486dx2 System Question

[Zac67]

@da9000

Very good description - and I, too miss the good ol' simple days... ;-)

[Speelgoedmannetje]

da9000 wrote:
There are certain people who are more prone to enjoying physical objects, touching, feeling, smelling (hey, stop thinking what you're think you dirty pervs! :-p ). Anyways, I'm the type that enjoys putting his hands onto things

Go on, go on! I love when men are talking like that :-D

Also on the PPC Macs it seriously needs a JIT - it's hard to get sound that's not choppy, and definitely not working well with many demos.

I don't run it on PPC macs, and I don't get choppy sound as well, it's just 100% MSDOS, in fact, it's more compatible than a real MSDOS machine, since it perfectly emulates all the environments.
You just need to get the settings right.
Normally I also prefer the real thing (heck, I collect old computers, while these can be emulated), but now my pentium1 would gather dust if it were not for the fact that I use it's parallel port for StarCommander (PC->C64 floppy transfer).
Well, it is that way after dosbox 0.70 + DBGL, otherwise I'd say you're totally right considering 486's.
However, the feeling of a 286 cannot really be emulated, with their lovely yellow/orange monochrome displays (ah, memories). I do not want that to be emulated either.
Maybe it's a repression of my memories during the 486 time, or maybe I remember it too lively, when my computer was always too slow, and setting ipx networking/soundblaster settings/emm386 fuss was really a pain in the arse (har har)
It's the very reason why I fell in love with the spare computer I got (because of the single tasking nature of my pc) - an Amiga.

[Invisix]

@da9000

Perhaps I worded my posting incorrectly, and it has nothing to do with ignorance. :-D

For the record my CPU is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ (Brisbane) @ 2.1Ghz. Idle, the core(s) run at 1Ghz, full load the core(s) run at 2.1Ghz.

I have done alot of research when it comes to dual-cores and it all seems to be leading to the same conclusion which I have outlined below.

What I meant by hype is that the total speed of the CPU is NOT what people think... it's each core running at a set speed... 2 cores running at 2.1Ghz each does not effectively equal 4.2Ghz. No, it's simply 2 cores running at 2.1Ghz each SEPERATELY from each other, not a combined total. A dual-core 2.1Ghz CPU is not necessarily faster than a 2.1Ghz single core. It's all about the threading.

The ability of multi-core processors to increase application performance depends on the use of multiple threads within applications. For example, most current PC games will run faster on a 3 GHz single-core processor than on a 2GHz dual-core processor (of the same core architecture), despite the dual-core theoretically having more processing power, because they are incapable of efficiently using more than one core at a time.

What may happen in the case of future multi-core games is that the main code can run on one core, and other code, let use for example the physics engine, can run on the other core. Both at 2.1Ghz for each core, but that does not mean the game is running at an effective rate of 4.2Ghz. That is how multi-core CPU's work.

Not many games are yet multi-core capable, however the infamous software developer Valve Corporation has stated its use of multi-core optimizations for the next version of its Source engine, shipped with Half-Life 2: Episode Two, and Crytek developed similar technologies for CryENGINE2, which powers their game, Crysis.

:rtfm: Please note: These statements are not meant to be ABSOLUTE truth, these statements are based on information in which I have obtained overtime on the internet.