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As for a comparative PC chip what I recall the Xchip/NV2a was roughly the same league as the Nvidia Geforce 3 Ti500 (I think the Ti500 was clocked slightly higher though), which at the time was Nvidia's top GPU. As for that list you linked to it would probably be somwhere between the 4th and 5th tiers fom the bottom of the list where it covers Geforce 3 Ti200, the stock GF3 and the top end Ti500.Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
I thought I had searched ever possible way to find articles like these, I guess I didn't. Page 13 is pretty decisive, even at 25 frames per second 52,000 per frame is 1.3 million per second. It's interesting that the average framerate is 25/30 or below, with only half of the games hitting that. I noticed that about that generation of games, they didn't seem to target a solid framerate in most games. Page 32's summary is interesting as well. VUO was the PS2's "SCU DSP", but some games hit 125k polys at 60FPS with only 8% of the VUO, I'd like to see those games. I guess Gran Turismo 3 is one of them, that's the only 60FPS game I know of besides F355 Challenge.Quote:
Originally Posted by Crazyace
So way above the Radeon 7500? That is interesting, I upgraded my PC to an All in Wonder 7500 in 2003 or 2004, shortly after I bought the Xbox. PC games looked clearly superior to PS2 games after that and the Xbox was sometimes better sometimes worse. I couldn't run Doom 3 at all even after I upgraded again to an AiW 2006 and 1300Mhz Duron.Quote:
Originally Posted by stu
Melbourne house did a F1 game on PS2 - which is interesting to compare with their dreamcast efforts ( There's an interview about it here http://uk.gamespot.com/grand-prix-ch...912020/?page=2 )
I forgot to mention this, the game looks interesting. Melbourne House did wonders with the PS2 Transformers Armada game. I will have to see if I can snag Grand Prix Challenge sometime, Test Drive Lemans did not make the port all that well.Quote:
Originally Posted by Crazyace
Moved from the Xbox 720 16-core thread:
While looking for a case for what was to be my 90s game box I landed a Pentium III 500Mhz system with a Riva TNT AGP card. I just got it cleaned up and ran 3DMark 2000 with all non-crucial services off. I thought the results were somewhat interesting:Quote:
Originally Posted by TVC 15
I guess not much of that makes sense, but the 2.5 million polygons per second with one light is an interesting return in comparison to the Dreamcast. This is the last generation Nvidia card before hardware transform and lighting was added with the Riva TNT 2 cards, I think. I'm not sure how the MTexels/s rating compares to the Mega Pixel speeds TVC was talking about above either.Quote:
3DMark Result: 1866 3D marks
CPU Speed: 152 CPU 3D marks
Game 1 - Helicopter - Low Detail: 36.9 FPS
Game 1 - Helicopter - Medium Detail: 26.6 FPS
Game 1 - Helicopter - High Detail: 13.6 FPS
Game 2 - Adventure - Low Detail: 33.6 FPS
Game 2 - Adventure - Medium Detail: 26.9 FPS
Game 2 - Adventure - High Detail: 18.0 FPS
Fill Rate (Single-Texturing): 140.8 MTexels/s
Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing): 144.6 MTexels/s
High Polygon Count (1 Light): 2557 KTriangles/s
High Polygon Count (4 Lights): 2248 KTriangles/s
High Polygon Count (8 Lights): 1934 KTriangles/s
8MB Texture Rendering Speed: 60.1 FPS
16MB Texture Rendering Speed: 59.9 FPS
32MB Texture Rendering Speed: 59.3 FPS
64MB Texture Rendering Speed: 43.9 FPS
Bump Mapping (Emboss, 3-pass): 59.9 FPS
Bump Mapping (Emboss, 2-pass): 60.1 FPS
Bump Mapping (Emboss, 1-pass): 60.1 FPS
Bump Mapping (Environment): Not supported FPS
Hi Sheath,
This brouchure for Riva TNT quotes a 5M triangle limit - maybe the 2.5 is lower due to direct x overheads :)
http://web.archive.org/web/199707060...28/index3.html
Egads! I've been quoted! I think those details came from a few technical discussion threads over at Vogons I did some lurking on. In fact Sheath if your thinking of making a retro PC I'd recommend joining or at least doing some thread searches, a lot of great info and posters over there.Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
In the company of people who know what there talking about (i.e Crazyace, Chilly Willy) do take those specs with a small pinch of salt, otherwise I'll feel embarrassed!
Oh yeah, maximum spec capabilities should always be regarded as "in a vacuum". I just thought it was interesting given that discussion over whether PIII based PCs had clearly surpassed the Dreamcast. Even with a Pentium III 500Mhz this PC doesn't technically outperform the Dreamcast's launch titles. 3DMark 2000 pushed systems harder than ANY PC game I saw at the time, at least in per scene detail and texture mapping. Actually all of the 3DMarks did that, so I consider them fairly accurate to true performance. I even tried overclocking this Riva TNT at Barone's request, but it just scrambled everything and crashed Windows.
I'll run 3DMark 99 Max with my new Matrox Mystique 8MB as soon as I figure out how in the heck to get Windows 98 to treat my Ultra ATA hard drives with respect. I'll probably also install the TNT in the 98SE partition as well just to see if 98 or XP is more resource unfriendly. I stumbled over some threads on Vogons already, thanks for reminding me. Currently I am having a hell of a time getting a boot menu that actually allows me to select XP or 98SE, right now I'm having to use a boot manager that loads from CD-ROM to select them, and have downright broken 98SE trying to update the IDE drivers. Man, I remember how much of a pain 95-98SE were to keep running with any sort of reliability. I've been spoiled by all of the plug 'n play that XP uses.
Wether PC's where behind or equaling the Dreamcast at 1999/2000, the Dreamcast was bleeding edge. Its no surprise people canonised it after death, such a great piece of hardware.Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
Amen! I have completely forgot how to dual boot windows 9x, I did once get Vista and 98SE to play nice, but all I can very vaguely remember was command line stuff, such a faff. Maybe my psyche has buried it as some traumatic event!Quote:
I'll run 3DMark 99 Max with my new Matrox Mystique 8MB as soon as I figure out how in the heck to get Windows 98 to treat my Ultra ATA hard drives with respect. I'll probably also install the TNT in the 98SE partition as well just to see if 98 or XP is more resource unfriendly. I stumbled over some threads on Vogons already, thanks for reminding me. Currently I am having a hell of a time getting a boot menu that actually allows me to select XP or 98SE, right now I'm having to use a boot manager that loads from CD-ROM to select them, and have downright broken 98SE trying to update the IDE drivers. Man, I remember how much of a pain 95-98SE were to keep running with any sort of reliability. I've been spoiled by all of the plug 'n play that XP uses.
My pet project at the minute is finding a Voodoo 2 for my old Power Mac. Get this, earlier and up to including version 3 copies of Virtual PC for the classic Macintosh (OS 9/8/7.6) allow the use of a standard PC PCI Voodoo 1 or 2 to provide 3D acceleration in virtualised windows 95/98! I have some mad cap experiment in mind to see how it works and see if I can get 3d accelerated Half-Life working, since I don't have any decent pre-2000 PC hardware anymore. I even managed to get Half-Life running in software mode on Virtual PC, it was hideously painful!
I would defiantly root around on Vogons, some one wise should very quickly solve any hardware problems your having, and can offer some of there own anecdotal info regarding performance benchmarks, they love comparing benchmarks. I'm sure the Matrox Mystique whilst decent back in, when was it 97-98? Would get eaten for breakfast by the DC PowerVR and Riva TNT.
That's what I think, but I've been wrong before. If my VGA-S-video converter works as I expect it to I should be able to make videos comparing the performance differences.Quote:
Originally Posted by TVC 15
What I am finding odd is how few resources are returning from a simple bing or google search. Maybe I should search on yahoo for Windows 98 tips. oldapps.com has been useful, but finding motherboard specific drivers for this stupid Gateway has been a pain. That's why I wanted to use my old Asus board, but the jump from a Celeron 300A to a Pentium III 500Mhz was too good to be missed. Ah the days when part numbers told you something about the processor.Quote:
Originally Posted by TVC 15
That sounds like an experiment, whether or not it will be fun is up to the daemons.Quote:
Originally Posted by TVC 15
Defiantly I will root! Yeah, I don't expect the Matrox Mystique to compete, but I do expect it to represent pre-3dFX hardware accelerated 3D PC graphics at its best in 1997. That is the highest I will feel compelled to compare Saturn and PS1 games, any better and I might as well compare them to what my octal core W7 64-bit machine can do.Quote:
Originally Posted by TVC 15
Device manager > HDD > DMA checkbox > OK > close > rebootQuote:
Originally Posted by sheath
Thanks! As soon as I repair Win98 for the third time today I'll give that a shot!Quote:
Originally Posted by TmEE
Okay, I repaired 98SE again and looked for the settings you mentioned. The actual Hard drives don't have a DMA setting and neither do the IDE or SCSI controllers. Is there an update I need to find that will enable that? The hard drives sound totally different when I boot from XP than when I boot from 98SE too, they're way louder and faster in XP right now.
http://www.tmeeco.eu/BitShit/NotEvenThis.png
Nothing here ?
Nope, and nothing generic either:
http://www.gamepilgrimage.com/sites/...movies/HDD.jpg
I defragmented the Fat32 formatted drives first in the XP partition using Defraggler and then within the Windows 98 boot drive with Diskeeper lite and it stopped having so much trouble. I just can't get the audio to play even though the drivers say they are working with the same card that works with the same cables in XP. I also can't figure out why my USB Host driver shows an error but my mouse and keyboard work fine. I also need to figure out how to uninstall DirectX 9.0c so I can reinstall 6.1 for Matrox. :/
This seems to me like your drives are not connected to some IDE controller but "SCSI" instead (my SATA cards all show up as SCSI to windows and DOS). In such cases you will not have DMA in that manner, normally the performance is already at max level even if there is no driver, but sometimes you do need a driver.
What SCSI and/or HDD controller you got ? Or better, what is the mobo ?
http://www.tmeeco.eu/BitShit/StorageControllers.png
What does the Performance tab on My Computer show ?
And you cannot uninstall DirectX, it is there to stay.
I think I figured that out, but there is a Direct X Happy Uninstaller for Windows XP, I was hoping there would be one for 98SE. Matrox's software isn't working with 9.0c.Quote:
Originally Posted by TmEE
I have a Promise Ultra ATA / 66 PCI card that both hard drives are connected to. I think the performance lag was more to do with fragmentation than anything else, it still doesn't seem as fast as it does in XP though.
http://www.gamepilgrimage.com/sites/.../Devicemgr.bmp
http://www.gamepilgrimage.com/sites/...Devicemgr1.bmp
You need good BIOS and stuff for that card to perform well. It is quite crappy low cost card, I had it in my server for a while and chucked it for being disappointing.
Turning the Ultra66 into FasTrack66 does give better performance.
The Mystique 4MB was my first graphics card, that's why I wanted it for this machine more than for the comparisons. I never got to sample all of the Mystique optimized games beyond the disks that it came with (Destruction Derby 2, Mech Warrior 2). It runs fine for games prior to 1999, which is also what I was aiming for. The Riva TNT 128 will handle the rest, I just need to switch between PCI and AGP in the bios at start up to use both without having to physically remove them.
As for bios, did you use an official Mystique bios to get more features or did somebody make a hack? I'd be worried to mess with that too much, I destroyed an Evil Kyro PVR-2 card putting in a recommended third party bios. I'll look into Fastrack66, thanks for the heads up.
Now I'll also need to find out why my Soundblaster Live! Value doesn't play audio in 98SE but does in XP, and why I can't get sound in Tomb Raider with the on board Sound Blaster 128D that does work in 98SE. All of these driver installs and uninstalls, plus rebooting every time, plus defragging every two reboots is reminding me why I never missed 98SE once XP came out. ;)
I have no experience with those GFX cards, and if I did they would go straight on the gutting bench and then trash. I don't value old GFX cards, only some of their components :P
Ultra66 can be turned into a Fastrack66 by adding a resistor on one pin and flashing FT66 BIOS, but that works only if you have not got the latest BIOS on the card.
Live! cards got plenty of drivers that do not work properly. There is a collection of them in here : http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/1159...or-windows-9x/
The ones I got now mostly work but will BSOD if something attempts 192KHz. I have not tried a whole lot of them though.
Defragging has been useless from my experience, I do it once every 2 years and it gives no difference whatsoever...
As for breaking windows, back up the registry (USER.DAT and SYSTEM.DAT) before doing stuff, if something fails copy the backup over old... everything is as good as new. As for XP, the massive loss of performance is what keeps me from not using it :P
Thanks for that info, it seems like it is running appropriately now though. I will keep this bookmarked for future reference.Quote:
Originally Posted by TmEE
That worked! Finally, thank you. I tried every official driver and got no errors in device manager but no sound. Now the audio even works in Tomb Raider.Quote:
Originally Posted by TmEE
Defragging with windows' defragmenter is basically useless. I use Defraggler in XP and Diskeeper Lite in Windows 98SE. Both massively improve the performance in Windows and games when I make sure to keep the fragmentation at 0%. Windows defragmenter will never actually get the hard drive 0% fragmented.Quote:
Originally Posted by TmEE
I never use windows dufrag either, mainly because it is painfully slow :P
You really don't notice a difference when you get the hard drive(s) down to 0% though? It's a big deal on all of my PCs, and most of my clients come to me thinking their computer is toast but all it I have to do is install Spybot/Malwarebytes and run defraggler a few times.
Either way, I finished setting everything up yesterday and got some videos of Ultimate Race uploaded:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rlz9D077NRY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrZC9Kd72cA
Now if I could just figure out why Tomb Raider Mystique is garbled at the title screen.
I rarely get a HDD down to 0%.
All it takes to maintain system performance at all times is to have 512MB+ RAM and disable of swapfile, or at least making swapfile size static. Swapfile is what kills your performance.
Creative is notorious for bad drivers and they haven't had a solid product since the AWE64.Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
DOS games won't work right mostly due to expecting ISA soundcards which the PCI ones badly emulate. DirectX games should work if you have solid drivers, but Creative is not known for those. Even the proper drivers my sisters old Celeron used for their Live card, produced worse sound and a lot of clicks on games, that my AWE64 did not. Go figure.
Yeah, the stupid thing is I had an AWE64 ISA card in my attic that I just threw away because of a bad gameport. This computer has a gameport built into the motherboard, but I didn't know that a few months ago I would have this computer. :/Quote:
Originally Posted by zyrobs
With the drivers TmEE pointed out above my sound now works in DOS and Windows, but for some reason I'm having Direct X/video card driver conflicts with the Riva TNT (not 128!) and the Mystique, it's sort of on a per game/app basis now though.
Here's more Ultimate Race running on the Riva TNT with all effects on this time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_5EzssMYEI&list=UUu4faGQpaag-3t-HXDoM9ug&index=1
Even when I can't get 3DMark 99 Max or 2000 working this game still works, awesome game.
If you really want to go for a hardcore DOS gaming build, and you care about FM synth (adlib/soundblaster) music quality, than the AWE64 is a bad choice anyway since the OPL3 clone has some significant inaccuracies.Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
Ace, TmEE, among others could give some suggestions (or you could check out the vogons PC forums), but real Sound Blaster 16s (or SB Pro 2.0 for some things) are generally the best bet for that. Specific models are better than others in some respects, but iirc, many of the cleaner/better sounding (analog) ones tend to be the later models made just prior to Creative's switch to their clone. (they'd already switched to a licensed ASIC implementation of the Yamaha chip for those cards, but they're genuine OPL and have logos printed on the ASIC package)
The very early AWE32 cards would also be a consideration if you want AWE compatibility and good sounding general midi, later models have the cloned "CQM" creative chips though. (TBH, CQM isn't intolerable either -there are far worse cases, but since pretty much all CQM cards are ISA anyway, and SB-16s are cheap -even on ebay- it's not really a problem)
Ace's "many sounds of x-wing" youtube series details a lot of the different OPL quality/emulation differences as well as general MIDI and AWE sound in that game.
Also, Win98SE is definitely the way to go for most DOS/9x gaming . . . it even solves some weird extended memory compatibility issues you see with later DOS games (X-Wing comes to mind) that otherwise need specific drivers and tweaking to work in pure DOS . . . unless you use DOS7 in the first place. (the version 98 runs on top of)
Apolloboy, ItellYaHuat, and I are lucky enough to live close to Weirdstuff warehouse here in Sunnyvale (also only a couple blocks away from the former Atari Inc/Corp headquarters :p ), and there's hundreds of ISA sound cards at very low prices, especially if you buy a few things. At worst, any of the above sound cards mentioned could cost you $5, but $3 is pretty typical. (it's also kind of fun to just see all the random old hardware around . . . kind of like a living museum)
I suppose I want maximum DOS compatibility. I'm not exactly satisfied with using a PIII 500 machine with 256MB of RAM for games like Doom though. I wish I could find a way to underclock this CPU to at least 200Mhz.Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
I remember playing around with all of the different supported MIDI types on my Awe 64 ISA card back in the day. The Sound Blaster Live! Value sounds exactly the same to me so far. Getting an SB16 ISA card is preferable though, I'll probably do it before I do any hardcore DOS game comparisons.Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
Cool, I'll check this out today. Thanks!Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
Good to hear, with as much trouble as I went through getting everything working I didn't want to hear that Win 95 was somehow better (Ugh).Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
Yeah, if I saw an ISA card in the wild for $3 I would definitely pick it up.Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
A K6-2 (or III, or 2/III+) socket 7 platform tends to offer the most flexibility . . . and, also, oddly, even with a 500 MHz K6-III+, some DOS games (Jazz Jackrabbit in particular) still run fine, but fail to load on much slower Celerons and PIIIs. (including a coppermine PIII 667 that I underclocked to 333 on a 66 MHz bus) No idea why this is since the reason it crashes is supposedly a cached loop timeout issue during startup (something Tiido mentioned), and I could understand maybe the K6-2 doing it (ie if the loop wouldn't fit in L1 -and board level L2 is slow), but the III+ has a 256 kB full-speed on-die L2 cache like the Coppermine Pentium.Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
Even stranger is that the PIII intentionally slowed down the LOOP instruction to help avoid some of these problems, while the K6 featured 1-cycle execution for LOOP.
But I digress, Socket 7 with K6-2/3 is great, with a super 7 motherboard you can play with the bus speed and the unlocked K6 multipliers, though it's limited to 2.5x minimum for the 333 onward (so no slower than 166 or 150 MHz on SS7 boards -some SS7 boards go down to 60 MHz). If you want fast 486 class speeds, you can disable the on-chip cache and leave the slow board-level cache on, or disable all cache for 286/slow 386 speeds. (the latter is also possible with PII/III/Celeron, though)
Even looking on ebay it's not to tough to find a decent SS7 board and a late gen K6-2/3 if you keep an eye out. (Asus P5A-Bs were selling in the $15 range for quite a while, and most K6-2s can be had for around $5 shipped) And the majority of generic ATX cases will fit baby AT boards just fine too. (and those lat gen AT board use ATX power connectors too)
As for your current PIII-500 set-up, depending on the motherboard or BIOS, you should be able to force 66 MHz FSB and knock that down to 333 MHz.
Ace's examples of SB-live for FM synth stuff sound horrible . . . it's not even CQM but software emulation using the Live!'s DSP iirc . . . nasty stuff. (digital -PCM- playback tends to be fine though, and AWE/General MIDI support is OK too -though different sounding sample wise than AWE)Quote:
I remember playing around with all of the different supported MIDI types on my Awe 64 ISA card back in the day. The Sound Blaster Live! Value sounds exactly the same to me so far. Getting an SB16 ISA card is preferable though, I'll probably do it before I do any hardcore DOS game comparisons.
Yep, Win98SE is great . . . more compatible and more stable. Don't bother with installing the unofficial SP3 though (it's great, but only if you need to run modern stuff -like what Tiido does with his 98 rig) and don't bother with Windows ME either. :pQuote:
Good to hear, with as much trouble as I went through getting everything working I didn't want to hear that Win 95 was somehow better (Ugh).
If shipping costs aren't too bad, Apolloboy or I could probably pick one up for you locally. You should make a decision on specifically what you'd want first though. (if you're happy with good OPL3 FM compatibility/quality and 8/16-bit SB PCM compatibility, then that's pretty easy, but AWE or good sounding General MIDI support are other factors -you could try using dual sound cards though and not worry about that if you like the AWE/General MIDI support of the Live!)Quote:
Yeah, if I saw an ISA card in the wild for $3 I would definitely pick it up.
Of course, if you don't even care for the FM sound in most games supporting GM/AWE/etc, then this matters a lot less anyway. (still does for old games with only Adlib/SB support . . . unless you're using MT-32 music -very few games are Adlib only) On that front though, I'd take AWE32 over 64 or Live (sound fonts and reverb/etc effects sound weird IMO) and if you aren't worried about real OPL3, SB-32s and AWE32 cards aren't to hard to find. (the early models are the tougher ones to pick out -they were high end cards at that time, and were only manufactured for about a year before the design change)
I assume you board has ISA, but if you were looking for PCI, Ace's best rated one is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8guSyk-k7TE
Advance Logic ASL4000
Here's Ace's personal favorite SB Pro2.0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9a42Yf11WU
And SB Live emulating OPL3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5z8FjUlwd8
The far worse (ie horrifically bad) example of SB Live in Floppy Disk X-Wing (above in Collector's CD in 4-op FM mode)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYsQbD33vtg
Not to mention later gen Creative cards using soundfonts mapped to FM instruments (Audigy is like this too iirc -ensoniq based ISA cards did that too)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua4F7ebOSWI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXObHZEY8u4
Also note the Flopy version uses an older version of Lucas Art's IMUSE engine for sound, so this may also be more indicative of problems that could appear in other older Lucast Arts games. (CD X-Wing uses the revised IMUSE sound engine from Tie Fighter)
Oh, and AWE32 sound in CD X-Wing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA_fx0N8TgI (TBH, I'm on the fence whether I like this more than good 4-op FM midi)
AWE-32 doesn't handle General MIDI much better than AWE64 though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kwZZypU21c (it's really intended for the Roland Sound canvas sample set, I think)
The flaws in CQM FM are a lot more subtle, but there still there. (more obvious in some games than others though, Doom is more obvious than CD X-Wing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG-p-bvHAHg
Thanks for the links. I don't think I have ever liked midi sound regardless of the driver. I'm not sure what it is, but I just get jolted out of any listening enjoyment by those instruments. I much prefer FM.
As for picking up an ISA SB16 or something, I probably will at some point. I haven't used this 90s box since I built it and haven't wanted to make any comparison videos. Also, its onboard sound seems reasonably good, though I haven't tried anything with midi sound just yet.
In the AWE 32 to AWE 64 comparison I think I prefer the later. At least on my logitech PC speakers with sub woofer the AWE 64 is much easier on the ears, the AWE 32 split my ears more than once in that video. AWE 64 sounds less "midi-like" to me as well. The SB Pro 2.0 might be my favorite as well, very clean sounding, but some of the instruments make the music sound more repetitive than the AWE versions.
Still, I much prefer the true FM sound and more reasonable reverb. It sounds like the Sound Blaster Live! isn't too bad either, though it doesn't sound exactly right. I wonder if the Live! Value that I have would sound like that.
Hot dog, those videos absolutely NEED to be played at 720p or they sound like garbage. Fricking Youtube.
Oh god yes. My old computer had that, super socket 7. It had ISA, PCI, AGP 2x, SDRAM, EDO RAM, compatibility with both AT and ATX power supplies, and a USB connector (on top of serial and parallel out). And it was smaller than a current mATX board.Quote:
A K6-2 (or III, or 2/III+) socket 7 platform tends to offer the most flexibility
Almost every PC game uses MIDI of some sort . . . not General MIDI, but some MIDI driver. And by the early 90s, a lot of it was actually General MIDI based too, or directly converting instruments from Roland's standard to a semi-customized FM diver. (a lot of mid 90s DOS stuff -and pretty much all 9x stuff- mapped General MIDI to OPL sound . . . sometimes at the expense of losing some instruments -not enough channels- and almost always at the expense of sound quality)Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
Doom and Doom 2 are good examples of this; compare the DOS versions to the Win9x ports both using FM. (general midi from the 9x versions sounds off compared to the -at least modestly opimized- OPL MIDI from the DOS versions)
What sort of onboard sound is it, just common AC97 style sound or one of the older boards with actual soundblaster compatibility? (I doubt the latter since that was mostly limited to Socket 7 -and Super 7- boards)Quote:
As for picking up an ISA SB16 or something, I probably will at some point. I haven't used this 90s box since I built it and haven't wanted to make any comparison videos. Also, its onboard sound seems reasonably good, though I haven't tried anything with midi sound just yet.
I think the value will sound about the same . . . for non-FM stuff at least. (again don't count on emulated FM sounding good at all) For sample based midi stuff, I think the Live! sounds OK . . . I'm not sure how it manages AWE compatibility, but General MIDI sounds better than Soundcanvas in some cases. (more so for the cut-down quality on MS GSWSS -Windows software MIDI player)Quote:
Still, I much prefer the true FM sound and more reasonable reverb. It sounds like the Sound Blaster Live! isn't too bad either, though it doesn't sound exactly right. I wonder if the Live! Value that I have would sound like that.
The Gateway 500 has a Sound Blaster compatible on board sound chip. I don't know anything about it, but I decided to go with the Live Value instead. I'll swap to a SB16 or Pro 2.0 ISA card eventually, but for now I'm going to leave the system alone and use it just for capturing gameplay video. All of the games I have installed so far use CDA for the music not Midi, that was what I was referring to.
Ugh . . . CD-DA PC games . . . sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't for no apparent reason. The obvious one is not having the CD audio mixing line connected (which is why I remember playing Garfield, BUG!, and Sonic CD with no music as a kid), but other times it's really weird like Ray Man. (couldn't get the music working on Apolloboy's machine)Quote:
Originally Posted by sheath
The switch to using non-CDDA streaming audio was a godsend IMO . . . aside the ability to use a variety of formats and sample rates, it just works in general. (provided you have working PCM sound drivers) Early/mid 90s DOS/Windows games were already doing that too (like Return to Zork and Wing Commander IV) . . . it also allowed for better dynamic (streaming) soundtracks than CDDA and the option (or requirement) to install them to HDD.
Games using MOD players were really cool too . . . especially EPIC's late 90s/early 2000s stuff. (like Unreal)
OTOH, I still would have liked to have seen SoundBlaster games using drivers with significant use of PCM as well as FM, at least on the level that was common on the MD and potentially well beyond that. (convenience of DMA sound and a lot of RAM and CPU resource -the latter varying by release date obviously, but a lot compared to consoles at least . . . since Soundblaster PCM support in games wasn't common until after 1990)
Hmm, I haven't had any problems with CD music not playing. Not even back in the day. The only time I've ever seen that was with a bad sound setup, the line was muted or something silly, or like you said nobody connected the optical drive's audio line to the sound card. Either way, if I ever did have a problem I'd just rip the disk to my hard drive and load it through daemon tools, that ought to take care of any lingering issues. ;)
Pinball Fantasies and Jazz Jackrabbit comes to mind.Quote:
Originally Posted by kool kitty89
Pinball Fantasies required so much conventional ram that I had to comment out the mouse driver from the autoexec.bat and reboot the machine if I wanted to play that game (and then re-add and reboot for other games that needed the mouse).
Good times.
Those are MOD players . . . which I already mentioned were fairly common in late gen DOS (and some Windows) stuff. (including Unreal -albeit way beyond the 4 channel Amiga MOD style stuff typical of DOS games).Quote:
Originally Posted by zyrobs
What I was saying it's a shame was NOT used is FM music complemented by PCM like the Genesis (or a bit better than that even -given the hardware PCM playback and CPU resources available).
On the note of RAM usage, Pinball Fantasies on the Amiga required expanded RAM as well. (1 MB rather than the common 512 kB chipRAM)
Interestingly, it's also one of the very few games to push relatively advanced sample playback via PWM on the PC speaker (crappy PWM speech/SFX were a lot more common though).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzvaL7LYIAU (you can hear that characteristic PWM squeal as well ;))
Well Pinball Fantasies was made by demoscene coders so no wonder it did some advanced things.
After doing some more research on how PWM is implemented in software on the PC speaker, this actually isn't that strange. Going by this article:
http://fly.cc.fer.hr/GDM/articles/sndmus/speaker2.html
It employs 2 interval timers, with one driving CPU interrupts at the sample rate of the digital audio stream and the 2nd timer controlling the PC speaker's pulses. For each sample, the CPU gets an interrupt request and then sets the 2nd timer to play a pulse of a specific length corresponding to that sample's amplitude value.
And with the resolution and operating frequency of the interval timers used, and the physical properties of typical PC speakers, this was limited to 72 useful pulse widths to approximate (roughly) linear amplitude values with. (so slightly better than 6-bit PCM equivalent)
So it ends up being about as CPU intensive as interrupt driven PCM playback through a DAC (like a covox style parallel port dongle).
Honestly, I'm not sure why more 90s era DOS games didn't give that option, at least as a lower quality alternative. Particularly with odd cases like Wolfenstein 3D or even Doom still offering simple PC speaker square wave beep SFX options.
interrupt overhead is massive and the timers are generally used elsewhere like to time video. VBL can only be polled on most setups, it is not wired to an IRQ.