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Offline dougal

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Re: 80386 poster
« Reply #14 from previous page: March 10, 2010, 07:25:07 AM »
I had a 386DX-40 with 32Mb of ram and a (i think) 4mb graphics card and Sound Blaster 16.

It was a pretty good machine. Could run Windows95 and play Doom and Duke3D at decent speeds, besides being stuffed with games like Monkey Island etc...

I even used to run my BBS from it.
A1200HD- Blizzard 1230IV / 64Mb / Kick 3.1 / OS 3.9 / 20GB HD
A4000 040 @33Mhz -Kick 3.1 / 16MB
A2000 Rev4.4 - \'030 @25Mhz / 8MB / Kick 3.1 / ClassicWB
CD32 -     Stock (W/ 2 CD32 Controllers]
A500 Plus - 68000 / 2MB Chip / 2Mb Fast / 2.04/1.3 / A590 / A570
A600HD - 2MB Chip / 8MB Fast / 2GB CF HD / Kick 3.1
CDTV

PowerMac G4 1Ghz (MorphOS / Leopard)

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Offline Hell Labs

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Re: 80386 poster
« Reply #15 on: March 10, 2010, 04:31:06 PM »
Quote from: tone007;546925
Only 64mb of RAM, too.  It actually seems to run faster with the CF than the old 6gb drive, maybe it likes the pagefile with no head delay.

God, that must be terrible to use. I mean, wow. How much crap did you disable in that install?
A1200 Computer Combat. OS3.0. No accelerator, no fastram, mouse soon. And ebaying it.
 

Offline yakumo9275

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Re: 80386 poster
« Reply #16 on: March 10, 2010, 06:20:20 PM »
the other thing to remember was that the x86 FPU was (and still is) stack based making it pretty poor performer, MMX came in as register based and very easy to use... mmx was like WHOA!
--/\\-[ Stu ]-/\\--
Commodore 128DCR, JiffyDOS, Ultimate 1541 II, uIEC/SD, CBM 1902A  Monitor
 

Offline brianb

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Re: 80386 poster
« Reply #17 on: March 10, 2010, 07:30:43 PM »
Man that was my machine back in the day...  386DX-40, 8MB of RAM, SoundBlaster 16 card, 9600 baud modem, and Doom!  Built from the old Computer Shopper magazine...  Good times.
 

Offline Amiga_Nut

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Re: 80386 poster
« Reply #18 on: March 10, 2010, 11:19:04 PM »
Quote from: tone007;546768
I've got a 233mhz MMX subnotebook (Toshiba Libretto) from 1998 that's still going strong, I swapped the HD out for a CF card and put Win2k on it.  Quite the original netbook, given a WiFi card.


The 110CT you describe is an awesome machine I've got 3 of the things. They're about the size of a VHS cassette which is tiny compared to even netbooks today. Recommend the rarer 64mb machine not 32mb though, then stick a PATA 7200RPM drive for capacity or a very high bandwidth CF card within a 2.5" IDE to CF all in one housing designed for legacy notebooks and stick XP* on it...job done....and works great with VICE for portable C64/VIC20/C16 goodness!

MMX was 3rd generation Pentium after the initial 60/66/75mhz models then the 100/120/133mhz stage. There was even a hybrid 300mhz MMX for notebooks only too. MMX does give a significant advantage for things like MPEG decompression even @ 166mhz. Some of the benefit will be the improved speed and size of the L1 and L2 cache too though.

(XP needs a lot of tweaking for the Libretto P1MMX models but it can be done and is worth it if you have USB PCMCIA cards (or USB dock) in them for the convenience of XPs bloatware driver directory onboard)
 

Offline Bif

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Re: 80386 poster
« Reply #19 on: March 11, 2010, 06:28:53 PM »
Quote from: yakumo9275;547033
the other thing to remember was that the x86 FPU was (and still is) stack based making it pretty poor performer, MMX came in as register based and very easy to use... mmx was like WHOA!

Oh you made me dredge up horrid memories of X87 programming. Thanks!
 
Actually x87 wasn't too incredibly hard to program, but it was hard to program for if you also want good performance (on Pentium and up). The trick is to use the FXCH instruction to swap values in the registers/stack - this essentially gives you random access to the registers. With that, you can then pipeline better as you can compute unrelated things in different registers. Where it became very painful is that you now have to keep track of what results are where in the stack amongst a pile of FXCH instructions moving things around. Lots of commenting necessary.
 
I think that's really the most horrid thing about x86 winning the computing war. We are still stuck with all these arcane instruction sets. Thankfully its rare to need to hand assemble any of that any more, compilers are pretty darn good.