1/2, racing games like NFS:SE, etc - and has been ~fairly~ successful so far. I also want it to be my main win9x system because the CPU and graphics combo are blisteringly fast for any game at a decent resolution up to the launch of Windows XP (a beefier PC takes care of WinXP). Any glide capable game gets run on the P3 550 and Voodoo 3 combo.

There's been a few quirks, like a weird super-speed jittery quake (both pure DOS and the WinQuake versions) that doesn't seem to be fixed with any console command. To explain the behavior, all animations and movement runs without a limit, almost like watching a timedemo. It's okay though, I can just run GLquake with texture smoothing turned off. I just have never seen this problem and I cannot find anything online about it. It's very weird.

Descent 2's framerate is way too high and makes the mouse input very slow. I think it's just an engine problem - mouse polling combined with CPU speed that can't be fixed when framerates are too high, unless there's a way to hack the resolution up to like 1280x960 to make the framerate lower. I understand this is an issue for the glide versions of the games too. If it's fixable I'm all ears.

Not related to games, but, the PCI network card (intel) I'm using has a BIOS for bootstrapping/PXE booting and causes a memory problem with XMS/EMS - it gives me a warning saying that XMS won't run, then after a while it boots into DOS with XMS enabled??, yet most games still work with no issue. I think I need to add a switch to the XMS/EMS lines in the philscomputerlab pack to shift the starting address to somewhere else (i dont actually know what i'm doing so i havent bothered yet). If there's a tool to identify and get the memory address for me, rather than guessing, I'd like to know more.

In terms of audio, yes, the FM of the vortex 2 absolutely sucks but the wavetable is more than useful in, like, any game after 1994. Vortex 2's SB 2.0 compatibility is nice, but i can "feel" that the cpu is too fast for some games. For example in Doom under dos 7.1 some sound samples get cut off too early. I have a hunch that turning off a cache or 2 might help this.

Onto the positive results:

Any Directx game from 98 to 2001 is amazing (so far). I'm sure I'll run into a few games that have speed issues.

Doom / Doom 2 Windows 95 version doesn't any audio problem at full speed (and 640x480 is as smooth as butter!). The music plays just fine through the Dream Blaster X2.

I'm guessing it's the drivers GeForce drivers, but build engine games run better in Windows 98 than from rebooting into DOS?? Is it framebuffer related? Idk... but I'm ok with it.

Monkey Island CD version (Monkey Island Madness) runs from windows, without any caches being turned off. That's very cool.

I will be testing out the vanilla Lucas Arts games with speed problems in the next few days; I'll update once I find out how they go with caches turned off. Indiana Jones, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island 1 and 2 are on my list. I'll try out Jazz Jackrabbit too as I know that's got the 200mhz "bug". Maybe turning off the caches makes it too slow?

PS. One more thing - is there a way I can add 640x400 as a custom resolution to Nvidia's driver and lock it to 70hz? The reason is my LED display tells me "out of range" when trying to use 640x400. This is totally stupid because any 320x200 output gets doubled up to 640x400 anyway, running absolutely fine... go figure. BUT in Red Alert and Command and Conquer, it only works at 640x480 with black bars at the top and bottom. The heck??

foil_fresh wrote on 2022-01-27, 05:31:

Over the last week I've been toying around with a P4 Northwood 2.4 on an intel 845 board using a GeForce 4 ti4200 128mb and a Vo […]
Show full quote

Over the last week I've been toying around with a P4 Northwood 2.4 on an intel 845 board using a GeForce 4 ti4200 128mb and a Vortex 2 with Dream Blaster X2 for sound. I want to limit myself to 2 dos/w9x machines, the other being a P3 550 / Voodoo 3 / AWE64 & Orpheus combo.

The idea of the P4 system is to run as many of the later era SVGA software (where possible) mode DOS games with high really nice framerates - things like the build engine games, descent 1/2, racing games like NFS:SE, etc - and has been ~fairly~ successful so far. I also want it to be my main win9x system because the CPU and graphics combo are blisteringly fast for any game at a decent resolution up to the launch of Windows XP (a beefier PC takes care of WinXP). Any glide capable game gets run on the P3 550 and Voodoo 3 combo.

There's been a few quirks, like a weird super-speed jittery quake (both pure DOS and the WinQuake versions) that doesn't seem to be fixed with any console command. To explain the behavior, all animations and movement runs without a limit, almost like watching a timedemo. It's okay though, I can just run GLquake with texture smoothing turned off. I just have never seen this problem and I cannot find anything online about it. It's very weird.

Descent 2's framerate is way too high and makes the mouse input very slow. I think it's just an engine problem - mouse polling combined with CPU speed that can't be fixed when framerates are too high, unless there's a way to hack the resolution up to like 1280x960 to make the framerate lower. I understand this is an issue for the glide versions of the games too. If it's fixable I'm all ears.

Not related to games, but, the PCI network card (intel) I'm using has a BIOS for bootstrapping/PXE booting and causes a memory problem with XMS/EMS - it gives me a warning saying that XMS won't run, then after a while it boots into DOS with XMS enabled??, yet most games still work with no issue. I think I need to add a switch to the XMS/EMS lines in the philscomputerlab pack to shift the starting address to somewhere else (i dont actually know what i'm doing so i havent bothered yet). If there's a tool to identify and get the memory address for me, rather than guessing, I'd like to know more.

In terms of audio, yes, the FM of the vortex 2 absolutely sucks but the wavetable is more than useful in, like, any game after 1994. Vortex 2's SB 2.0 compatibility is nice, but i can "feel" that the cpu is too fast for some games. For example in Doom under dos 7.1 some sound samples get cut off too early. I have a hunch that turning off a cache or 2 might help this.

Onto the positive results:

Any Directx game from 98 to 2001 is amazing (so far). I'm sure I'll run into a few games that have speed issues.

Doom / Doom 2 Windows 95 version doesn't any audio problem at full speed (and 640x480 is as smooth as butter!). The music plays just fine through the Dream Blaster X2.

I'm guessing it's the drivers GeForce drivers, but build engine games run better in Windows 98 than from rebooting into DOS?? Is it framebuffer related? Idk... but I'm ok with it.

Monkey Island CD version (Monkey Island Madness) runs from windows, without any caches being turned off. That's very cool.

I will be testing out the vanilla Lucas Arts games with speed problems in the next few days; I'll update once I find out how they go with caches turned off. Indiana Jones, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island 1 and 2 are on my list. I'll try out Jazz Jackrabbit too as I know that's got the 200mhz "bug". Maybe turning off the caches makes it too slow?

PS. One more thing - is there a way I can add 640x400 as a custom resolution to Nvidia's driver and lock it to 70hz? The reason is my LED display tells me "out of range" when trying to use 640x400. This is totally stupid because any 320x200 output gets doubled up to 640x400 anyway, running absolutely fine... go figure. BUT in Red Alert and Command and Conquer, it only works at 640x480 with black bars at the top and bottom. The heck??

The build engine games running better from Win98 DOS is likely due to 98 setting up sound card variables which persist when dropping back to dos from Windows, a clean reboot DOS likely isn't setting thigs up correctly or cant without windows being loaded, certain sound cards are guilty of this due to being PCI and needing windows to activate features. The Vortex 2 is likely guilty of this as its a Windows sound card first and a DOS sound card second through emulation.

foil_fresh wrote on 2022-01-27, 05:31:

Over the last week I've been toying around with a P4 Northwood 2.4 on an intel 845 board using a GeForce 4 ti4200 128mb and a Vo […]
Show full quote

Over the last week I've been toying around with a P4 Northwood 2.4 on an intel 845 board using a GeForce 4 ti4200 128mb and a Vortex 2 with Dream Blaster X2 for sound. I want to limit myself to 2 dos/w9x machines, the other being a P3 550 / Voodoo 3 / AWE64 & Orpheus combo.

The idea of the P4 system is to run as many of the later era SVGA software (where possible) mode DOS games with high really nice framerates - things like the build engine games, descent 1/2, racing games like NFS:SE, etc - and has been ~fairly~ successful so far. I also want it to be my main win9x system because the CPU and graphics combo are blisteringly fast for any game at a decent resolution up to the launch of Windows XP (a beefier PC takes care of WinXP). Any glide capable game gets run on the P3 550 and Voodoo 3 combo.

There's been a few quirks, like a weird super-speed jittery quake (both pure DOS and the WinQuake versions) that doesn't seem to be fixed with any console command. To explain the behavior, all animations and movement runs without a limit, almost like watching a timedemo. It's okay though, I can just run GLquake with texture smoothing turned off. I just have never seen this problem and I cannot find anything online about it. It's very weird.

Descent 2's framerate is way too high and makes the mouse input very slow. I think it's just an engine problem - mouse polling combined with CPU speed that can't be fixed when framerates are too high, unless there's a way to hack the resolution up to like 1280x960 to make the framerate lower. I understand this is an issue for the glide versions of the games too. If it's fixable I'm all ears.

Not related to games, but, the PCI network card (intel) I'm using has a BIOS for bootstrapping/PXE booting and causes a memory problem with XMS/EMS - it gives me a warning saying that XMS won't run, then after a while it boots into DOS with XMS enabled??, yet most games still work with no issue. I think I need to add a switch to the XMS/EMS lines in the philscomputerlab pack to shift the starting address to somewhere else (i dont actually know what i'm doing so i havent bothered yet). If there's a tool to identify and get the memory address for me, rather than guessing, I'd like to know more.

In terms of audio, yes, the FM of the vortex 2 absolutely sucks but the wavetable is more than useful in, like, any game after 1994. Vortex 2's SB 2.0 compatibility is nice, but i can "feel" that the cpu is too fast for some games. For example in Doom under dos 7.1 some sound samples get cut off too early. I have a hunch that turning off a cache or 2 might help this.

Onto the positive results:

Any Directx game from 98 to 2001 is amazing (so far). I'm sure I'll run into a few games that have speed issues.

Doom / Doom 2 Windows 95 version doesn't any audio problem at full speed (and 640x480 is as smooth as butter!). The music plays just fine through the Dream Blaster X2.

I'm guessing it's the drivers GeForce drivers, but build engine games run better in Windows 98 than from rebooting into DOS?? Is it framebuffer related? Idk... but I'm ok with it.

Monkey Island CD version (Monkey Island Madness) runs from windows, without any caches being turned off. That's very cool.

I will be testing out the vanilla Lucas Arts games with speed problems in the next few days; I'll update once I find out how they go with caches turned off. Indiana Jones, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island 1 and 2 are on my list. I'll try out Jazz Jackrabbit too as I know that's got the 200mhz "bug". Maybe turning off the caches makes it too slow?

PS. One more thing - is there a way I can add 640x400 as a custom resolution to Nvidia's driver and lock it to 70hz? The reason is my LED display tells me "out of range" when trying to use 640x400. This is totally stupid because any 320x200 output gets doubled up to 640x400 anyway, running absolutely fine... go figure. BUT in Red Alert and Command and Conquer, it only works at 640x480 with black bars at the top and bottom. The heck??

A lot of items there... your mouse is it USB or PS/2? USB mice can be an issue in DOS. (Whether it's a P4, socket 7, PII/III or anything with USB capability)

For your XMS/EMS problems, you probably want to run memaker to have it automagically figure where to shuffle your drivers around to fit around ROMs in the UMA. Hand tweaking is often preferred after that... this is less a P4 problem than a regular DOS problem so should be plenty of threads about it.

Custom resolutions might be more a video BIOS thing, though you might find a util that forces vesa modes.

Thanks @BitWrangler for the advice, I ended up spending a few hours last night installing games and trying things out.

The mouse is PS/2 and I've turned off legacy USB input support in BIOS. I'm using the latest cutemouse driver.

So after testing out all the games I suggested, pretty much none of them worked as I'd hoped and it is simply the XMS/EMS issue causing the problems. I'll definitely try memmaker to see if I can get them working better.

Under Expanded memory Setmul wouldn't work, it would just hard hang the PC. Ctrl-c and Alt-Ctrl-Del would not register.

With Extended Memory selected, I could successfully disable L1 cache (which I think turns L2 off as well, because Setmul L2D doesn't say anything after running it - I'll have to run that tool that benchmarks cache performance). I still only had about 450kb left over which had all the Lucasarts games giving me memory errors that I've never seen before 🤣, and at some points of the games the whole thing would just hang. Like in Monkey Island Ultimate Talkie, walking into the SCUMM bar hung the game. I think the speed of the P4 is still an issue with the caches disabled, because the SB 2.0 audio for Day of the Tentacle was very crackly like a bad SB16. Jazz Jackrabbit still crashed with the 200 error...

EDIT: I see in the original post that Setmul L1D is likely disabling L2 cache only, making more sense as to why Jazz doesn't start.

Sam N Max crashes when testing GM music on port 330, DOTT finds it just fine. I know that the au30dos.com driver (Vortex 2 TSR) sets my SB paramaters (set blaster) as 220 / 7 / 1 and doesn't specify a port for the MPU-401. How can any GM music happen at all when nothing is specified? It's a bit mind bending. I wonder if I can just manually set it in the command line as a T6 not a T4 card... I mean, in Windows I have DMA 1 and 3 for the SB compatibility driver...

Oh, and here's something funny, the Intel 845 motherboard I have (D845PESV) simply does not have an option to turn off caches in the BIOS, 🤣. I guess I take that for granted.

450k of conventional memory seems very little. Are you moving anything into upper memory blocks?

But I guess it is to be expected that these sound drivers are much heavier than a those for sb16.

foil_fresh wrote on 2022-01-27, 05:31:

PS. One more thing - is there a way I can add 640x400 as a custom resolution to Nvidia's driver and lock it to 70hz? The reason is my LED display tells me "out of range" when trying to use 640x400. This is totally stupid because any 320x200 output gets doubled up to 640x400 anyway, running absolutely fine... go figure. BUT in Red Alert and Command and Conquer, it only works at 640x480 with black bars at the top and bottom. The heck??

Nvidia cards are VBE 3.0 compatible, so you can tweak refresh rates and add resolutions with DOS utilities specifically made for VBE 3.0

Is it framebuffer related? Idk... but I'm ok with it.

Yes, you need to disable linear framebuffer. More detailed look with expected frame rate can be browsed here

I want to share the solution to my sound problem: C-Media 8738 dos initialize tool "PATCHED"

Nice... but apologies, I read that thread when digging around for CMI8738 stuff, but forgot to include it.. was having a bit of CMI TMI

It seems quite stable. Quake, carmageddon, kyrandia 1, and wolf3d demos worked fine. Autodetect in carmageddon did not work, maybe this is to be expected.

Doom had some problems starting, might be usb mouse.

Gonna try something speed sensitive next...

Methods to get table fog on Radeon 9000 appearing in the thread I branched from Re: GeForce4 vs. GeForce FX? don't know if it works for others like 9200, 9250, or even the low end of the Xhundreds.

More caulk... another gap filling option for a P4 Win98 machine... Compile PCem v8.1 to run on win98
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Solved my MS-7005 heatsink retention problem maybe, found a sink with it's own retention mechanism... otherwise it was probably messing around with epoxy and paperclips to jury rig the broken latches. Where does all the time go though, at age 7 a spare afternoon is long enough for a full pirate voyage or something, a few decades later it's long enough for, whoops, blinked and missed it, it's supper time already.