Good work ! Made some notes for future reference based on your troubles 😀
Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun
voidstar wrote on 2025-01-05, 22:33:For testing, I picked ST:TNG Unity by Spectrum Holobyte. It is about 600MB and was one of the "last DOS games" (even in its README.TXT, they had last minute How-To added explaining that Win95 hadn't been released yet, but they had suggestions how it might be configured to work under Win95). And also, it's a game I never played before, so interested to see how it plays on this 386DX-33.
However, as it turns out, ST:TNG Unity requires a math coprocessor! I do have one, but it is only 20MHz and caused stability issues with this 386DX-33. I have another 33MHz coprocessor on order, will be a few days. Quake also requires a co-processor, so we'll see how it handles also (and it took forever to install that across the SDLPT device). Any other pre-DirectX large-DOS games to suggest? Something with BG music and FX. I guess WC4 was still MS-DOS in 1996, I'll see if that requires a co-processor as well. But dialing back a couple years, lots of good stuff in '94 (Warcraft, SystemShock, XCOM, Elder Scrolls, XWing/TieFighter).
But at least I can confirm ST:TNG Unity was installable from a CD-R that I just burned today, using that SBIDE.SYS driver that we just figured out how to setup for that original 1997 Creative 24X CD-ROM 😀
IIRC ST:TNG A Final Unity asked
as its minimal requirements. I played it on my Pentium build so I had no issues whatsoever.
1995 was far from the end of DOS games: it was a year when VESA-compatible video and CD-ROM requirements became common but 3D acceleration had not been mainstream yet. It took the gaming industry two more years (thanks to the huge success of the original Diablo) to migrate under DirectX, eliminating hardware IRQ setup before starting the game.
As for your 80386DX-33 I'd suggest testing it with slightly older games that ran under Mode 13h (320x200, 256 colors) instead. I enjoyed playing F-15 Strike Eagle III and Day of the Tentacle on my 80386DX-20 with 1x CD-ROM (Panasonic CR-523).
I was not able to solve my picoPSU issue with the physical Creative CD-ROM PATA (and I tried 90W on up to 300W picoPSU/microATX). But I came across the ZuluIDE (that takes ISOs on a microSD and emulates CD-ROM access across IDE), and can play audioCDs also.
I have photos and notes about it here:
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/get … 7/#post-1432951
Now I'm having a bit of trouble with joysticks. I found some Joystick specific test programs (because CheckIt 3.0 wasn't being reliable on joystick testing), and the joysticks are working. But it is very inconsistent in how various MS-DOS games are supporting the joystick ports.
RE: 1995 and DOS games. I guess in those years I had OS/2 and didn't get much into the VESA era. Win98 + DirectX finally convinced me to give up on OS/2.
voidstar wrote on 2025-02-23, 07:11:Creative CD-ROM PATA
What's the exact model of your CD-ROM? Panasonic / Creative interface had the exact same physical shape of PATA but was different electronically (similar case: ATX vs. Dell PSU). IIRC they started switching to PATA only after Pentium era when 430FX Triton chipset offered two onboard IDE channels and users started connecting their CD-ROMs to MB rather than sound cards.
voidstar wrote on 2025-02-23, 07:11:I have photos and notes about it here:
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/get … 7/#post-1432951
I'm afraid that VCFed requires registration in order to view/download attachments.
