shock__ wrote:

Dant wrote:

Good luck getting i.e. second reality to run on an i7

You would be surprised 🤣

Not an i7 but on a Phenom II and Asrock 770 chipset board.

You can go into BIOS, set the reference clock to 100 and multi to 0.5 🤣

BAM you have a modern 50 MHz CPU 😁

throttle.exe also works on a Phenom II and I also tested an Atom based netbook.

I have a W98SE DOS Bootable USB Stick for testing and yup all the speed sensitive games worked just fine.

No ISA slot on that board however, so that was as good it gets.

However with some luck you can get a PCI based AudioPCI /Sound Blaster Live! going. Unfortunately they have issues with really old games as well and FM emulation is average to shocking.

However for games that support General Midi (Doom and later) this solution works perfect.

Still I came to the conclusion that perusing this further isn't worth it. The problem is that while you can slow down the processor, your video and memory subsytem is light years faster than a vintage 386.

So you will run into games that use "graphics cards" tricks to do scrolling and BAM those games will still run way to fast. The fact that industrial boards with ISA slots usually don't allow overclocking (under clocking in our case) or change of multipliers doesn't help either.

So yea personally I didn't see the point, especially with so many other options around (real vintage 386 and 486 machines, super socket 7 slowed down with cache settings and ISA video card, DOSBox...).

And unfortunately these boards are so expensive that no Retro guy has gotten one "just to muck around" with it.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

You would be surprised LOL […]
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shock__ wrote:

Good luck getting i.e. second reality to run on an i7

You would be surprised 🤣

Not an i7 but on a Phenom II and Asrock 770 chipset board.

You can go into BIOS, set the reference clock to 100 and multi to 0.5 🤣

BAM you have a modern 50 MHz CPU 😁

Cool 😀 Awhile ago when I was doing various silly experiments on my former Desktop (AMD64-3200+, Socket 754) under DOS and noticed Second Reality wasn't working at all 😒 Didn't check further into this tho, I have to admit.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Still I came to the conclusion that perusing this further isn't worth it. The problem is that while you can slow down the proces […]
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Still I came to the conclusion that perusing this further isn't worth it. The problem is that while you can slow down the processor, your video and memory subsytem is light years faster than a vintage 386.

So you will run into games that use "graphics cards" tricks to do scrolling and BAM those games will still run way to fast. The fact that industrial boards with ISA slots usually don't allow overclocking (under clocking in our case) or change of multipliers doesn't help either.

So yea personally I didn't see the point, especially with so many other options around (real vintage 386 and 486 machines, super socket 7 slowed down with cache settings and ISA video card, DOSBox...).

And unfortunately these boards are so expensive that no Retro guy has gotten one "just to muck around" with it.

That pretty much sums up what I wanted to say, while showing the LPT-AdLib as a possible alternative.

shock__ wrote:

LPT-AdLib

IMO a very sensible project considering that that Sound Blaster speech / sound effects and MIDI (external Roland modules) usually work just fine on newer machines. And the lack of real Yamaha OPL chip is usually the thing that sticks out.

Though I have no idea about difficulty / cost involved in making such a device...

I must also note that DOSBox's OPL3 emulation is very very good. At least IMO.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

shock__ wrote:

LPT-AdLib

IMO a very sensible project considering that that Sound Blaster speech / sound effects and MIDI (external Roland modules) usually work just fine on newer machines. And the lack of real Yamaha OPL chip is usually the thing that sticks out.

Thing is, that LPT-AdLib is strictly limited to pure AdLib I think, so no SB/Midi there.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Though I have no idea about difficulty / cost involved in making such a device...

If you know that you should let go of your soldering iron once the room starts to smell like chicken you should be ready to go 😉 About the costs, I'd put it somewhere the lines of "less than $10" (excluding the AdLib card), all parts can be bought for a few cents at radioshack or similar (the most expensive part prolly is the ISA connector or the perfboard needed).

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I must also note that DOSBox's OPL3 emulation is very very good. At least IMO.

Agreed once more. But purists and stuff you know 😉

Dant wrote:

You see were trying to use any ISA card we want on these systems, LPT adaptation limits our usable IRQs, and bandwidth, along with preventing use of DMA channels or any sort of 16-bit card.

Yea man can I ask why? Just wondering what you are trying to achieve.

Thanks 😉

Going back to the OP, I did some searches for modern ISA-slot p4 mainboards a few weeks ago.

The one that looked best for me [partly cos I have a microATX case spare...] was an Intel D845GECL, micro-ATX, 1 ISA slot, 1 AGP 4x slot.

But there were also boards by iBase, iTox, Zeiss, Kontron,QDI and Alptech. Two of them were 775, the rest were 478. The 775 boards had 915 chipsets.

Some of them did not have AGP slots, but of those that many weren't proper AGP slots - seemed like they were for digital output to a flat-screen only. And there's the chipset variants where you can't turn off the onboard video, but maybe that's the same boards.

Seemed a bit of a minefield, notwithstanding the issues over chipsets being supported by older OSs - I was thinking of running Windows 98 on one, dual-booting with 2000 or xp. I was going to run an ews64xl as the isa card, and then I saw something about that card being picky about boards, so i'm in a quandary about whether a p4 isa board would likely just be a waste of money. [Why a p4 and not a bx board? I have a few spare p4 processors, a 2.6 478 and a 3.2 775.]

Ever checked into PICMG 1.3?

There are backplanes which have ISA, PCI-X and PCI-E slots ... Single board computers with that specification go up til at least socket 775 from a quick google.

ratfink wrote:

Windows 98 on one, dual-booting with 2000 or xp.]

But these operating systems are all about PCI sound cards right?

I thought W98 was ruled by card such as Diamond MX300, Sound Blaster Live! and Audigy.

Why the need for an ISA sound card?

I want something to run an EWS64XL in, which is isa and iirc the best drivers for it are for 95/98.

It probably doesn't need a 2ghz+ cpu, all I recall is that a k6/3+ wasn't always up to it.

But now I think of it, one idea had been to also run linux [rather than 2000/xp as I indicated] so we can use rosegarden, though that will require a different sound card as ews64 is not well supported by linux.

Somehow I was under the impression that for W98 you really want a PCI soundcard. Having said that windows 98 isn't my area of expertise 🤣

This might be interesting:

http://www.costronic.com.tw/Ev71p.htm

Not sure how much it costs, if you go to thier homepage it asks you to email an enquiry.

Not sure what a "backplate" is: http://cgi.ebay.com.au/IEI-Technology-PX-10S- … =item4155a84e34

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

shock__ wrote:

You would be surprised LOL […]
Show full quote

Dant wrote:

Good luck getting i.e. second reality to run on an i7

You would be surprised 🤣

Not an i7 but on a Phenom II and Asrock 770 chipset board.

You can go into BIOS, set the reference clock to 100 and multi to 0.5 🤣

BAM you have a modern 50 MHz CPU 😁

Wow...what motherboard do you have? I think I can only get my Phenom II down to 1000 Mhz? Though I haven't really tried except for a quick glance in the BIOS. I'm using an MSI AM3 board (WITH floppy connector!! 😁 😁 😁 )

This one: http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=770DE3L

I'm not using it anymore as it started to lock up after I played with a Sound Blaster Live 5.1 Digital which later turned out to be dead and likely killed that mainboard 🤣

Using an Asus uATX board now. Doesn't go as low. I believe 400 MHz is the lowest...

DonutKing wrote:

This might be interesting:

http://www.costronic.com.tw/Ev71p.htm

Not sure how much it costs, if you go to thier homepage it asks you to email an enquiry.

The info underneath the pics says that you need to write a device driver yourself. Could be very tricky, if you're not in to that kind of thing.

Also (just to save writing another post, I'll stick this info here) regarding new mobos and SB emulation using SB PCI cards. I think you need the mobo to support NMI, otherwise I don't think it will work.

retro games 100 wrote:

DonutKing wrote:

This might be interesting:

http://www.costronic.com.tw/Ev71p.htm

Not sure how much it costs, if you go to thier homepage it asks you to email an enquiry.

The info underneath the pics says that you need to write a device driver yourself. Could be very tricky, if you're not in to that kind of thing.

As written on their page somewhere, those are reference designs ... chances are good you might even have to solder a few wires yourself. Prices for those cards are most likely gonna be ridiculously high as well. Just compare to this -> http://www.twinind.com/catalog_detail.php?id=147 (fully passive "riser" without any electronics/logic)

Hey, I said it was interesting, not a solution 🤣 😉

DonutKing wrote:

Hey, I said it was interesting, not a solution 🤣 😉

OK! 🤣

I see what you mean... But, didn't they have fully working integrated bridges on systems <10 years ago? What happened?

Dant wrote:

I see what you mean... But, didn't they have fully working integrated bridges on systems <10 years ago? What happened?

Those are pretty much uniquely designed/adapted for each socket/cpu type. Why they died out? Tell me one _modern_ use of the ISA bus (except quick and easy prototyping maybe [which is the main reason boards like the mentioned in the original post still exist]).