First post, by Darkcrafter07
- Rank
- Newbie
Hello there, some might know me by these projects on doomworld:
1. Hell Renaissance - a mapset with repacked mods, hires assets and a custom launcher for Doom;
2. Doom and Doom 2 GENMIDI lumps converted to sound fonts;
Recently I have found a new hobby on building a retro PC out of the one that got in my hands accidentaly it was a 2002 Intel Celeron 1.7GHz, 512MB RAM with 256+256 DDR sticks, with a killed 40GB HDD and no CD-DVD drive.
The FDD was ok so I kept it that way. Later it was disassembled down to a bolt and washed out with chemicals and dryed out. HDD was replaced to Maxtor 250GB via some 5$ chinesse SATA to IDE adapter which works really nice,
even though that motherboard has two SATA connectors, the hardrive lagged very hard and what's even more strange, Windows XP installer didn't detect it.
I was able to scrap just a tad bit newer motherboard which also came with Intel Celeron 2.4GHz a bent off NVIDIA FX5500 video card with a fan torn off. So some capacitors were replaced, holes drilled gently in the video card
(barbaric!) and a system fan mounted on thin wire so that it works, now firmly installed in the motherboar and no short circuiting occurs in the AGP slot.
The HDD was partitioned to 2 parts, both formated in FAT32 and dual booted via "BootMagic" software to Windows 98SE and Windows XP SP3 so that when one system is working it doesn't see other logical drive.
This way it's no more possible for Windows XP "bootsect.dos" to be spoiled as it needs to be written in the sector #0 and a chance to lose an capability to run Windows 98 is decreasing a lot.
So far it's a nice PC for old software and games and the only thing it lacks now is a proper OPL3 sounding which I can't imagine a retro PC without as I had "ESS AudioDrive 1868WDM" when I was a kid.
This PC is capable to run DosBox v074 and such games like Doom work on it like it was a DX2-80MHz 486, of course Quake works as well but speed still suffers, well, if Quake is run under Win98 then this machine is way too fast for it,
it's only pure DOS that runs it without a compromise and it's the game that causes no issues at all - as it detects NVIDIA card and provides video modes up to 1280x1024 (25 fps).
I wouldn't really bother with building a retro PC if I had to use just DosBox, PCem or 86box as I wanted to get my hands on the real thing.
It's just a couple of days ago I could finally setup "SBEMU" under MS-DOS7.10 so that it would work in protected and real modes on SiS Realtek AC'97 chip. Some games like Dune2 can't run as they can't pull any XMS memory out of it.
All Doom games and Heretic, Quake, Quake2 DOS, Duke Nukem 3D work both with sound and music that way but as soon as mouse starts moving it starts behaving like if somebody pressed keyboard keys and never released them, be it SBEMU setup or pure DOS. At least SBEMU works and I'm really glad things like this exist.
Now I'd like to get the same thing but for Windows 9x and Windows XP but with a few tweaks:
1. It needs to work just like real fm-synthesis card would: read DOS or Windows programs OPL commands and directives;
2. A much wider instrument bank selector, there is a lot of found on the web;
3. Better CPU optimization options:
a) percussion channels to work with 49716 sampling rate to reproduce sound more faithfuly where it's the most necessary;
b) melodic channels to allow selecting different samling rates like 11.25kHz, 22kHz, 32kHz, 44.1kHz to unload the CPU a bit;
c) different emulator cores for percussion and melodic channels to save some cycles somewhere;
d) an option to mix it up with sound fonts - that could also save some cycles as well as alter the sounding a lot;
e) the whole mixer thing making for all the components to work in sync;
4. Unattainable by now some other rich man features like (optional and that's very gross!):
a) digital effects like EQ, compression, limiting, flangers, choruses, delays, reverbs via DX/VST/VST2 plug-ins;
b) midi effects like time, level, pitch randomization (to humanize it a bit), notes chopping, arpegiation, etc...
b) a system of presets that is based around folders or zip-files containing all necessary stuff like fm-banks, soundfonts, settings, midis, vsts.
If there were some people to make such things happen that would be super cool for the world as it would cover a need to obtain some really odd options like super rare PCI or LPT cards with an FM chip and lots of inconveniences.
What I found currently here is that @datajake1999 made a fork of Nuke Windows OPL3 emulator driver but for Windows 2000, that could be a nice base to build something like that off?