Could be, but we are talking about ibm pc scsi drives (or amiga apparently 😉)

Mmm yeah, my old intellistation with two scsi hard drives used to sound like a jumbo jet starting up. It's true though that old apple scsi's seemed quiet. Were they 10krpm though?

ratfink wrote:

Mmm yeah, my old intellistation with two scsi hard drives used to sound like a jumbo jet starting up. It's true though that old apple scsi's seemed quiet. Were they 10krpm though?

10K? oh god no. more like 5400rpm. more than capable of saturating the isa bus. When I finishe REV 2.0 of my 386 it will have one of these hard drives. Mostly because the 10krpm 4gb drive i bought off ebay will not work on 50 pin cable. (works fine on 68) meh.

Origin games always benefited from SMARTDRV. I remember a reviewer complaining about the Installation time of Wing Commander 2 on his 386 machine.

With SMARTDRV it only takes a fraction of that time.

Built a similarly-intended, "Ultima 7" system a few years back...

It has a 486SX/33, which, as mentioned, seems to be the ideal speed. Audio is handled by a Sound Blaster Pro 1 and Roland MPU-IPC w/CM-32L. I did take things a bit further than necessary, perhaps, by expanding the memory to the full 32MB capacity, and writing a little batch file that copies the entire game in and out of RAM for disk-free play.

That AST looks awfully familiar..... Radio Shack used that same case for the Tandy Sensation II! Different motherboard though. Not surprising as Radio Shack was moving towards selling AST PCs at the time.

NJRoadfan wrote:

That AST looks awfully familiar.....]

Well, considering the fact that the Sensation II's were built by AST... 😉

Cloudschatze wrote:

It has a 486SX/33, which, as mentioned, seems to be the ideal speed. Audio is handled by a Sound Blaster Pro 1 and Roland MPU-IPC w/CM-32L. I did take things a bit further than necessary, perhaps, by expanding the memory to the full 32MB capacity, and writing a little batch file that copies the entire game in and out of RAM for disk-free play.

Nice one, I like the disk-free play idea 😎

Do you remember having any trouble with the music becoming corrupted? I was in a cave and it started blipping and blopping; I figured it would go away with a re-start so ignored it and carried on for a while, saving as I went.

I re-booted the machine and loaded my game - still corrupted. Only starting a new game fixed it... so now I'm back at square one. 😒

It's not a hardware thing if a re-boot didn't fix it.

Cloudschatze wrote:

I did take things a bit further than necessary, perhaps, by expanding the memory to the full 32MB capacity, and writing a little batch file that copies the entire game in and out of RAM for disk-free play.

Interesting, I also hold 32mb of ram in my 486 pc. Before I'm thinking to try this method, does it make a notable difference, in terms of smoothness of game play?

I can assume, if nothing else, that the hard drive thrashing sound may not be overheard as much, with the game working in ram.

Thanks for your input.

pianoman72 wrote:

Interesting, I also hold 32mb of ram in my 486 pc. Before I'm thinking to try this method, does it make a notable difference, i […]
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Cloudschatze wrote:

I did take things a bit further than necessary, perhaps, by expanding the memory to the full 32MB capacity, and writing a little batch file that copies the entire game in and out of RAM for disk-free play.

Interesting, I also hold 32mb of ram in my 486 pc. Before I'm thinking to try this method, does it make a notable difference, in terms of smoothness of game play?

I can assume, if nothing else, that the hard drive thrashing sound may not be overheard as much, with the game working in ram.

Thanks for your input.

That sounds like you have made a RAM Disk. Consider the difference between 4-5MB/sec with a contemporary IDE drive and VLB controller and 133MB/sec of a 33MHz/32-bit bus. Loading games are by far the task that takes the longest, so loading the game off RAM should cut down the time tremendously.

hmmm, I never heard of this game having speed issues on a 66mhz 486. U7 is on my game playlist so looks like I need to work on anouther build.

As has been noted, Exult is a perfectly acceptable alternative. There's also U7run, which will get the job done nicely on Win9x machines.

IMHO there should be an Exult build for DOS, quite frankly nowdays the original engine feels quite crappy to me. That's what keeps me away from playing the U7 games all these years...
Don't get me wrong, it was a feat back in the day but now that horrible scrolling makes me dizzy.
Same problem with U8, I played it back then with a Zenith 486/66+5428 and I don't touch it again because of the scrolling speed inconsistencies/motion

Exult for dos..... Wow wouldn't that be great!

Badmofo: I have only just recently seen this thread. Your cases are always the best mate and I admire your dedication to build a box specifically for Ultima 7.

Serpent Isle is the best game I have ever played.

Smartdrv is definitely a MUST for Ultima 7

Exult also has horrible scrolling 😉
The game just works this way...
AFAIK in the early early days, Exult was ported to Dos 😉

^ really? there is still horrible scrolling in Exult? but whyyyyyy?
😁

Guys, you don't seriously mean smartdrv when you say "smartdrv", do you?..

smartdrv is the most basic of all caches, and it can't even be unloaded.

Norton SpeedDrive (SPEEDRV.EXE), that's all I'm going to say.

Could anyone point out a video showing Ultima VII running in a 486SX/DX? I want to see sample the mostly agreed-upon ideal speed.

If you want to run Ultima 7 with working UMBs, find a UMB driver that unlocks shadow memory on your chipset like HIRAM.SYS or "The Last Byte Memory Manager 2.52a". You get Unreal mode friendly UMBs, and its faster since your machine isn't stuck in V86 mode while in DOS for other things.

Great Hierophant wrote:

Could anyone point out a video showing Ultima VII running in a 486SX/DX? I want to see sample the mostly agreed-upon ideal speed.

Here's an exceptionally crap-tastic video using my AST system mentioned above (486SX/33, RAMDrive):

http://youtu.be/K_YRY-nSI7Q

You'll notice that playing the game from RAM does not remedy the pauses while walking.

Enjoy! (or something...)