Got to play a bunch of new games bought on GOG summer sale and test them for Phil's real DOS compatibility chart. Some highlights:
Fallout is the Windows, not DOS version. 🙁
Shadow Warrior and Blood come in mixed mode CD format, but you don't need the CD to play the game. In the case of Shadow Warrior, you get no music without the CD; with Blood, it comes with FM/MIDI support, so you can use those for music.
Betrayal at Krondor is the same: you need the CD if you choose CD music, but you can play without the CD with FM or MIDI music. Interestingly, this game is very speed sensitive. The game flatout froze on me during startup unless I was at slow-to-mid 486 or lower speeds. And even at 486-25 speeds, MIDI music would glitch. It only played normally at 486-16 or slower speeds.

I made the CD for Blood, yes, it's for music only 😀

I got quite good at creating these discs 😀

I use an audio converter to conver MP3/OGG to WAV.

Then InfraRecorder to burn the mixed mode CD.

Yes, the Free Audio Converter does make it a quick job, though I don't like the pop-up ad when you close it. I seem to remember Malwarebytes Anti-Malware flagging it as "potentially unwanted" too. But after further scans it seems fine. And it's the quickest converter of the bunch too. 😀

Gave up on 7th Guest. The game does work, but it has 1 CD Audio track on disc 1 and disc 2. So you play the game from HDD but got to swap the CD before you go up the stairs.

Ended up buying 7th Guest and 11th hour on eBay 😀

Will enter them into the sheet, 7th Guest at least works, 11th hour has a Windows executable only and missing a SETUP program. Too hard 😒

This summer sale got me nearly every game on my wishlist. Pretty soon I'm going to need a bigger monitor just to display all the GOG titles. 🤣

Nice list 😀

Tested around 40 DDR RAM sticks with memtest, and 15 or so of my ide and older SATA drives for errors. So far so good. But I have at least that many more to go!

petro89 wrote:

Tested around 40 DDR RAM sticks with memtest, and 15 or so of my ide and older SATA drives for errors. So far so good. But I have at least that many more to go!

Time-consuming and thankless work. Do you have more than one system to test them in at a time?

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I was about to bust out the old Laserdisc player for retro movie night, but decided to do something completely different this time:
Pentium III powered High Definition Home Theater. I took my copy of Guardians of the Galaxy on Blu-Ray, transcoded it to 720p with x264, copied it over to the PIII, turned on the popcorn machine and had a blast.

No shortcuts like accelerated video decoding were taken, either. That poor PIII was doing all of the 720p AVC decoding on its own, which is pretty impressive for a relatively low-clocked single core CPU without SSE2.

Hooked up to the big screen, with the X-Fi card bitstreaming DTS 5.1 to the AV receiver, that old computer was providing a home theater experience not too far behind the full 1080p/7.1 Blu-Ray!

Overclocking was a must. At stock 1.4GHz, the video would occasionally fall behind the audio track during some of the more complex scenes. However at 1575MHz playback was perfect. CPU usage was nearly maxed, but it didn't skip a beat. I believe the increased bus speed did the trick. SSE support is also a must. A 1.4GHz Athlon (without SSE) just lacks the horsepower to smoothly play 720p AVC.

Derping around with future build,so far i have:

550 mhz P3 Katmai with Thermaltake Golden Orb
Transcend TS-ABX
idk but i think 128 or 256 mb sdram
Xelo Riva TNT2 Pro 32mb
Diamond 3dfx VooDoo 2 8mb (dont have pair so far)
Creative Sound Blaster PCI 128 CT4750
Tekram scsi card
and nic
thinking about one more sound card something like ymf-7xx based or Vortex2

something like 20gb ide hdd and 73gb scsi + win98 se

any suggests? 😜

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clueless1 wrote:

petro89 wrote:

Tested around 40 DDR RAM sticks with memtest, and 15 or so of my ide and older SATA drives for errors. So far so good. But I have at least that many more to go!

Time-consuming and thankless work. Do you have more than one system to test them in at a time?

Of course, but then what would I use to play games while doing the tests?!?! 😊

clueless1 wrote:

This summer sale got me nearly every game on my wishlist. Pretty soon I'm going to need a bigger monitor just to display all the GOG titles. 🤣

gog.png

Now that is impressive 😳

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No offense taken. 😀 I'd like to think I might get around to playing all of them in my lifetime, otherwise they wouldn't have made it onto my wishlist to begin with. Is it really any different than buying hardware you may never use other than to test with once or twice? 😉

Testing a couple of sound cards compatibility (YMF724, Vortex Aureal 2) under plain DOS with a variety of games. Details in YMF744, DOS, no DMA? (PC/PCI, SB-link tests) (edit YES DMA, read further down) and Aureal Vortex 2

Played some Far Cry--got through the Research level and made it to the Tree House. Just saw my first few glimpses of Trigens. Oh, joy.

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Testing done for today, now getting ready to spend a few quality hours with Pirates! Gold. It's tougher than I remembered.