I'm with you, if I could make a relatively small Micro AT Dos/Win95 Box I would. Does anybody know if Dosbox will let you throttle the emulation so the games look and perform like they would on different processors and graphics cards?
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I'm with you, if I could make a relatively small Micro AT Dos/Win95 Box I would. Does anybody know if Dosbox will let you throttle the emulation so the games look and perform like they would on different processors and graphics cards?
The Unisys is available as a Pentium 200 as well.
The downside to laptops is that they often used really subpar audio/video hardware, with no option to change it. Gotta be careful what you buy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ace
How much of this applies if you're going to be using DOS compatibility via Win9X? (preferably 98SE)Quote:
Originally Posted by TmEE
I know there's a handful of games that are timing sensitive, but you're pretty stuck with many of those (I believe even some early 90s games like Wing Commander and Alone in the Dark have that problem) unless patches or win9x remakes are available. (I know there's the very nice Kilrathi Saga re-release for 9x)
My main reason for using such a custom machine is for games that need more power in any case and can't run well emulated at all (or have significant compatibility issues -in the case of old windows specific games), so the handful of such slow games I could emulate anyway. (in fact, the win9x machine I'm considering would probably be powerful enough to emulate those games)
I've been planning to put together a win9x/DOS gaming machine and was planning for somethign relatively close (maybe a bit older) to what Tiido is running with his PIII (or is it a Celeron?) with SDRAM and a Radeon 9600. (all the 9x00 ATi cards we have lying around are AGP though, so that would limit me to our Athlon XP motherboards, otherwise I could drop to my only Celeron/P3 IWill board and use some of our old PCI cards but I'm not sure how low I could practically go and expect some later 9x games to run well -going to the old RAGE Pro might be pushing it, but I think we have some other PCI cards around -not sure if we still have a VooDoo)
Not sure of the sound card, but as long as there's any decent DMA audio, the Windows general midi software driver should be OK. (I rather like the soundcanvas instrument set) I have no idea what sound card I was using for adlib/SB compatibility back in the mid 90s to early 2000s, but whatever it was it worked perfectly fine with X-Wing CD, Return to Zork, and several multimedia/edutainment DOS games i recall. (we always used the FM synth options -probably as they were often defaults- and they sound very much like what I hear in DOSBox)
I'd assume what we had back in the mid 90s was an ISA card, and I think the Iwill board had at least 1 ISA slot too, so it might have been the same sound card. (I'm pretty sure it's a creative card, but I'm not positive -I need to look though our old components)
Whatever it was, it was working fine in my 1.1 GHz (1.3 GHz when we switched to the Celeron) win95 machine.
Jax, what speed is your K6-2+? Chances are it's faster than my regular K6-2... Let's hope it's around the 200MHz mark.
Computers with 200MHz CPUs will make sound cards with a real YMF262 output a bunch of scrambled notes with certain games, just so you know. From what I've been able to test, they're most stable with computers containing CPUs slower than 133MHz. Anything faster than that will make the YMF262 output a bunch of scrambled notes with certain games.
If you insist on using a computer with a CPU faster than 133MHz, I advise you to get a SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold for your sound card. Since this doesn't use a real YMF262 or any kind of ASIC implementation of a YMF262(it uses Creative's cloned YMF262 instead), the cloned YMF262 can tolerate much faster CPUs(up to 1GHz from what I was able to test). Either that or get an ESS AudioDrive sound card. Those use the most accurate clone of the YMF262 and work fairly well. The only thing it doesn't have is SoundBlaster 16 support, but then again, a SoundBlaster 16 and up doesn't have proper support for the SoundBlaster Pro(no Stereo).
Maybe it'd be best if you get a SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold and a SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 and use those sound cards together.
Ah, so not only software emulated OPL3s, but hardware ASIC implemented versions of the real chip are also OK.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ace
I know PCI cards can be dodgy, but I think there may be some reasonable cases, especially compared to the numerous poorer quality ISA cards with crap mixing/amp circuitry, though the best ISA cards would probably be preferable to the best PCI cards.
I don't care if it's a "REAL" discrete OPL3 or not as long as it sounds good... then again that's one big advantage of emulation given few if any real sound cards have the clarity of VDMSound/DOSBox, but there's the issue with cases of emulation errors and missing features. (which would be far more significant if developers actually used the OPL3's features rather than treating it primarily as an 18 channel OPL2 with stereo)
Also, one comment on MIDI: the early creative cards are a bit off for sample based general midi, but a huge portion of FM music is also MIDI, but usually a custom driver used by the developer (not sure if creative had generic MIDI drivers) and apparently none opted to use PCM instruments via the DMA channels along with FM. (a few games used MOD players, but that was PCM ONLY, not both...)
Not sure if there were ever any decent general midi FM drivers for the OPL2 or OPL3 for that matter. (it would be a bit tough given you have to cut polyphony -especially without using PCM- but at least you had a fixed instrument set so a well optimized driver should have been able to handle a fair amount of things acceptably well, at least with the OPL3... and the MT32 was limited to only 9 channel output, but then again it fared poorly with general midi drivers)
I'd imagine there are drivers to use SB/SB16 (or Pro Audio Spectrum) DMA channels for general DMA PCM sound output in windows, so you could have general MIDI that way as well. ;) (8-bit would probably not sound that great, but an SB-16 shouldn't be too bad compared to lower end onboard sound -once motherboards started including onboard DMA audio)
You'd definitely never want to have soundfont emulated OPL/OPL2 though, that's horrible and not really emulation at all.
It's a 500. I thought it was a 550 when I built the page but I remembered wrong.Quote:
Originally Posted by Guntz
Then my K6-2 is probably around the 400MHz range. I think so at least, long time since I ever ran a computer with this thing. Thanks Jax. :D
Do keep in mind that many non-Creative ISA sound cards don't use true OPL3, but rather a hardware clone, be it discrete or ASIC-based. Those clones all vary in quality, but the two best clones I've heard are the ones used by ESS on their AudioDrive sound cards(only one part of the white noise is wrong) and Creative on the highly-integrated models of the SoundBlaster 16, some SoundBlaster AWE32s and all SoundBlaster AWE64. This clone is less accurate than ESS' clone, but the clarity is better.Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
Then there are the really lousy clones, which are made by OPTi and Crystal. OPTi uses a hardware clone of the YMF262 on their 82C931 and other single-chip ISA sound cards, and this one is pretty lousy. It doesn't hold its notes at all, many notes play at the wrong volume, and most notes are not 100% correct. Crystal's OPL3 hardware clone is even worse. This is even less accurate to true OPL3, and, at least in OPL2 mode, there are some rather nasty spikes in the amount of gain coming out of the sound card, causing some heavily distorted FM Synthesis. Have a look at this video I recorded of X-Wing played using a Crystal CS4235 sound card:
That's how bad Crystal's OPL3 hardware clone is.
Certain other sound cards use a direct replica of the YMF262 integrated within their ASIC. This is the case with the Aztech AZT2320, which outputs FM Synthesis exactly like a real YMF262, but clearer and, like with the ASIC-based YM2612 on later Genesis models, doesn't hold its notes as long. I do believe there are other ISA sound cards made by Avance Logic and C-Media with 100% accurate FM Synthesis, but I never heard those sound cards in action, so I can't say if they're really that accurate, but I can tell you their PCI sound cards have 100% accurate FM Synthesis(but the SoundBlaster support in the PCI C-Media cards is pretty much broken; it doesn't work most of the time).
Software-emulated clones started appearing around the time when the SoundBlaster Live! line was released and is most commonly found on PCI sound cards. The SoundBlaster Live! and SoundBlaster Audigy both use a rather terrible emulated YMF262 for FM Synthesis. In OPL3 mode, it's not too bad, but in OPL2... I'll let this video speak for itself:
Then there's Aureal's Vortex chipset, which is really only good for SoundBlaster Pro support. The General MIDI misses a lot of notes and the emulated YMF262 has rather poor sound quality(sounds heavily downsampled) and plays sound at a lower pitch than the real YMF262. Overall, not very good.
ESS also removed their "ESFM" OPL3 hardware clone after they made the Solo-1 PCI sound card, instead replacing it with a different hardware clone that's considerably worse than the ESFM:
COMPLETELY wrong. This is on an ESS Maestro-2, just so you know.
I have kept my old Dell Dimension for just this need ;) Intel P75, Awe64 soundcard, mechwarrior 2 cd. Life complete! :D
Ace, also remember that some quality issues have nothing to do with the clone ASIC or YMF262 chip specifically, but the external analog circuitry used, just like with the Genesis/MD and clones. (in creative's cards alone they started off with really poor analog circuitry in early SB cards and got gradually better up to the SB16 where it was moderately acceptable but still strained and heavily filtered) I think the Pro Audio spectrum was better in that regard, but isn't fully SB compatible either. (it's fully FM compatible, but the DMA audio is mapped differently so games not supporting the PAS won't work... though that's not a huge number of games and you could always use more than one sound card ;))
Actually, there might be a number of cases where using 2 cards may be easier than finding one with both good FM and SB-16 PCM support.
Some of the Yamaha cards are really nice though, I know that's what Tiido uses. (a YMF719 iirc)
Average SB-16s seem to be close to average early model 2 MDs in that sense, and one comparison clip Tiido sent me comparing an SB16, his yamaha, and DOSBox definitely sounds comparable to comparing a bad MD2 to Fusion with the filter disabled (or a CCAM with no filtering), though his Yamaha card doesn't sound as clarity competitive with model 1 MDs, maybe more like the better model 2s. (at least in the example he recorded, DOSBox sounded much cleaner and richer than either of the cards, but the yamaha was definitely far better than the SB16)
I'll let you know what cards we actually used on our old PCs once I've digg them out again. (I think one may actually be installed in the K6-2 PC in the garage)
I got a SoundBlaster Vibra16 model CT2260 over the weekend, and I'm liking the sound it outputs, though it does sound less filtered than on the SoundBlaster Pro 2.0. My SoundBlaster Pro 2.0 has some VERY heavy filtering on the FM Synthesis, which adds an insane amount of bass to the sound.
Then you've got sound cards like my OPTi 82C929A where the FM Synthesis becomes distorted if you set the volume of the YMF262 too high. Now, mind you, I like how it sounds in X-Wing, but there are other games where it doesn't sound too good.
Speaking of the 82C929A, I was sent a sound clip of the LS-212 cloned YMF262, and it appears as though it's not actually a YMF262 clone, but rather a real YMF262 in disguise(possible stolen YMF262s that have been rebranded?). I have not noticed a single difference between it and a real YMF262; it holds it notes just as long and doesn't output any notes incorrectly. Although, I am questioning the volume at which the LS-212 outputs the white noise, as it seems overly loud. Might be because the 82C929A doesn't have any kind of filtering on it.
the Fastest K6 was 300mhz. K6-2 started around 200mhz though.Quote:
Originally Posted by Guntz
I had a K6 200mhz, and I miss this machine, almost as much as my Celeron 500, and my Dual P3 1GHz machine. Now those where smokers...
Well it can be any megahertz value, I ain't got a clue. 400MHz was a just a random guess going by Jax...
Would be nice if AMD gave some meaningful information on the top of their chips...
They say right on them!