My 386 time machine project so far

Not forgetting the K6-III which actually came out before the K6-2+ , and had 256Kb L2

I'm jealous you even have a K6-2+

-edit, PS that's pretty awesome work getting the mobo up again hah

 

Yea I was sooo happy when that board booted again. Still don't know where I went wrong, but I am done with flashing that board again

Ran into my first game that gave me issues despite slowing down the machine with all my tricks.

The Heart of China would run fine with PC speaker but with SB it would give me a "Unable to initialize" message and googling tells me it's speed related. So I tried this in DOSBox and yea after around 20000 cycles you get this message. 20000 isn't much it's a 486DX2-50 or something...

But one time the game did play and I have no idea why. So I though well it's worth a shot and pulled out the AWE64 card and put in a cheapy clone card (ESS AudioDrive) and it worked right away. Quit the game. Tried again. Yup works. No idea what's up with the AWE but there is likely more to it...

 

HoC is likely better with MIDI anyway. It doesn't use any sophisticated voice effects at all IIRC. Does RotD initialise properly?

Does that CDROM driver work properly and allow you to increase the spin down timer, or is it better to stick with the one from Teac?

 

Haven't tested RotD yet!

I admit I haven't tried it yet. The TEAC works fine, although after a while it also spins down. Still it's an improvement...

 

This is a "3dbench database" I have compiled with help from VOGONS users (http://vogons.zetafleet.com/)

This could come in handy if you are also trying to slow down your machines to hit a certain speed!

Instructions and benchmarks files can be found in my first post in this thread: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=26175

 

Awesome! Get in contact with me hey? I'd be eager to see the beast going again. A lot of my younger gaming memories are tied up in that 'board.

 

Mine has no VESA Local Bus and no 486 socket-- it's too old, it's ISA-era, not VLB era. It's so old its momma knew Michelangelo.

 

Hahaha, look at those 3DBench results! Go DX40 go!

EDIt; Man, I remember back in the day I used to buy games that said "MINIMUM; 486 SX" or "MINIMUM; 486 DX33" because I knew the ol' 386 would do it without a drama. Except one!
... Duke Nukem 3D ... It needed 486 instructions!

 

Hey, I just did a few 3dbenches with 4 cards here on my 486. Want the results at all?

 

I think I got enough results allready

 

It's just I have one you don't, a video 7 from like 1988.

Got 22.2 on a dx2/66, my pci virge got 50.0 on the same system.

 

Got around to testing the Pentium 200 chip (NON MMX) today and included it in my new "Timemachine - FSB Scaling" spreadsheet.

We see some nice FSB scaling with L2 cache enabled. It also shows us how the CPU architectures differ.

Without Cache AMD K6-2+ is the slowest chip, Intel is doing better but Cyrix comes out on top

Missing the 100 MHz FSB scores for the Cyrix. Will source a higher rates Cyrix chip soon to get that score. Also missing the 75MHz FSB for the K6-2+ but that's not a big deal...




So in a nutshell most Socket 7 cpus give you a 486DX-2 when you disable L1 cache and a 386DX when disabling L1 and L2.

 

thats awesome. nice work Mau1wurf1977!

 

Thanks man!

I love when you can take all these results and summarise it in a single sentence...

 

My retro system:
K6-2 550
Asrock MVP4 Motherboard
256MB ram
Integrated Trident Graphics
SB16 audio
20GB disk
32x CDROM drive from the grab bag
FreeDOS 1.0, currently using JEMM386.

Performance is broadly similar to Mau1wurf1977's K6-2 AladdinV platform. The only weakness with this platform, as I see it, is the rudimentary onboard graphics.

Remaining compatibility problems:
stability issues with NU Sysinfo
ctmouse incompatible with certain software (Fragile Alliance, for example)

The next step is to throw DOS 6.22 on a spare drive and see if this resolves problems or not.

Can others add any commentary with regard to using FreeDOS in a similar application?

 

Freedos is ok, but the EMM386 that comes with it crashed a lot of my games.

Nothing beats MS-DOS 6.22 when it comes to compatibility / stability / "it just works"

Yes it's FAT16 only (2GB partitions max) but that's not a big deal. You can create 10x 2GB partitions if you want.

That onboard graphics is not a weakness at all. We are talking MS-DOS here. There is no such thing as 2D or 3D acceleration under DOS, the CPU does everything (apart from Glide 3DFX games of course...)

 

It was glitching in the 640x480 3dbench run. Also, I haven't checked which VESA version is supported.

I'm going to also try MS-DOS 6.22 HIMEM and EMM386 with the FreeDOS kernel. Possibly the OpenDOS set as well. Just a question of time.

 

S-Video capture directly from AGP Geforce MX 400:

I got some gear for testing out VGA capturing...

This first video is directly off the Geforce MX 440 which I use in my current Retro PC (SS7 board with Pentium 133 and L1 cache disabled).

For capturing I got a Compro C200 Plus USB capture card. One of the view I found clearly stating they come with W7 64 bit drivers...

Pretty happy with the image quality so far. I also have a VGA to S-Video converter box. The IQ is not as good, but many machines don't have an AGP port and so you can't use a modern Geforce or Radeon with TV Out.

 

You can see the odd bit of interlacing here and there, but otherwise it's pretty good.

 

S-Video captured through VGA to S-Video conveter box which I got from ebay!