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RG100 Does Socket 7

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Reply 40 of 58, by HunterZ

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My only experience is K6-2 with an AGP Voodoo Banshee, but the difference with and without VIA AGP drivers installed was night and day. You could really tell that the chipset was holding back the video hardware.

Reply 41 of 58, by retro games 100

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Tetrium wrote:

I personally vastly prefer to use PS/2 whenever I can, if only for being able to use a standard 3-button optical scrollmouse 😀

and

swaaye wrote:

I don't like serial mice because PS2 ports spoiled me with their faster report rates. Serial mice are literally choppy due to the low report rate.

I've just tried something I should have tried ages ago. I plugged my light weight wired optical 3 button scroll mouse (used in my Windows XP machine) in to the Asus P2B (Windows 98 ) mobo's USB port. When the win98 desktop appeared, the USB device was seen, and something called HIDCLASS.SYS was installed. It seems to work OK. This set up may not work with ctmouse.exe, but that's not a problem. I can very easily use a different mouse (eg PS/2 or serial) for my DOS needs. Actually, going back to the serial mouse, it's this one -

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … em=250613108620

The listing says: 520 / 800 DPI. I'm not sure what the 520 means, but 800 DPI sounds quite good. That's the same value that my optical mouse uses. This serial mouse really isn't too bad!

Reply 42 of 58, by swaaye

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If the mobo can do the USB legacy emulation you might be able to use the USB mouse in DOS. I've never actually tried this though. 😁

However, another reason PS2 is preferred over USB is CPU utilization. While that hardly matters on a modern machine, USB can drag older machines down considerably. PS2 is much lighter on the system. This is true for all USB devices, including joysticks, and back in the day gameport joysticks were preferred due to this.

Reply 43 of 58, by retro games 100

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Regarding USB mice: that's very interesting. I tried 3 mice: 1 USB, 1 serial, 1 PS/2. The USB mouse definitely made Deus Ex's frame rate look a bit choppy! The serial and PS/2 mice made this game's frame rate look smoother. I will get another mouse from ebay - it will be another PS/2 mouse, but this time an optical high DPI value mouse. (They're very cheap.) The PS/2 mouse I have ATM is a rather poor Microsoft ball mouse.

Reply 45 of 58, by HunterZ

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swaaye wrote:

However, another reason PS2 is preferred over USB is CPU utilization. While that hardly matters on a modern machine, USB can drag older machines down considerably. PS2 is much lighter on the system. This is true for all USB devices, including joysticks, and back in the day gameport joysticks were preferred due to this.

If that's true then it's highly ironic because Win7 (and maybe Vista?) removed gameport support because having to frequently poll the port was supposedly deemed to be too resource-intensive.

Also, I hate PS/2 ports because they're the only ones that aren't hot-pluggable (well, maybe for AT keyboards aren't either - I don't remember). Also, PS/2 keyboards tend to not register certain combinations of keypresses which can be annoying for gaming.

Reply 46 of 58, by swaaye

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You are right that gameports are very demanding. For some reason that little fact escaped me before. 😁 I believe the original gameport is the most wasteful. There was a brief "digital gameport" era just before USB came in, and that version of the gameport addressed the extreme CPU drain I believe. Most PCI sound cards have those gameports. Just getting it off of the ISA bus probably helped some.

If I'm using Win9x, I always try to go PS/2 for keyboard and mouse. Seems to be the fastest, least CPU intensive way to go I think. On modern PCs, I just stick with USB though because there's little to gain these days.

Back when USB was rather new, with say the 430/440 chipset series or Super 7 shit, I remember having a lot of weird issues with USB. Part of it came down to cards not liking to share the USB IRQ and the IRQ was shared with a PCI slot. Win9x was also at fault here because IRQ sharing is not so great with it. Also, occasionally you'd run into a mobo with one of those horrible early ACPI implementations and I'm sure weird stuff cropped up with USB cuz of that. So I'm a bit USB-jaded, especially if working with old hardware.

Reply 47 of 58, by 5u3

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HunterZ wrote:

Also, I hate PS/2 ports because they're the only ones that aren't hot-pluggable (well, maybe for AT keyboards aren't either - I don't remember). Also, PS/2 keyboards tend to not register certain combinations of keypresses which can be annoying for gaming.

AT and PS/2 keyboards share the same protocol (there are cheap "dumb" adapters to change the connector). The issue with some key combinations not working is caused by the controller inside the keyboard and varies between manufacturers.

HunterZ wrote:

fyi, USB mice can usually run PS/2 with an adapter. They usually come with the adapter.

True, but only works with mice supporting both PS/2 and USB protocols. Some newer and/or very cheap models only speak USB, and the PS/2 adapters don't work on them.

Reply 48 of 58, by Old Thrashbarg

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The issue with some key combinations not working is caused by the controller inside the keyboard and varies between manufacturers.

And, moreover, PS/2 is capable of accepting a greater combination of keypresses than USB. USB can handle 6 simultaneous keypresses, while PS/2 has no limit. There's also the fact that PS/2 is based on a hardware interrupt, while USB needs constant and active polling of the attached devices. Neither point is usually a problem (though the latter one might be a bit of an issue on particularly slow machines), but PS/2 is, nonetheless, technically superior for input devices.

Reply 49 of 58, by retro games 100

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swaaye wrote:

BTW, nice STB Nitro 3D w/ Virge GX. I've got one of those myself. Too bad all of the S3 S3D API games refuse to run on it!!!!!

I stumbled upon this video card on ebay:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … em=320601015107

It's an STB Nitro, but it looks like the chip onboard is by Cirrus Logic. Is this an inferior Nitro card, and not as good as the Virge GX chip based cards? Thanks.

Reply 50 of 58, by swaaye

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I'm not sure it's inferior, but it's not a Virge GX. 😀 The Nitro line had a few different models.

Virge GX can sort of manage some D3D games whereas that Cirrus Logic chip is 2D only.

Reply 51 of 58, by sprcorreia

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Tetrium wrote:

It looks like a 430VX mobo, one of -the- oldest ATX mobo's around. The VX chipset can only cope with the lowest density SDRAM, hence why a single sided 64MB stick won't work properly.

The mobo looks like it's made by Intel. Interesting that it has no SIMM slots whatsoever

I have a couple of Intel HX ATX motherboards... They are quite old, older than VX.

Reply 52 of 58, by Tetrium

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sprcorreia wrote:
Tetrium wrote:

It looks like a 430VX mobo, one of -the- oldest ATX mobo's around. The VX chipset can only cope with the lowest density SDRAM, hence why a single sided 64MB stick won't work properly.

The mobo looks like it's made by Intel. Interesting that it has no SIMM slots whatsoever

I have a couple of Intel HX ATX motherboards... They are quite old, older than VX.

Pics? 😁

And btw, VX and HX are at about the same age. VX was mainstream while HX was more high end

Reply 53 of 58, by Antinomy

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Nope, not the same era. VX was same as TX as they both handle SDRAM but in different amounts.
HX is the same era as FX. The NX is even earlier. I've remembered that I have an Intel ATX HX-based board. Looks like the really oldest ATX. 😀

Reply 54 of 58, by 5u3

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HX is the Intel chipset to use if you want the L2 cache to cover more than 64 MB RAM (unless you've got a K6 with on-die L2 cache). Many boards also need the TAG RAM to be upgraded for this to work.

Reply 56 of 58, by Old Thrashbarg

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Yes, but HX doesn't support SDRAM leaving you with EDO.

That's really not a problem, though... EDO is pretty easy to come by, and on the Pentium platform, there's no appreciable performance penalty compared to SDRAM.

Oh, and you're wrong about the eras, the VX and HX came out at the same time, early '96 IIRC. The 430FX was at the beginning of '95, a full year before the HX. The VX replaced the FX on the lower end, and the HX was a bit of a belated replacement for the NX aimed at the higher-end.

Reply 57 of 58, by Tetrium

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I had a look at the dates the VX and HX were released. Wiki mentions both were released in February 1996, so I always assumed they were 'brothers', but perhaps I don't know the full story?

Afair the VX was supposed to be Intel's mainstream lowerend chipset and the HX it's higher end chipset.
I assumed the HX did not get support for SDRAM as this chipset was also supposed to be used in servers, and servers like to use proven but older technology, and SDRAM was very new at that time.

Reply 58 of 58, by robertmo

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5u3 wrote:
AT and PS/2 keyboards share the same protocol (there are cheap "dumb" adapters to change the connector). The issue with some key […]
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HunterZ wrote:

Also, I hate PS/2 ports because they're the only ones that aren't hot-pluggable (well, maybe for AT keyboards aren't either - I don't remember). Also, PS/2 keyboards tend to not register certain combinations of keypresses which can be annoying for gaming.

AT and PS/2 keyboards share the same protocol (there are cheap "dumb" adapters to change the connector). The issue with some key combinations not working is caused by the controller inside the keyboard and varies between manufacturers.

HunterZ wrote:

fyi, USB mice can usually run PS/2 with an adapter. They usually come with the adapter.

True, but only works with mice supporting both PS/2 and USB protocols. Some newer and/or very cheap models only speak USB, and the PS/2 adapters don't work on them.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

The issue with some key combinations not working is caused by the controller inside the keyboard and varies between manufacturers.

And, moreover, PS/2 is capable of accepting a greater combination of keypresses than USB. USB can handle 6 simultaneous keypresses, while PS/2 has no limit. There's also the fact that PS/2 is based on a hardware interrupt, while USB needs constant and active polling of the attached devices. Neither point is usually a problem (though the latter one might be a bit of an issue on particularly slow machines), but PS/2 is, nonetheless, technically superior for input devices.

Does that mean issue with some key combinations not working may happen on usb keyboards too?