swaaye wrote:Lately I've been regretting dumping all of my VLB stuff, but I also know in the back of my mind that I got rid of it because I couldn't stand dealing with its flakiness and slowness anymore. Doesn't stop the mind from wandering though.... 🤣
(Apology to bushwack, because my post below isn't about the Winchip topic.)
I also have this thought. But I keep thinking, what is the best retro gaming equipment to have? IMHO, one way to answer this is to look at your games collection. For instance, if the DOS VGA games "Dark Forces" or "Doom" run without any issues on any Pentium I or II or III mobo, then there's no compelling reason to run it on a 486. I understand that a good 486 VLB board is better than a good 486 PCI board. When I use the word better, I presume that means faster. I'm not sure if there are any other noteable benefits when playing old DOS games. If there are, please tell me. Running the VESA benchmark utility "Pcpbench.exe" on a good 486 VLB board will yield faster results than probably any 486 PCI board, no matter how good the PCI video card is. But I understand that the speed increase is just a couple of frames per second faster. Eg VLB = 9, PCI = 7. (Very approximate values for 100Mhz - I think.) The problem for me is that I wouldn't want to run any DOS VESA game on any 486 mobo. AFAIK, there are no DOS VESA games in existence that won't run flawlessly on any Pentium 1 mobo. So, why choose a VLB based 486 mobo instead of a PCI based 486 mobo? Is there something "special" about a good *VLB* 486 mobo, that gets "lost" when you upgrade from a 486 era mobo to a Pentium era mobo? I ran the "Superscape 3Dbench 1.0" VGA benchmark utility on a PCI 486, with just a DX2-66 CPU in it and got 50 frames per second, and that makes me think - isn't that good enough?
Personally speaking, I've gone about the retro hardware choice the following way -
I've got no PC games from the early 80s up to the late 80s. If I had, I think I'd get a 286 for the early stuff and a 386 for the later stuff. However, the DOSBox emulator is incredible, and IMHO can be considered as a perfectly satisfactory way of playing nearly all ancient DOS games.
I've got a small number of PC games from the early 90s. These games were typically released on 3.5" floppy disk. I think there's 5 ways you can approach this situation. These 5 options are not listed in any special order.
1) Run them on a 386. This was how most of these games were meant to be played. (I don't own any 386 mobos.)
2) Run them on a 486. A small number of these early 90s era games won't work correctly. Typically, you'll get speed problems. If this occurs, you can disable the BIOS cache options. This will eliminate the speed problems at the hardware level, but I don't fully understand if this technique might somehow interfer with any of the games' general gameplay in any way.
3) Use DOSBox.
4) Play the Amiga game equivalent, either on an Amiga or an Amiga emulator. If the same old PC game exists on the Amiga, the chances are it will look better.
5) If the game isn't speed sensitive, then run them on any old Pentium machine.
The other PC games I have are from the early 90s and onwards. These games were typically released on CD-ROM. AFAIK, none of these games have any speed or compatibility problems if you run them on any 486 or old Pentium 1 mobo. In other words, you don't specifically need a 386 to solve any speed problems. So, where does that leave the dilemma about choosing a VLB 486 mobo instead of a PCI 486 mobo? If you own a 386, and any 486, and any old Pentium mobo, I can't see how you would specifically need one. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Just one other thing - writing the above got me thinking about old socket 7 Pentiums. IMHO, they're quite a useful addition to the retro hardware collection. The good thing is, unlike 386 mobos and to a lesser extent 486 mobos, inexpensive socket 7 mobos + CPUs + RAM can still be easily found.
