mrau wrote:Jo22 wrote:I agree with that. No that is a bad idea to upgrade the machine massively, but..
Well, I think it is fine the way it is. A 286-10 or 286-12 is a sweet spot for playing CGA games
a little bit smoother, but not too fast to make them unplayable.
machines back then could not be clock adjusted on the fly?
It depends on the machine, I guess. Not all of them had NEAT-like chipsets.
Also, some used wait-states for "turbo" instead of actually changing clock frequency.
And some machines had ISA-speed coupled with CPU-speed, because ISA was more or less directly wired to the processor.
Bye the way, this is an interesting aspect of early 286 motherboards..
Machines made before, say ~88, did pre-date ISA specs. So technically speaking, they had AT-Bus slots at the time.
And because of the lack of these specs, early but higher-end 286 PCs often supported notable BUS speeds of 10/12/16MHz,
before ISA lowered it down to depressingly ~8MHz.
Evidences for this can still be found on ancient RAM boards, which often claim to support 12MHz operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standa … ying_bus_speeds
mrau wrote:
i remember fast 286 were faster than slow 386 in 16 bit software at times; i miss the times when this was geek territory;
Yes, I believe that's true. The 286 supported ISA natively, while the 386SX needed a bit of external electronic.
By the way, something to comes to my mind: The 386DX did also support 16bit/24Bit operation. In theory, it could do all the stuff the 386SX could do.
If I'm not mistaken, some older magazines of the time even said the SX was a lame, useless invention made by Intel.
mrau wrote:zip used the fpu? 😮 so how was lossless compression guaranteed then? i always thought these 2 things were incompatible;
any idea how simcity made use of the fpu? this thing ran very well on my dx40, fpu back then was slow though... any comparison/info on how fpu improved the simcity experience?
Sorry, I meant EMS. Pkunzip does support different porcessors, though. As for SimCity, I think it did help quite a bit.
The whole simulation was very number-heavy, afterall. Another game supporting FPUs might be SimEarth, but I'm not sure.
pkunzip_ems.png
mrau wrote:
can the same memory cards provide ems and xms? in that case ram could stay at 1mb is that correct?
any idea how much ems/xms was required/handy for these programs? someone here had a machine with 32mb hard EMS iirc; i often thought this technology was dropped too soon; (might have been handy till early duron era imho);
Hi, EMS cards are cool, I think. 😀 I've got an AST Rampage 286 W/ 2MiB and I can't complain. It worked with everything EMS so far (upto LIM4, EEMS 3.2).
The card comes with its own driver, remm.sys, and is independend of the main memory.
At least in EMS mode (still have to try XMS mode), there's no need to touch any of the memory chips on the 286 motherboard.
From a personal experience, it can even be installed in 386/486/586 machines without problems (in EMS mode).
And most games I've played so far, did never ask for more than 2 Megabyte of EMS. So I think that's fine for most stuff.
If you'e curious about hardware EMS, have a look at https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/wiki/Lo-tech_2MB_EMS_Board
While I haven't had a chance to try the card myself (currently out of stock), I assume it works similar to the old Rampage.
Except for using an 8Bit slot, instead of the Rampage's 16Bit connection. But on the other hand, the LoTech board uses much quicker RAM.. 😉
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