The Cyrix Instead box of happiness

I built this PC well over 2 years ago now but for whatever reason it really struck a chord, so this is a long, probably boring, definitely self-indulgent love letter to my Cyrix. Here’s the original build thread if anyone’s interested. It’s been endlessly refined since then, and as it’s evolved my other retro creations have had to sit and watch while the Cyrix assumed their roles – early DOS, late DOS, early Win9X, NES, SMS, C64, Atari 2600.

I'm running Windows 98SE with a boot menu to choose b/w DOS 7 or Windows - 'DOS mode' sees most of the action but having Windows there with USB support (via a USB 2.0 add-on card) is very handy, and of course I needs my Solitaires.

The PSU is a relatively newly made Startech AT unit - I don't think they make them anymore which is a shame.

The monitor is a Philips 107E5, which is a 17" shadow mask. Not perfect geometry with some resolutions but it has a lovely bright, clear image and doesn't make any annoying sounds like some CRTs do.




CPU / Motherboard:

The motherboard I went with is a GA-586T2, mainly because it's what I had on hand at the time. It's a run-of-the-mill example of a Socket 7 board from ~1997 - 512kb cache, supports SDRAM or SIMM, USB, etc. I've had issues with the PS2 header in DOS but otherwise it's been reliable and easy to work with. I'm using 64MB of SDRAM which again is what I had on hand - probably more that this machine needs but not so much that it causes problems.

CPU-wise I started off with a 6x86MX PR233 - a great chip but it struggled a bit with SVGA DOS era stuff, so I quickly upgraded to an MII 300GP which was released in mid-1998. The 300 is of course the 'Pentium Rating' or 'Performance Rating' but it's actually a 233MHz part that can (sometimes) match an Intel Pentium 2 running at 300Mhz. A bit cheeky perhaps but Cyrix had to work any angle they could in their fight for market share - there's a good rundown of the battle here.



There are multiple utilities out there which let you twiddle Cyrix CPU registers to potentially improve performance. From what I understand this has more of an impact with earlier chips and earlier motherboard chipsets - in my case all the good stuff seems to be set by default because try as I might, I couldn't get any performance gain out of various utilities.

Just as important to me as uber performance though is slowing this machine down to cater for speed sensitive games - a 33MHz 486 is what I aimed for. I've tried various methods over the years but my best results to date have been via a combination of SETMUL and AT-SLOW. SETMUL can't change the multiplier with this CPU sadly but it can disable the L1 cache, which brings the machine down to ~66Mhz 486 territory. AT-SLOW takes the edge off nicely and the result is a smooth slowdown that can be enabled / disabled on the fly via a couple of batch files:

486.BAT

Code:

C:\UTILS\SETMUL\SETMUL >nul L1D
C:\UTILS\AT-SLOW\AT-SLOW >nul /T133

686.BAT

Code:

C:\UTILS\AT-SLOW\AT-SLOW >nul /r
C:\UTILS\SETMUL\SETMUL >nul L1E

These batch files can then in turn be called by other a batch files to boot the relevant game like so:

DUNE2.BAT

Code:

CALL 486
DUNE2.EXE
CALL 686

Video:

I had a Matrox Millennium in this machine initially and they're great cards for later DOS games, but they have some compatibility issues with earlier titles. A mini-project ensued and with compatibility, availability, speed, and image quality in mind I determined that an ARK2000 based card was the one for me. The example I have was made by 'Legend', but it appears to have been produced in the exact same format by different companies, including Hercules as a 'Stingray 64'. I have an example of the Stingray now too and it's just as good, though a tad slower than the Legend card. Swapping in the Legend BIOS fixed that though, what a Legend



The last challenge with the ARK was getting a linear frame buffer initialised - this speeds things up noticeably in SVGA modes. As with the CPU registers there are a few different utilities around for enabling the LFB in Cyrix machine - '6X86OPT' is what I use. With the Matrox all I needed to do was send in the relevant flag and 6X86OPT did the rest, but not with the ARK. Long story here if interested but in summary with this card, which has a less advanced VESA implementation, I needed to determine where in memory its LFB resided, pass that memory location in to 6X86OPT, and then use Univbe v6.53 to enable it. Later versions of Univbe didn't work for me and 6.53 uses less memory, so I deem it good.

Another advantage of using Univbe with this card is that you get VESA 3 support, which lets you adjust the refresh rate of SVGA modes with utils like 'UNIRFRSH.COM'. Duke3D for example is much easier on the eyes @85Hz, I find.

And regarding 3D - I do have some good Voodoo based options but ultimately I decided that I wanted to keep this machine lean and mean. I lost interest in gaming for a while at about the time 3D was taking off so I have no nostalgia for it other than a few PSX games and Quake, and they play great on my other permanently set-up retro machine (a Windows XP P4). And of course Cyrix don't really do 3D anyway thanks to the weak FPU they became infamous for when Quake hit the scene. The MII 300 actually runs quake pretty well, but business applications and pre-3D is where they shine and that's OK by me.


Sound:

As everyone knows there’s no such thing as the perfect ISA sound card but my long and winding road has led me to a lightly modded YMF719E. This is a SB Pro clone + WSS chipset that found its way on to countless motherboards and cheap sound cards. Most of these cards are half-height unfortunately, so bigger MIDI daughter-boards don’t fit. The Serdaco X2GS solves that though; tiny, sounds awesome, and can be set to reverse stereo to counter the card’s incorrect wave-table stereo.



Another challenge with these 'OPLSAx' cards is the DOS software, called 'SETUPSA'. It's pretty awful but there are alternatives these days thanks to Unisound and Tiido’s SETYMF. It’s important with this chipset however to set the 'SB VOL' mixer setting to its lowest value or you won’t get stereo in Wolf3D, which uses a mixer hack to simulate stereo instead of using the SB Pro (or SB16’s) stereo capability. I didn’t try too hard I admit but I couldn’t work out how to set up the mixer correctly with those alternatives, so I’m sticking with the original for now.

Here are my SETUPSA settings - note the 'SB VOL' values set to 1:



As you can see there are actually two mixers on this card, one for the SB Pro emulation and one for the WSS (which is excellent BTW), and you obviously need to assign resources to everything. This makes SETUPSA’s interface pretty confusing but the defaults are generally OK. The WSS wave-table mixer setting is labelled 'WSS AUX2'. The SB Pro mixer’s wave-table setting is called 'FM' – I think wave-table and FM synth volumes are linked but in saying that I’ve set the FM option way down low and tried Wolf3D – the music was the correct volume. Wolf3D might be messing with the mixer? Who the hell knows but again the X2GS comes to the rescue with the ability to change its onboard amp levels, so you can get perfect levels for everything with some patience.

Speaking of levels, some DOS games are much too loud and earlier games generally don’t include a volume setting in-game. The YMF71x SB Pro mixer is compliant with the real thing so handy little DOS apps like SBPVOL can be used to adjust levels on the fly. To avoid having to lunge for the volume knob when I load a loud game (I’m looking at you Jill of the Jungle) I’ve set up a couple of batch files to do this automatically – one to reduce the volume:

LOWMIX.BAT

Code:

C:\UTILS\SBPVOL\SBPVOL F5 V5 N

And then one to reset the mixer back to my preferred levels:

FIXMIX.BAT

Code:

C:\UTILS\SBPVOL\SBPVOL SS N
C:\DRIVERS\YMF\SETUPSA /S

These are called within the batch file that I use to call the relevant game, for example:

GO.BAT

Code:

call lowmix
jjfile1.exe
call fixmix

The final challenge with SETYMF is that it has an annoying habit of updating your AUTOEXEC.BAT every time you call it if it doesn't find a reference to itself where it expects to - not cool and unnecessary given all its settings are stored in an .ini file. To get around that I opened the 'SETUPSA' executable in my trusty hex editor and changed the relevant reference to ‘AUTOEXEC.XXX’ (or whatever); the app still works fine but obviously can’t find .XXX and moves on.


HDD:

For years I've used a period correct spinner for the OS and a CF adapter to run games off - "the grinding noise is part of the experience" I'd tell myself while I sat patiently waiting for Windows to boot. But recently the click of death was also to be heard so I bit the bullet replaced both drives with a 16GB SSD via one of those nice Startech IDE->SATA adapters. As is always the case with SSD's vs mechanical drives (in my experience) it's been an awesome upgrade. DOS appears so fast it's like booting a game console, and Windows 98 whips along nicely too.

I'll never go back.




Emulation:

Over the years I've built up a collection of retro systems that I have even the slightest nostalgia for but I can't have them all set up at once, so generally they just sit in their box. Much to my delight I've found that my mighty Cyrix can do a more than satisfactory job of emulating most of them - not perfectly of course but well and truly good enough for me to fire up an old favourite and enjoy it.

All of the emulators I'm using are DOS based - I didn't want to have to wait for Windows to load before I could play my 8-bits. But fundamentally this PC doesn't have enough Mhz to run Windows based emulators anyway.

For a controller I use a Logitech pad attached to the gameport of the sound card, which works like a charm.

The usual disclaimer RE the images below - they all look much better in real life. I should give up taking photos of CRTs.

SMS

There are quite a few DOS based SMS emulators but MEKA was a pretty clear winner. Getting the most out of it with such a limited machine was a challenge though and took countless hours of trial-and-error - fun! The latest version (0.70) was able to do lovely smooth scrolling with vsync on, but once audio was enabled it got choppy and try as I might it was never good enough, even when using frame-skipping and low audio quality. The older version 0.51 however was closer to the mark - perhaps it was a little more light weight. With this version I was able to use 22Hz audio and get an almost acceptably smooth scroll with frame-skipping instead of vsync. The final piece of the puzzle was using a super high refresh rate - at 130Hz refresh the scrolling is perfect, with only very occasional stutters in the audio.

I have ~15 of my fave ROMs running and all work great.




NES

NES emulation for this era machine is of course all NESticle, version x.xx being the most recent. I had some issues around games running too fast or slow depending on whether they were NTSC or PAL and there are of course different versions of ROMS around, but in the end this was easy to deal with via a command-line switch that lets you specify FPS. Then it was just a case of comparing the emulated speed to the real thing and then writing a batch file which passed the relevant FPS setting through for each game.




C64

As much as I love my C64 I just wasn't using it, so it also got Cyrixed. Again there are a few options including VICE which is well known, but CCS64 was the easiest to use I found and gave the best result on this PC. It's amazing how well it emulates this quirky machine actually - all I'm missing is the crunching of the 1541 disk drive. Its SID emulation is excellent - not 100% accurate of course but when it's wrong it's not bad, just different. Like a good OPL3 clone - you can tell the difference but it's not offensive.

All the games I've tried have worked fine, even multi-disk, and maybe half of the demos I've tried have worked too which is impressive given the tricks and hacks those use to perform their magic.

You can switch controller ports on the fly and it supports JiffyDOS so boot times are as quick as my 1541 Ultimate II+ if not faster.




Atari 2600

Emulating the 2600 was too easy thanks to z26 (version 1.58). Other than choosing a resolution there was no work required - it sounds good, it looks good, and the speed is spot-on.

 

I've enjoyed seeing snippets of this machine over the months, and it's good to see all the bits and tricks presented together. Great write up

 

Awesome machine and overview

 

Great machine Bad, and nicely written up too. I /hated/ flipping around with mouse drivers/cdrom/sound etc in dos, just to get that extra little bit of memory back to be able to run said game.. crazy.. uterrly crazy.. and here you’ve brought my nightmare back to life…

lolol.. nice build man.. it’s good to see the parts assembled by someone who knows what they are doing (I poke around in the dark myself) and the click of death has also led me away from spinning platters on most of my old stuff.. those old drives are hand grenades.. pure and simple.

very interested in the Serdaco X2GS, how do you find it? Any issues?

Absolute magic setup man, enjoy it, and I’d love to see some stuff running on this, I have to admit though, not a fan of the matrox vga card, but that’s a personal thing, and you you’ve got your own reasoning behind choosing that model, so more power to you.

Excellent stuff..

 

Awesome machine. Loved the writeup. Learned some new things and recognised some old things. Fired up Jill of the Jungle myself a few days ago and wow.. the volume on that game..

Will definitely implement the volume control things when I get to my DOS stuff. Strangely, although I have DOS upbringing through and through for the last couple years I was mostly preoccupied with my 1999 PC. I guess I'm compensating for what I missed and/or dreamed about professionally at the time. Another theory I have is I'm saving DOS for later like a cherry on top of the retro pie . I also skipped all the mid-90s 3D stuff, avoided all the console stuff and basically only played a few PSX games and kept the DOS tradition alive will into the mid-00s. I didn't care about 3D gaming so much that I learned about Sega Saturn's existence maybe a few years ago and honestly thought N64 had a dosen games at most.

The magical 1991-1999 time period in computer tech will always be engained in my mind as the amazing time of technical advance in computer technology, but more importantly the promise, the mystery, and the excitement of a better future.

 

Thanks guys

Yes it sounds great to me - I've owned an SC55 and SCC1 in my day and the X2GS is defs the same sound. It has more kick than the real thing though which might get on some people's nerves - very solid bass. But the effects can be configured to your liking which is great - you do need to take it out of the PC though and plug it into a modern machine to do that, so it's not just a case of adjusting it on the fly.

No complaints here but I have noticed that switching b/w the banks doesn't seem to work 100% - there's a user bank as well as the Roland bank. For me the effects got messed up while switching using the provided midi command file. Not a problem for me personally because I don't really like the X2's user patchsets but again could be a problem for some. I raised it with Serge and he said he'd look into it when he had time.

 

Enjoyable read, badmofo - I like reading about your scripts and how you've worked around most of the tiring things accountable dealing with plain old DOS. Tweaking and perfecting the software one in system is a real pleasure under DOS when you get it right. Once setup, don't touch and enjoy!

I'm soon to try an ARK1000 VLB graphics card in my 486 (on way looks like a Paradise Bali 32 card) - never knew of these cards; I'm battling with a Tseng ET4000 W32 at present which is glitching in several games and demos, while perfect in other situations. I've your trusty S3 VLB card, but you just can't resist trying something a little different.

 

It's really interesting to read the evolution of this machine has it becomes closer and closer to a perfect DOS PC. Thanks Badmofo. Once again you've saved me a lot of time and possibly also a lot of money.

 

100% my pleasure - the amount of fun I've been having with retro lately if off the charts. I think many would argue that the perfect DOS PC would have more Mhz and probably a more modern video card with VESA v3 built in, but all this fun I've been having is due to this machine's limitations I think. It's forced me to really get to know this specific configuration.

 

Fully agree. So much useful information in this post. I've been very strapped for spare time this year so it's really nice to read about other people's experiences in such detail and potentially avoid the same pitfalls.

 

Always appreciate a Socket 7 build, especially with a Cyrix.

I've liked reading the bits and pieces when you've posted in the consolidated threads, but nice to have it all in one spot for reference - some interesting information, particularly on the ARK2000 (as I would have mostly dismissed it).

Anything you feel the need to change or tweak?

 

I'd like to spend some time messing around in the BIOS and see if I can get a bit more performance out of it - memory timings, etc have always been a bit of a mystery to me. I wonder for example if I can find some faster RAM and tighten up the timings - any measurable improvement would give me a thrill

I should also spend more time messing around with the X2GS MIDI device - the instruments sound just like a real Roland SC55 to my ears but it's got a much stronger bass and more reverb by default. When used with my modern 400W 2.1's it sounds great, but the trusty old 2.1 Cambridge Soundworks on my retro machine can't handle all that excitement and it sounds a bit messy.

Fortunately it's very configurable so I've spent a bit of time toning it down - mostly just cutting the reverb in half to-date but also dropping the amp output. It sounds much better but as you can see I have many more options to explore, so explore I must.





I've also been having fun with a new keyboard and mouse I picked up recently for cheap - the keyboard is as rubber-dome as they come but has a really nice feel to it. The mouse is optical which is pretty controversial - I've been forcing myself to use a period correct ball mouse up until now. I've also had trouble with PS/2 mice on this PC in DOS but after trying various mouse drivers I've found that it works OK for the most part with CTMOUSE v2.0 - not v2.1!

The only game that isn't happy is Warcraft II but I suspect it's a speed related issue - I solved that by ditching the DOS version and using the Battle Net edition. No MIDI support sadly but the optical mouse is so freaking nice to use compared to a ball mouse that I'm willing to make that sacrifice - I'm and C&C man anyway

 

With some PC133 SDRAM, you'd think you would be able to really tighten the RAM timings - it would be interesting to see if it makes any real difference.

I had a X2GS on the way (with you to blame ), so good to see it's very configurable.

 

Yeah probs no real difference but something for a rainy day perhaps.

I hope you like the X2GS!

 

New case badge?

 

I tried this for fun on a Acorp 5ALI61 motherboard with the Aladdin V chipset, using 128MB of Amicore PC133. CPU is a Pentium 233 MMX so 66MHz FSB.



First image is CAS 3 with "normal" setting in the BIOS (not many options).
Second is CAS 2 with "fast" setting.

Slightly measurable...

 

Lol well it's something!

I'm already using PC133 RAM here I've discovered so no room to move there. Speedsys was reporting memory throughput of 94.2 MB/s but after some uneducated fiddling I'm seeing 107.13, so that's significant. I'm sure it'll make no real-world difference but seeing performance numbers go up is always nice. I'll RTFM and see if I can do better.

 

I managed to squeeze about 5% more performance out of this machine recently by switching from EMM386 to UMBPCI – they do the same job but the latter leaves the CPU in real mode, which is a tiny bit faster. A side effect of this was that my trusty old DOS menu system ‘PowerMenu’ was spazzing out when launching my DOS based SMS emulator of choice (MEKA), and try as I might I couldn’t get them to play nicely together.

I’m not ready to give up on PowerMenu for my DOS games but I’ve been looking for an excuse to play around with another DOS menu system that was apparently popular back in the day but which I don’t remember coming across – QuikMenu III. I’ve also been meaning to reacquaint myself with Corel PhotoPaint v6 which I used a lot back in the day, so the universe was telling me that it was project time.

My goal was to create a Windows98 boot menu entry for each of my emulators and have them boot to their own instance of QuikMenu, customised with an appropriate theme. Multiple instances of QuikMenu will run happily on the same machine as long as you edit its local .inf file, which includes the running directory. QuikMenu is almost totally customisable, although some flags are included in the .inf file only. You can change the colours for everything, import and edit icons in its excellent icon editor, change the font, and create your own backgrounds which is pretty awesome.

It runs in 640X480 so after the title bar, footer, etc is displayed the background needs to be about 640X430, and can only be a 256 colour, 8-bit image (I read that it can handle 16 bit but it didn’t work for me at that depth). This is where PhotoPaint came in - my arbitrary rule was that I could use parts of images taken from the modern internets, but I had to edit and convert them on the Cyrix.

Version 6 of PhotoPaint was released in 1995 and can still hold it’s own in some ways when compared to a modern tool like Paint.Net, but has aged terribly in others. Masks and objects are easy enough to work with but the ‘undo’ functionality for example is awful. If you want to undo more than your last change then you need to use ‘Undo List’, which brings up a list of arcane codes, from which you can select the point you want to roll back to. But instead of working its way back, it undoes everything you’ve done in the session and tries to re-do each change up to the point you wanted to roll back to. This is slow and buggy, so half the time it would CTD and I’d lose everything. In fairness it's probably the wrong version for this machine, I should look at getting version 9 or so.

Anyway, overall I had fun but the limited colour palette does make it hard to do anything remotely fancy – fades, etc would result in all sorts of unexpected colours when QuikMenu displayed it. I’m happy enough with the SMS and Atari backgrounds, not so much NES so I might redo that one day.

My config.sys and autoexec.bat files needed re-doing but ended up simplified if anything – I dropped SMARTDRV because I’m using an SSD so it’s super quick anyway and none of the emulators appear to need high memory. This is what I came up with, any suggestions are welcome:

Config.sys

Code:

[COMMON]
LASTDRIVE=Z
BUFFERS=40
FCBS=10,4
STACKS=9,256
DOS=HIGH,UMB
FILES=40

[MENU]
MENUITEM=DOS,DOS
MENUITEM=WIN98,Windows 98
MENUITEM=SMS,Sega Master System
MENUITEM=NES,Nintendo Entertainment System
MENUITEM=C64,Commodore 64
MENUITEM=ATARI,Atari 2600
MENUITEM=DOSCD,DOS with CD-ROM
MENUITEM=NOEMS,DOS with no EMS

[DOS]
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\DRIVERS\UMBPCI\UMBPCI.SYS
DEVICE=C:\DRIVERS\UMBPCI\LOWDMA.SYS

[DOSCD]
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\MTM\MTMCDAI.SYS /D:MTMIDE01
INCLUDE=DOS

[WIN98]
[SMS]
[NES]
[C64]
[ATARI]
[NOEMS]

Autoexec.bat

Code:

@ECHO OFF
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4 P330
PROMPT $P$G
PATH C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND;C:\XTGOLD;C:\MENU;C:\UTILS
SET TEMP=C:\WINDOWS\TEMP
CALL 686OPT

GOTO %CONFIG%

:WIN98
WIN
GOTO END

:DOS
:DOSCD
:NOEMS
:C64
:SMS
:NES
:ATARI
LH DOSKEY.COM
CALL SETUPSA
C:\DRIVERS\MOUSE\CTMOUSE.EXE /R4

GOTO %CONFIG%_CONFIG
            
:DOS_CONFIG
LH MENU
GOTO END

:SMS_CONFIG
CALL UNIVBE_X
CALL MEDMIX
PATH %PATH%;C:\SMS\MENU
QM.BAT
GOTO END

:NES_CONFIG
CALL MEDMIX
PATH %PATH%;C:\NES\MENU
QM.BAT

:C64_CONFIG
C:\C64\C64.BAT
GOTO END

:ATARI_CONFIG
CALL LOWMIX
PATH %PATH%;C:\2600\MENU
QM.BAT

:DOSCD_CONFIG
LH C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /S /D:MTMIDE01 /L:D
GOTO DOS_CONFIG

:NOEMS_CONFIG
CD GAMES\ULTIMA7
ECHO TYPE 'GO'
GOTO END

:END

Here’s the final result after carefully choosing and editing icons for everything – this was almost the hardest part! The usual disclaimer around my CRT photos; it looks much nicer in real life.

 

I've had a play with QMIII on the 386, but only in stock form. Those custom instances are fantastic. This rig only gets cooler!

 

I'm a big fan of Quikmenu 3, our first family PC came with a copy of it. I install it on all my DOS rigs.

Awesome work on the custom backgrounds! I also didn't know you could setup multiple instances. TIL.
I usually just setup multiple pages to group applications together, but your solution makes sense if you want to load specific drivers/utilities and have different backgrounds for different emulators. That's a pretty neat trick!