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I assembled some old hardware and installed Windows 98 SE, and now I'm not sure what I wanted out of it... It seems I've thrown out all my old PC mainboards with ISA on them, so despite saving a bunch of interesting cards (mainly an AWE64 and ESS AudioDrive) there's nothing to install them in. But it's got an internet connection!
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Apr 21, 2017 20:20
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Crotch Fruit posted:As for Windows XP class hardware, I also have a VIA EPIA-V mini ITX board with a C3-800 MHz, I have my doubts about it's abilities to play games like Quake or Unreal Tournament but I admire it's novelty. I also have a 1.2GHz Socket A Athlon with onboard graphics and an AGP slot that I might try to play around with. I have one of those at an even slower clock (I think 500 MHz) and it certainly can play the original DOS version of Quake just fine. I don't have an old enough WinQuake at hand to try that out though. (The ModeX options for 640x480 or 800x600 in DOS Quake are too poor performance to be playable.) Also keep in mind that the DOS version of Quake was made with being run through Windows in mind, in fact it runs better inside a Win9x DOS box than in pure DOS. Edit: Wanted to try Unreal on it, but don't have the disk space. I'm running it off a CF card on an adapter, I know I have some larger cards around... nielsm fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Jun 21, 2017 |
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Jun 21, 2017 18:35
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Unless your goal is to be fully authentic and replicate the low-capacity media experience, wouldn't it be better to just get an SD-card based floppy emulator? And then get a network connection running as soon as possible to transfer the rest.
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Jun 29, 2017 22:22
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Crotch Fruit posted:I don't care about authenticity of the hard drive since I believe that should not have much effect on software or games besides load times, I'm OK with missing out on exciting load screens. Some games crash if the CPU is too fast, but I'm not aware of any games that crash if the hard drive runs too fast. I'm interested in trying to get an IDE to CF adapter since I think CF cards are basically IDE devices unlike SD cards, I can order a IDe to CF adapter for $2 from China, or spend $10 on an IDE to SD adapter. I have a fair number of micro SD cards, but not a single CF card so I'm not sure which route I want to go, in a way I want the CF more simply to experiment with CF cards. But for the moment, I have working hard-drives (and non working drives. . .) so I will try to keep as close to authentic for the time being, I could go all out and by all the bells and whistles right now, but I want to ease in the hobby gently. I can definitely recommend an IDE-CF adapter for harddrive. Although I initially had some trouble getting the right boot sector and other boot files on my card, eventually it did let me install Windows 98 with just the source files copied onto the card from my Windows 10 PC. After that I set up an FTP server on my network and used that to transfer anything else I wanted.
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Jun 30, 2017 07:25
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fishmech posted:There's also straight up IDE SSDs nowadays, which implement more robust wear leveling and handle the IDE bus better for speed. You can use them with a cheap USB enclosure to put the data on them Only things I've seen have been like $100 for 16 GB or likewise ridiculous cost/capacity, and very little or no specs available. Any manufacturers to look for? Search terms?
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Jun 30, 2017 15:34
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Most interesting thing may be that they identify the need for a programmable 3D acceleration chip. It's interesting that they don't aim for a fixed-function accelerator like pretty much every 3D accelerator up to the GeForce 4 generation (I think that was when the first vertex programs got introduced?), but instead more or less for an instruction set extension to support implementing custom rendering on top of. So acceleration for "graphics coordinate manipulation" (presumably proper vector/matrix maths), and various instructions to do texture sampling (even perspective corrected?) and color interpolation to fill. Really, more general-purpose than current-generation GPUs! (But I don't think their architecture would support hyperparallel pipelines like current GPUs are.)
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Jul 19, 2017 21:42
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Anyone have experience with the "Gotek" floppy emulators? I got one of the 1000 image models today and set it up on my Via Epia VE5000 machine, and I'm getting really inconsistent results. I tried formatting the same virtual disk on the same USB stick 3 times in Windows 95, first time got me 36 kb of bad sectors, second time 9.5 kb of bad sectors, third time 108 kb of bad sectors. It seems to get random bad results each time. Is this more likely to be a problem with my USB stick, the emulator hardware, the floppy controller, or the ribbon cable? I've tried with two different USB sticks, both seem to cause trouble though. I can probably find another ribbon cable to test with, but I don't have any other known-working mainboards (with floppy controller) on hand.
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Jul 27, 2017 20:08
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Charles Get-Out posted:I've heard similar stories of issues with those units and I've wondered if it's not a firmware issue. I know 8-bit Guy had a tough time getting his working properly. Apparently the developer of those emulators Lotharek sells also has a replacement firmware for the Gotek hardware, which would seem to be much more flexible. They sell that firmware for €10, but you still also need the equipment to flash it yourself. Apart from the additional cost and the flashing equipment, it also appears you can't read the original firmware out of the device, so once you start flashing there's no going back. Flashing it just seems to require a simple serial connection, maybe I can hack up something that can work from my Epia board, I think it has a serial port header. If so I'll give it a shot. http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emulator/index.html#download (search on the page for Gotek to find the right section) There's also another replacement firmware that works for Amiga images instead: https://cortexamigafloppydrive.wordpress.com/
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Jul 27, 2017 21:26
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Squish posted:The bundled software that comes with it is allegedly crap. There's a much better alternative that is produced by a 3rd party. Phil's computer lab has a review of the gotek and links to the software: That's the software for setting up and loading the USB stick from a "source" (modern) computer, not the firmware running on the device's microcontroller. My problem is some incompatibility between the device and the old hardware I've hooked it up to. E.g. if I load a Windows NT boot diskette image onto the USB, stick the USB into the emulator, and try to boot my retro machine from it, it will very soon give me read errors and fail to boot. And formatting an emulated diskette always gives me a random number of bad sectors.
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Aug 2, 2017 14:15
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Kthulhu5000 posted:But major emphasis on "might" here, because I've never seen it done. I think RGB video is pretty agnostic about standards, since it is just raw color signal data rather than a mishmash of color encoding systems overlaid on top of monochrome broadcasting. Keep in mind there's three factors in play: Scan rate, line count, and color encoding. Using component video resolves the color encoding issue, but does nothing about line count or scan rate. If using a CRT is a must, importing an old TV from Europe (or possibly somewhere in South America where I think they used 625 lines/50 Hz in some countries?) and use a mains power converter for it, otherwise maybe look into a flat panel TV with SCART input, those might work across standards.
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Nov 22, 2017 21:08
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Seat Safety Switch posted:The 68000 socket is definitely trashed, and hopefully the CPU isn't, because nobody really makes DIP 68000s anymore, and eBay wants a mint. Is it worth continuity testing from the 5V line on the power supply connector to the 5V on the 68000 (I think pins 49 and 14)? Probably doesn't matter much if the data/clock pins are bad. This is just a random thought, and I don't know if it's really doable, but: If the CPU is still being produced, just not in the same package, would it be possible to make a daughterboard hosting a modern packaged CPU, that mounts in the DIP socket?
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Dec 30, 2017 15:17
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fishmech posted:Psssh what you do is you cut a ragged hole into the top to fit a large fan and act like you're using one of the quick and dirty homebrew cpu accelerator/overclock kits of the time which needed that. The 8-bit Guy received a prototype of that case, it has fans on the bottom of the case.
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Jan 2, 2018 12:32
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fishmech posted:The arbitrary hiding/extra inconvenience to access DOS mode even though it was still integral to the system put a lot of people off too. I had to install Windows Me on a real system to see how bad this is for myself. What I've read (primarily from Raymond Chen) is that, while it's true that DOS still lives below Windows Me to some extent, it really does have much less of it. As long as you do nothing interesting in Config.sys or Autoexec.bat it should load the protected mode kernel much earlier and do much less real mode stuff in general. A clean install gives you a zero byte Config.sys, and Autoexec.bat just contains a bunch of SET commands, which could probably be removed as well. Playing around with PIF files I get the impression it has a much more complete DOS VM, perhaps also snatched from Windows 2000, so it might be able to do things that required unloading Windows before. I'd like to test with Dark Forces 1, which is very hostile to running under Windows 95, but I can't get past its CD check since Subst doesn't want to work. I think it thinks the 32 bit IFS driver for FAT makes the harddrive a network drive. WinMe installation experience: Was ridiculously slow, despite installing from/to an SSD, running on my Via Epia system with 128 MB RAM. It had Ethernet and sound drivers functional out of the box, but I did have to install a graphics driver.
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Jan 28, 2018 18:21
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Well, I was given an SC-55st, so now I will be listening to a lot of music.
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Feb 21, 2018 08:40
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kirbysuperstar posted:http://www.ausretrogamer.com/review-thec64-mini-computer/ The 8-bit Guy noted that while everything else looks very good, it does have a problem with input lag, about 100-150 ms delay from pressing a button until things happen. I hope that can also be improved.
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Mar 28, 2018 07:58
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Wondering, is there such a thing as a PCI sound card fully compatible with SB16 drivers, that does not require a TSR to work? It's fine to have an initialization program that gets the card to do PnP stuff and set BLASTER environment to match the resources it runs at, but it can't stay resident, and it can't depend on Himem/EMM.
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Apr 28, 2018 23:40
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A new PCB and it might get back to working, yeah. It looks like it's a double-sided PCB, also take some photos of the other side (with the missing corner replaced in correct direction) and you can probably get someone to reproduce it.
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Jul 15, 2018 10:43
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GutBomb posted:Secondly, I’ve got my config.sys and autoexec.bat all set up for dos mode and wondered if there was a more elegant way of having them coexist with windows 98. Right now if I leave them intact and boot into full 98 the boot halts because of himem being loaded twice (once by config.sys and once by windows 98) so what I’ve been doing is hitting f8 on boot and choosing “command prompt only” to boot into DOS and “selective startup” when booting into windows and telling it not to process those 2 files on bootup. Is there a better way to do it? Like some menu I could put in config.sys so on boot when it gets there it asks me when it gets there if I want dos mode or windows mode and just load the config.sys stuff if i choose DOS mode? Yes, you can make menus in config.sys/autoexec.bat, since MS DOS 6. (Win 95 comes with MS DOS 7.) This looks like a pretty thorough guide, also includes the changes you need to make to MSDOS.SYS to make it not boot to Windows.
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Jul 23, 2018 22:11
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Well, PhilsComputerLab sold me on getting a new old stock YMF744-based PCI sound card. Received it today and installed it, hoping to get better results than the SB PCI128 card I've been using. Results are mixed. Obviously works well enough in Windows, but getting it to work in pure DOS hasn't given me any success so far. DOS games through Windows are also a mixed bag. Quake 1 (DOS version) and Transport Tycoon work well enough, with 8 bit SB Pro settings, and MIDI music in Transport Tycoon sounds great. But if I try to get any kind of digital audio in Duke Nukem 3D, the machine either hard locks or reboots. The DOS configuration utility is also kinda weird and I'm not sure it really does anything.
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Aug 14, 2018 22:13
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I'm pretty sure the divisions in the AGP slot indicate what voltage levels it can supply, 3.3V or 5V, and the notch on the card indicates which voltage level it requires. It just happens that one voltage was common with older cards and one with later, so they often roughly correspond to the supported speed.
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Feb 16, 2019 23:04
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Just the other day I got my second General MIDI sound module, adding a Korg NS5R on top of my Roland SC-55st. And now I also have a Roland RA-50 (whose sound module should be MT-32 compatible) on the way. Surely this must be enough MIDI devices for any one person.
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Feb 28, 2019 19:03
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Maybe the right channel amp is bad, can theoretically be replaced if it's not a fully integrated thing.
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Jan 8, 2020 08:15
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Got a small package today, from Serdashop. CVX4, OPL3LPT, and a DB15MIDI, yay! All three work, finally have a way to hook up my MIDI synths to old hardware. Edit: Awesome, SoftMPU works with this PCI soundcard that requires a thing to run before its MPU-401 output works under DOS. Roland RA-50 with all-notes-off support = a proper MT-32. nielsm fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Jan 20, 2020 |
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Jan 20, 2020 19:43
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4DOS is a command.com replacement, basically just gives you a much more flexible command line shell. There was also 4NT which was basically a cmd.exe replacement with a similar feature set. I think 4DOS would probably have been worth having if you were programming on DOS/16 bit Windows, but for regular users the feature set would be wasted.
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Mar 14, 2020 09:34
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One point of note is that FreeDOS has several alternative memory managers. You have something like 3 alternative replacements for Himem.sys and 4 replacements for EMM386. They also work on MS DOS as far as I know, and they should have better support for modern CPUs. Also, in case you didn't know, when you load EMM386 (or equivalent) what really happens is that the CPU is put into protected/paged mode, and the driver wraps the running DOS in a Vx86 environment. So it really installs a new kernel (which implements DPMI) around the already running DOS kernel. This is why some old demos don't like it, they want to own the protected mode instead of playing by the rules of DPMI.
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Mar 17, 2020 21:43
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Chubby Henparty posted:Also thanks for the write up, really well put together. MS-DOS 5 (and PC DOS 5) were quite unremarkable, just worked but didn't have several of the fancy features added in MS-DOS 6. MS-DOS 4 tried some funky things I think, and was supposedly unstable (I never tried it myself).
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Mar 21, 2020 17:39
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Oh right, yeah. DOS 5 was the first version to ship with Himem and EMM386, and support DOS=HIGH, DOS=UMB, LoadHigh, and DeviceHigh. I think it also introduced SmartDrv?
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Mar 21, 2020 21:02
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Since there isn't a PC-specific thread I'll just post here: PhilsComputerLab posted a video yesterday about a new tool to enable the Sound Blaster Pro emulation built into certain early-2000's VIA chipsets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4Fv2DwlldI The Vogons thread for the tool is here, and includes download links: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=73270 I just tried it out on my Via EPIA V 533 system, and it works perfectly. I have to enable the Sound Blaster emulation in BIOS, make sure the IRQ doesn't overlap with any other PCI devices, set the BLASTER environment to match the BIOS settings, and then run the tool. And it works, no TSR or protected mode drivers required! Finally I have functioning SB-compatible digital sound on that system. Just don't use the FM music feature, it's horrible and not actually FM synthesis. (Skip to around 28:35 in the above video to really make your ears bleed.) You're much better off buying an OPL2LPT or OPL3LPT if all you have is one of these Via chipsets. Or hook up an external MIDI synth via Gameport. Anything but that fake-FM. I tested with the Second Reality and Crystal Dream 2 demos, which I know can be quite demanding on compatibility, and they both play perfectly. (CD2 in particular does not work with EMM386 loaded, which means anything requiring protected mode drivers is out.)
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May 11, 2020 16:35
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UnkleBoB posted:I picked a CX5M up last month, too. Mine came with a keyboard. Have only messed with it a little. It's pretty fun. Surely it's possible to reverse-engineer that connection and make an adapter to MIDI.
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Jul 13, 2020 21:13
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Johnny Aztec posted:the TX Northbridge was released in Feb of 1997. Had a FSB of 60/66. Did not support SMP (I do not remember what that is) SMP is Symmetric Multi Processing, i.e. having two or more CPUs in the system. Modern multi-more CPUs are an extension of that with multiple CPUs in a single package. Johnny Aztec posted:I just opened up a desktop TANDY system. Well, a TANDY branded beige box. Hardwired 486 SX, full 8 sticks of the old RAM (EDO, was it?), bunch of cards. nielsm fucked around with this message at 11:52 on Dec 3, 2020 |
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Dec 3, 2020 11:49
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DEEP STATE PLOT posted:i really want to build a good mid-90s spec pc to run my old dos and windows 95 games. i still have a bunch of them and would love to play them on proper, era-appropriate hardware. however, as i was just a dumb kid back then, i know approximately jack poo poo about components from that era. does anyone got good resources on what a good pc from back then would be running? TBH there's a big difference between a 1994, 1995, 1996 and 1997 PC. In 1994 a high end PC might have a 486 DX2 or early Pentium, probably not faster than 100 MHz, while in 1997 you might have a Pentium 2 at above 200 MHz. Although, at that point in time, having a faster CPU was never a detriment, everything ran off proper timers instead of simple, stupid delay loops. Something like a Pentium 2 around 300 MHz, with 64 MB RAM would be sensible. Graphics should have 2 or 4 MB video memory. You might add a Voodoo card too, if you can find one. SoundBlaster 16 or AWE64 would be good choices for sound.
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Mar 6, 2021 09:45
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Seat Safety Switch posted:Are you using the FlashFloppy firmware? I haven’t written to many ADFs, but I’m pretty sure it worked last time my A2500 was plugged in. Wow I didn't know that existed. I have a Gotek and had huge problems with it just not working with the PC hardware I tried it with, so I basically gave up on it. I'll have to try loading FlashFloppy on it instead of the stock.
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Mar 31, 2021 23:32
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Any USB CD or DVD drive should work fine, I don't think there's any significant difference in quality between them.
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Apr 26, 2021 19:23
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Rebuilt my sound setup today, much better organization of my MIDI synths. Top shelf is the RA-50, the "almost MT-32 compatible" realtime arranger. Third shelf is a cheap wireless mic receiver, and then a Yamaha MU50, a Korg NS5R, and a Roland SC-55st. Everything hooked up to a Behringer XR18 digital mixer on the bottom. (Spec-wise at least it's a handy way to hook up a lot of analog inputs without using too much space, though there's probably things that beat it in sound quality.)
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Apr 27, 2021 20:12
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GutBomb posted:Finally got around to setting up the IBM PC Convertible. Did you do anything to refresh the ribbon, or has it really kept that fresh for years? I have a dot matrix printer where I need to refresh the ribbon at least, and it's much younger (probably had business use until 1995 or later.)
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May 1, 2021 07:10
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Saoshyant posted:I don't know if 2000 is too modern for this thread but I was just completely mind blown looking at this person testing various highend GPUs from the era. They are all ridiculously huuuuuge If anyone was in doubt, this is a joke, just with lots of effort put into it. Some of the indicators: Cards longer than full-length PC form factor, that wouldn't fit in any case. The obviously ridiculous "Voodoo 5 9000" card. The motherboard with a stupid number of AGP ports, the AGP standard didn't support more than a single port, except for the very end of the age where AGP 3 which wasn't widely implemented added support for dual ports. And finally the benchmark software. So yes, this guy built a bunch of fake hardware and software for this joke.
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Jul 31, 2021 22:53
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Chumbawumba4ever97 posted:I guess what I really want is a desktop that works perfectly with 3.1 and 98/dos but also isn't a slow piece of crap. Does anyone make new hardware for this purpose? Or is there some sort of recommended hardware? "Yes, but..." it's actually industrial equipment intended for use controlling machines that work but the original computer hardware used for controlling them has had to be replaced. It's not cheap.
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Nov 22, 2021 01:02
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Windows 3.1 (and all earlier) need to install on top of an existing DOS installation. If you're trying to launch the Windows 3.1 installer from inside Windows 98, that's not going to work.
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Nov 22, 2021 18:44
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Yeah for early Direct3D games I think your best bets are real hardware, or for very early maybe PCem. GeForce 4 series or earlier, or Radeon 9000-series or earlier, should be fine for Windows 98.
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Nov 23, 2021 14:13
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Chumbawumba4ever97 posted:edit: I wiped the drive, made a 2gb C: and a 38gb D:. I installed DOS 6.22 to the C:, then Windows 3.1. Now I am booting from the Windows 98 install CD-ROM, and it's telling me my only options are to exit, or replace Windows 3.1. I don't want it to touch Windows 3.1. How can I make the 98 install disc not see 3.1? You will need a third party boot manager to make this work easily. It can work without, but it's a big hassle. I believe FreeDOS has a partitioning tool called XFDisk that also has a minimal boot manager included. You don't need all of FreeDOS, just the exe file for that single tool. Make sure both partitions are primary partitions. Then you can use a boot manager (easy after it's set up) to select which partition to boot from, or you can use Microsoft's fdisk to change which primary partition is marked as active. Only one primary partition can be marked as active at once, and DOS (and Windows 9x) boot from the active primary partition. The active partition always get lettered as C:, and remaining primary partitions and logical drives get lettered in their logical order after that. So if partition 1 has your DOS install and partition 2 has your Windows 98 install, then when you boot to DOS, partition 1 will be C: and partition 2 will be D:, while when you boot to Windows 98, partition 2 will be C: and partition 1 will be D:. Of course also remember that MS-DOS 6 and earlier can't read FAT32 file systems at all, so while it may be able to see the Windows 98 partition, it won't be able to read it. (But I think you can maybe get an IFS driver to be able to read it.)
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Nov 23, 2021 23:50
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