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Win98 network chat, I just threw together a 98SE VM quickly and I'm having no trouble getting near as makes no difference to 100mbit/sec. Haven't tested gigabit yet, just using the default emulated NIC that Virtualbox recommends for Win98. edit: Switched over to an emulated Intel Pro/1000 MT and maxed out at ~105mbit/sec, so technically faster but not by a meaningful amount. wolrah fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Jan 27, 2018 |
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Jan 27, 2018 22:34
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legooolas posted:Get the SciTech display drivers and 98 in a VM becomes usable (i.e. fast) enough for old games that I am selling my old hardware I used for that sort of thing to purists with more space than I have All the Windows 98 era games I want to play that don't get along with more modern OSes are 3D titles from the early DirectX era, so these drivers don't really help me accomplish anything unfortunately. I haven't been able to play Hard Truck 2 in years. That said, I still went down the rabbit hole and installed them plus one of the unofficial patch compilations so I now have a fully up to date Windows 98 install for.....something.
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Jan 28, 2018 05:27
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Charles Get-Out posted:What's the best way to daisy chain SCSI to CF nowadays? Looks like this could be an option: http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=SCSI2SD
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Mar 2, 2018 19:18
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Fleedar posted:Does anyone have experience with the SD card to IDE converters? I’ve had a number of intermittent reliability issues with my CF to IDE adapters, and SD cards are way cheaper, so I’ve been tempted to give them a shot. SD on the other hand is an entirely different protocol, so any adapters need to be "smart" and actively convert commands and data from one protocol to the other. Aside from physical construction quality issues I'd expect CF adapters to be much more reliable just because there's basically nothing to go wrong.
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Feb 7, 2019 18:22
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Forum Joe posted:Is there a different thread to talk about emulation? This one seems to be mostly people setting up old authentic hardware. But I grew up with a C64 and loved the hardware back then but have no desire to go back to 10 minute load times to play some games and scratch my nostalgia itch. Do the emulators not support save states? I'm not a C64 guy but that's been a pretty standard feature of emulators of all kinds as long as I've been using them. There may or may not be a way to launch directly in to the save state, but worst case scenario it wouldn't be that hard to set up a batch file that puts the state file you're looking for in the right place so you just run it and hit the load state button when the emulator launches.
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May 18, 2019 14:48
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Statutory Ape posted:that being said yeah i feel you on that, sort of. 20 years ago i was 12, otoh, i hosed up our family PC enough to catch a lot of wrath going up.. I got it entirely back to operational without my parents noticing, fortunately no data loss. wolrah fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Dec 3, 2019 |
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Dec 3, 2019 19:21
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Statutory Ape posted:lmao i just imagined your Ironically the thing I had been trying to accomplish when I broke everything (was tinkering with config.sys trying to get sound working when running in pure DOS mode because Treasure MathStorm displayed goofy colors when launched from Windows in 16 or 24 bit modes) ended up just working upon reinstall. quote:good for the gateway tech honestly lmao That was also probably one of the moments that locked in my career trajectory by filling in the blanks in my knowledge. I had helped my dad upgrade the RAM and install faster modems in the past, so I had a basic idea of the sort of lego-ish nature of PC hardware, but bootstrapping the software side was all new.
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Dec 8, 2019 16:42
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on that final reboot and sigh of relief
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It's always seemed to me that the biggest problem with DOS compatibility was the software itself. Limited resources plus complete and total hardware access leads to all kinds of "optimizations" in DOS software, especially demos, where assumptions are made that have no basis in any standards or documented interfaces. When software can and does arbitrarily poke around in memory, to be compatible you need to either actually have the memory look like it's expecting or wrap the software up in some way that makes the bits it's twiddling behave as it expects. Compatibility with specified behaviors is the easy part. It's compatibility with unspecified behaviors and/or "bug-compatibility" where things go off the rails. If you've ever messed around with the Windows application compatibility toolkit you've seen how many different compatibility hacks Windows supports enabling just to keep old software happy, even stuff from the NT era where loving around with system internals was neither easy nor recommended. I'd be willing to bet it's drat near impossible to be truly 100% compatible with a given version of any DOS-family system without just straight up having the same binaries in the same places.
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Mar 18, 2020 19:26
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DildenAnders posted:Does anyone have a link to a legit DirectX 3 installation that I could put on a flash drive and install to an old computer? The one Microsoft has requires internet, which I don't have owing to my lack of a wireless card. It's for attempting to run a Fallout 2 Demo, which says it requires DirextX3 to run, though obviously if a later one would work that would be great too. https://www.3dfxarchive.com/directx.htm http://www.oldversion.com/windows/directx/
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Jun 10, 2020 20:44
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nielsm posted:Apparently running regular original Pentium in SMP was an option. It wasn't until the "Coppermine" Celeron and "Tualatin" Pentium III that Intel started locking out SMP on consumer systems. In 1999 having an Abit BP6 with two Celeron 300As on a 50% overclock was the dream for a lot of people.
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Dec 3, 2020 17:08
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Bill Posters posted:I lived this dream (except with overclocked 466s) and it was completely worthless until windows 2000 got proper directx support. That said back then everyone was still mostly looking at peak and average FPS numbers, not consistency or minimums which would have better shown off the advantages of being able to devote an entire core to the primary tasks and let the background tasks use the other one. AFAIK it wasn't until a particularly bad Crossfire frame pacing issue that people really started to pay attention to the actual gameplay experience rather than the easy to measure numbers.
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Dec 4, 2020 16:13
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Long shot, but does anyone remember an application launcher from the DOS era called something like "POP! Menu"? It had a text UI similar to a "curses" app on a *nix system and was basically just a shortcut menu, allowing you to set up a list of commands that it could run if you selected the appropriate option. My grandfather had it on his Epson 286 and I've been trying to find a copy somewhere for years but between the name being rather generic and the general lack of archives from the time I haven't had any luck.
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Dec 29, 2020 23:52
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I'd agree that Win9x era stuff is definitely retrogaming because a lot of it doesn't work well on modern PCs even though it theoretically should be "compatible". When you need to either keep unsupported hardware around or maintain an emulation/virtualization environment to run it in, it's retro.
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Mar 31, 2021 16:36
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Dr. Quarex posted:Windows 3.1 was absolutely no fun at all for me as a kid, since gaming on it was so hard, so I can only imagine it will not be that fun to play with in a retro sense either. Though I can respect the hustle to want to get it working That said there weren't really that many games that were actually made for Windows 3.1 either. I recall most full screen games of the era having instructions that started with "Exit Windows to DOS", with Windows native gaming limited to mostly what could actually make use of a windowed interface like the Sim games or various card/board games. It was definitely well in to the Windows 9x era before most of my games were native.
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Nov 22, 2021 21:50
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rujasu posted:I set up 98 on virtualbox using the Scitech thing and it didn't work very well for me, but it was a few years ago and I could have been doing a number of things wrong. I'm also thinking in terms of early Direct3D games which won't play well with XP or later, and IIRC you can't use Direct3D at all with Scitech.
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Nov 23, 2021 16:30
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I have one of those card slot adapters I've been meaning to use to upgrade my old PS/1 off of its OEM 129MB disk. Are there any catches I need to look out for when buying a card? I know that FAT16 puts a partition wall at 2GB and there are a variety of Int13h and/or CHS related issues that could put limits around 500MB or 8GB, but at the moment a 32GB card isn't really any more expensive than a 2/4/8GB card so I'd rather buy the larger ones in case I repurpose the card for something else in the future. I don't care if I can't use all of it as long as whatever part my PC understands works as expected.
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Nov 29, 2021 18:32
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As a kid all I ever used the arrow keys for was moving around in games, so that would have pissed me off regardless to have it be literally impossible to move up+right or down+left at the same time. That probably would have also been occasionally annoying when navigating text but not the worst.
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Feb 23, 2022 15:42
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Dr. Quarex posted:I swear some game used "push mouse around to move forward" by default and made me immediately think it was the dumbest way to move ever, forcing me back to keyboard for another couple of years. It wasn't until Counterstrike that I finally gave in and adopted WASD, before then I used mouse-move where available and arrow keys otherwise.
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Feb 24, 2022 23:30
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nielsm posted:The Gotek exists for hardware floppy emulation. Have nobody made a similar device for hardware level CD-ROM emulation? https://shop.tattiebogle.net/product/prod_EkTnv3Tk2Trxhf seems to be what you're looking for. Optical drive emulation is a big thing in the console world these days, swapping out aging drives for FPGA-based adapters reading images from SD cards. I'd imagine it gets less attention on the PC side of things because virtual disk drives entirely in software are often an option.
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Jun 10, 2022 15:24
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Shadow Hog posted:I think it's more a technical issue than one of sofrware being more convenient, although I don't know the specifics. There's some talk of work on one right now on VOGONS, though who knows how far it'll go. Hopefully whatever it is supports Redbook audio properly (some of the software solutions don't - the SHSUCD* line for DOS, for instance) and will support formats than can handle copy protection like CCD or MDS (ISO and BIN/CUE can't properly get around those, you'd need cracks). What I meant by that is that PC users generally have options as far as mounting images. The ease of software CD-ROM emulation, though sometimes not full featured, strongly reduces both the demand for a hardware solution and what people are willing to pay for one. The hardware disk emulators available aren't made just for us. The GoTek units are used in all kinds of digital music devices and other appliances, the IDE unit I linked was designed for use with Dance Dance Revolution cabinets and has since added support for other arcade cabinets as well as a partial zip drive emulation for a Roland sampler, etc. The people using those machines need these devices, where for a retro PC user it's more of a neat convenience so the market just isn't going to be as strong.
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Jun 10, 2022 19:48
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If you have an unused but modern-ish PC or Raspberry Pi-like device you could use that as an intermediary, where that device could connect to the WiFi and then run proxies for your older gear to be able to connect to select parts of the modern internet. https://github.com/atauenis/webone https://github.com/DrKylstein/retro-proxy https://github.com/tenox7/wrp https://github.com/ttalvitie/browservice That'd probably be the best way to connect any older machines to the internet, keeping them separated in their own little subnet.
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Dec 19, 2022 23:54
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My first PC has a 486SX-25 and shipped with 2MB of RAM. I convinced my parents to buy another 4MB for it when SimCity Classic wouldn't run (even though it said 2MB as the minimum requirements) and then it got handed down to my grandparents who replaced the original 2MB with 16MB for a total of 20 so it could handle running AOL and IE 3.0 until it was finally retired from daily use some time in '98 or '99. I bought a CF card adapter years ago and have been meaning to fire it up and image the 129MB hard drive but still haven't gotten around to it. Last time I booted it up was around 10 years ago and it got to the Windows 3.1 desktop as normal then, but I don't have any PS/2 compatible input devices anymore so I wasn't able to do anything from there. On that note, at one point in the early 2000s I remember seeing the CDW catalog listing actual USB to PS/2 adapters that actively converted protocols so a modern keyboard/mouse could be used on an old system but I haven't been able to find anything of the sort for years, just an infinite quantity of those stupid loving connector converters for transition-era devices that speak both protocols natively and then search engines being "helpful" and assuming I really meant a PS/2 to USB converter. It feels like the sort of thing that there should be an open hardware project using one of the USB host mode capable Arduino type things but I haven't yet come across one.
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May 16, 2023 15:27
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I like the idea of original hardware on paper, but I also really like modern displays, modern input devices, modern storage media, etc. It gets expensive when every additional platform means a new set of adapters, DIYing, and sometimes even hardware modifications to make the original hardware operate as close as possible to the idealized version my nostalgia remembers. I don't want to be dealing with floppy disks, waiting on old hard disks, have to juggle installed games, etc. even while I do want to push that chunky AT power button My old IBM 486 is probably one of the easiest retro computers to use because most of the interfaces it has either still exist on modern-ish hardware for legacy support or adapters are in the bargain bin, but it's still enough of an annoyance that if it weren't my actual first ever PC I would not still have it around. Everything I could ever want to do with it can be done just as well (usually better) in DOSbox or a VM that isn't running on creaky 30 year old hardware. I mean if I won Powerball, sure. I'd have a room full of all kinds of old computers and consoles with all the toys. In the real world I am really thankful for all the wonderful emulator and FPGA core developers that let me have basically the entire history of personal computing with full support for modern storage and I/O contained in a MiSTer and a Steam Deck that combined take up less space on my A/V rack than the Xbox Series X sitting next to them. In the end none of us are doing this for any reason but our own entertainment so if it makes you happy then you're doing it right. --- Sort of on that topic though, a while back I was looking for USB to PS/2 adapters to use modern input devices with my old PC and I figured I'd share that I found what looks to be the answer I was wanting here: https://github.com/No0ne/ps2pico https://github.com/No0ne/ps2x2pico The first one is keyboard-only but has AT support and an XT fork, the second does both keyboard and mouse but is PS/2 only. I haven't tried either yet as I don't have any spare RP2040s around and haven't gotten around to ordering any more but it seems like it works. wolrah fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Jun 27, 2023 |
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Jun 27, 2023 22:20
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Coffee Jones posted:8 bit PC keyboards are significantly different from the IBM PS/2 that we all see today. Thing is, most games are going to start straight from boot. So, if you’re emulating, you have a game pad plugged into your PC, and you’re almost never going to touch the keyboard. armpit_enjoyer posted:For me, real hardware is important just because every micro from that era has a different keyboard layout and emulating them comfortably has and will likely always remain a huge pain in the rear end If it's just about the legends a lot of the popular retrocomputer platforms have inspired professionally produced custom keycap sets that bring those second and third tier functions to modern keyboards. If a non-standard layout is really important but you don't mind (or would prefer) modern keys a custom keyboard is pretty much "My First PCB Project" at this point, if you can draw it in KiCAD you can have it at your door ready to solder not long after. And of course there are adapters to convert almost anything to USB if you're looking for the absolute original feel. Again not saying anyone's wrong if they prefer to use original hardware, just saying this issue is not the hardest thing to work around.
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Jun 28, 2023 22:54
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3D Megadoodoo posted:An emulator will never do graphics properly. If they're good enough for someone, more power to them. The analog output stages of course had their factory tolerances and on top of that have a few decades of aging so you also have to be mindful that an emulator could be perfectly accurate and at the same time not match your real hardware. quote:If I hook up my VIC 20 to a television and if I hook up my The VIC20 to the same television, the displays look absolutely loving NOTHING like each other. I'd be willing to bet that if you hooked both real hardware and a MiSTer running the VIC-20 core and composite video adapter to the same display for a real apples to apples comparison you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. One of the older Raspberry Pis that has composite video output could probably also get pretty close if you can set the right resolution.
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Jun 29, 2023 23:36
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falz posted:Seems like a lot of questions on using what appears to be the name of a local mexican restauraunt to hack an ISO.
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Feb 16, 2024 23:00
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iPad displays with an adapter board are pretty popular in the MiSTer community, they're 9.7" 4:3 with a native resolution of 2048x1536 and not too expensive. No native analog inputs though so you'd need to have some way to convert your devices to HDMI or DisplayPort. I use one with a Laser Bear Industries VESA mountable case hooked up to my MiSTer and Steam Deck for my 4:3 era emulation needs.
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Feb 19, 2024 19:39
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