That's I topic I would love to cover. Time is my enemy though 😒

I'm overseas at the moment, visiting family and friends, so I won't be able to much for the next 2 weeks or so. I'm not kidding, I have a list of "projects" that I want to do, it's a full A4 page and I add more projects than I'm able to complete 🤣

I hear you, if I didn't have so much writing to do for my Master's dissertation, I would definitely be out there making more content. Thanks to the unreliable Postal Service in South Africa, I unfortunately have to wait very long for hardware to arrive, which is why I have a lot of unfinished projects. But thanks for being open to suggestions. I look forward to seeing what you're going to do next. Could you perhaps give us a hint of what we can expect in the future?

StarTech DVI DDC EDID Emulator with EDID Copy Review

I purchases this EDID Emulator a while ago, pondering over if it will do what I think it will do. Turns out it does exactly what I was hoping it does, so I wanted to share my experiences.

This device is useful in "tricking" a graphics card into believing a different monitor is connected, allowing you to force a resolution for example.

The unit has a dial with preset resolutions, but it can also copy the EDID information from a monitor and emulate those.

I use this device in two situations. When capturing DOS footage from a DVI graphics card, my capture card negotiates a 1280 x 1024 resolution and will capture at 50 fps. With this unit, I can set the 1024 x 768 setting which allows me to capture at 1024 x 768 and 60 fps.

Another scenario is my Samsung 24" 1920 x 1200 monitor. With DVI, it doesn't have a selectable resolution for the retro 4:3 aspect ratio 1600 x 1200 resolution, so using this unit I can resolve this.

Link to the product page: http://www.startech.com/AV/Converters/Video/D … -Copy~VSEDIDDVI

Welcome back Phil! I was starting to get withdrawal from not seeing any new videos.

philscomputerlab wrote:

... Time is my enemy though ...

Same here, i hardly find time to do retro stuff.
ATM i even pondering selling everything, because it just wastes space and collects dust. 🙁

Evert wrote:

Welcome back Phil! I was starting to get withdrawal from not seeing any new videos.

Hehe thanks 😀

Solarstorm wrote:

philscomputerlab wrote:

... Time is my enemy though ...

Same here, i hardly find time to do retro stuff.
ATM i even pondering selling everything, because it just wastes space and collects dust. 🙁

I know how you feel. I have an entire room full with old gear. But I don't want to sell. It took me so much time, money and effort to amass it all. Best is to just box it up, get some storage boxes, because you never know when you want to fire up some Wing Commander again.

I also wonder where I'll draw the line and stop. I've only recently begun doing this and I initially only intended to build myself a Socket 7 machine, then I got a Socket 462 machine and it's now at the point where I'll end up with about 5-6 machines. I really want to force myself to have as little spares as possible.

FORCOM M396F VER 2.2 386 motherboard review

This is a review of the FORCOM M396F 2.2 386 motherboard. This motherboard comes with an AMD Am386SX-33 processor, has 6 ISA and 4 memory slots.

Link to the DOS start menu files: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/phils-dos-starter-pack.html

Link to the 386 benchmark batch file: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/phils-simple- … batch-file.html

So I finally got around to test Komat's Wrapper for Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow and made a short video about it:

Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow Shadow and Light Fix

I must say I'm very much impressed. The game is now playable and it looks really good. While there might be some things that don't look exactly right, they will likely be minimal. Big thumbs up!

Star Wars X-Wing Tweak Guide GOG.com Steam

In this video I am showing you how a few tweaks that will improve the graphics, sound, music, speed and controls of the GOG.com version of Star Wars X-Wing (1994 CD Version).

Tweaks covered in this video:

- Refreshing your account in case the game doesn't show up
- Configuring the game to use General MIDI instead of FM music
- Using Sound Fonts for even better music
- Tweaking speed (there are speed related issues with the default configuration)
- Scaling options for full screen 4:3 aspect ratio correct image
- Joysticks tweaks to enable custom buttons, hat and throttle (I'm using a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro)

Link to my sound font page: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/general-midi- … soundfonts.html

Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold Review

This video was a lot of work. But glad it's done as the AWE64 seems to be quite a popular card. The idea is to provide a good overview of what this card can do and how to use it. It's not an in-depth technical dissection, plenty of that information is online and doesn't need repeating 😀

This is a video review of the Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold.

It's quite extensive and covers the following topics:

Card and connectors
Driver downloads
MS-DOS 6.22 driver installation
Diagnose
Configure resources under DOS
DOS mixer
Reverb and Chorus
3D Stereo Enhancement
Loading Soundfonts in DOS
GM, GS and MT-32 Emulation
Windows 9x driver installation
Windows 9x driver update
AWE64 Gold installation CD
Configure resources under Windows 98
Loading Soundfonts in Windows 98
DOS Games with General MIDI from Windows

Nice video on the AWE64 Gold. It's my favorite ISA soundcard as it's so flexible and just works 😀

vetz wrote:

Nice video on the AWE64 Gold. It's my favorite ISA soundcard as it's so flexible and just works 😀

Thank you 😀

How did you do the video capture on the 386 board btw? What graphics card and capturing hardware?

vetz wrote:

How did you do the video capture on the 386 board btw? What graphics card and capturing hardware?

Using the StrTech VGA2HDMIPRO

http://www.philscomputerlab.com/scalers--converters.html

Graphics card is a stock standard ISA VGA with WD chipset. But switched to one with CL chipset, as the DOS screen and 320 x 200 screen are centred. The WD is shifted a little bit.

Let's Play Wing Commander

Giving this a go. My Let’s Play videos introduce you to the game, how you play it, the controls and helping you decide if a game might interest you. To avoid any spoilers, only early parts of the game are shown.

If you weren't sure if Wing Commander is for you, maybe this video will help.

Idk if you did, but you could make a video comparing the performance over sound cards (like ISA vs PCI sound cards).

I'm curious about that because I wanted to try a PCI sound card (Like a Sound Blaster Live or the Diamond MX300) for windows only, and let the ISA sound card for DOS only.
But I'm afraid the results will be actually the same over pci and isa D:

Going with ISA for DOS and PCI for Windows is a pretty good rule. You'll find that PCI cards do a much better job with audio acceleration and technologies such as A3D and EAX.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Let's Play Wing Commander

Giving this a go. My Let’s Play videos introduce you to the game, how you play it, the controls and helping you decide if a game might interest you. To avoid any spoilers, only early parts of the game are shown.

If you weren't sure if Wing Commander is for you, maybe this video will help.

Very helpful! This is what old computer games Let's Play videos are missing, the damn controls and how to play! Please do more 😀 Maybe call the series "How to play?"

You are improving on your videos. If you go back to see your first ones, there is a huge difference to the better!

philscomputerlab wrote:

Going with ISA for DOS and PCI for Windows is a pretty good rule. You'll find that PCI cards do a much better job with audio acceleration and technologies such as A3D and EAX.

Can I mix both? like having the isa sc and pci sc on the same computer? I just hope there's no perforance hit using both cards D: ...

Well, for games from 1995 to 1999, what would be better, get an A3D card or an EAX card? I heard that A3D may make some performance impact on weak cpus 😖, so idk...
I could get a K6-III+ too, but idk, I think I just want to take the best performance with a pentium mmx (Also I would need to get a new bios for support it, since it's a read only bios)