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The "Not Quite Amiga but still computer related category" => Alternative Operating Systems => Topic started by: Invisix on November 19, 2007, 10:33:58 PM
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Hey all,
Since so many of us here are classic gamers, etc and even though this is not Amiga related, I still didn't know where else to go to ask this, so here goes.
I recently acquired a complete 486dx2-50Mhz system (Monitor, System, Printer, Keyboard, Mouse, etc) for around $15 USD (cheap compared to eBay prices), and I found an 80Mhz DX2 produced by Cyrix I had laying around, and I am wondering how "fast" the CPU is running at now that I replaced the default 50Mhz DX2 with the 80Mhz DX2.
If I remember correctly 486 dx2 are a "speed doubler" technology from the system bus which as far as I know is 25Mhz bus (the computer is a Tandy 4850 EP)... so my question is this... what speed is the CPU really running at? My assumption is 50Mhz, even though the CPU is 80Mhz? If that's the case i'll just put the default Intel 486 DX2-50Mhz cpu back in and leave the Cyrix 486 DX2-80Mhz in case I ever get a 40Mhz bus 486 board.
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Run msd.exe if you have dos, select the computer button, it might tell you there.
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(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Msd_Screenshot.jpg)
Select the letter corresponding to what you want to know more about. I don't have a machine running DOS but if i remember correctly, it will tell you processor brand and speed.
If you have win95 or 98, i think it still has msd, also your system might have msinfo, which can help out too.
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If I remember correctly the dx2 ran at 66 Mhz and the dm4 at 144 Mhz. It's been years, I got the 486 dx4 to play Battle Isle 2200 I got hooked on Battle Isle on the Amiga.
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"To attain full operating speed the Am486DX2-80, the Am486DX4-120, the Cyrix 80 MHZ Cx486DX2, and the Cyrix 5x86-120 must have an external bus clock running at 40 MHZ. VLB (Vesa Local Bus) motherboards were not speced to run over 33 MHz. Running VLB motherboards at 40 MHz is over-clocking. This is a risky gamble."
Pay no attention to that rambling about DM4 at 144MHz or whatever.
DX2 = 2x clock
DX3/DX4 = 3x clock
486DX4 75MHz = 25 MHz x 3
486DX4 100MHz = 33 MHz x 3
486DX4 120MHz = 40 MHz x 3
I couldn't find your exact model offhand, but the pictures may be of use:
http://www.jumpers.computed.net/m/m486_8.htm
You WILL have to play around a bit. Use the 80 MHz CPU to do this.
I would guess your motherboard is similar to:
http://www.jumpers.computed.net/m/S-T/33762.htm
I *think* your options will be to run at a 25 MHz system bus or a 33 MHz system bus. You currently are running at 25 MHz. You can at least get that 80 MHz to run at 66 MHz. Just plop it in there and tell your system to run at 33 MHz and that you have a clock-doubled CPU. If you try this with the 50 MHz rated CPU, you might just burn it up or break something else.
The most common 486 bus speeds were 16 MHz, 25 MHz, and 33 MHz. There was a (rare) true 50 MHz but it was expensive and most CPUs of the time wouldn't be able to hit 100 MHz and work in those motherboards. Some later motherboards could also do 40 MHz but again, that's going to be a bit more rare and you'll not likely run into that.
So your best bet is trying to get that 33/66 deal going with that 80 MHz CPU you have.
MSD and MSInfo will be useless to you, don't bother with them.
You might have better luck with some of the stuff here:
http://www.opus.co.tt/dave/utils.htm
Specifically, the section starting with PC-CONFIG.
Old DOS and 486 systems are obscure and require an obsolete set of knowledge to hack properly. Be careful of any information you receive if it's from the Amiga community. No offense to the blokes around here, but this is the AMIGA community, not the 486forever community, if ya know what I mean. I'm mostly a PC guy and know very little about the Amiga 500 I play around with from time to time.
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I should image it's running at 50MHz. My first IBM compatible was a 486 DX2 @50MHz and I upgraded it to 80MHz too. Although it was along time ago, I'm pretty sure I re-jumpered the motherboard to clock at 40MHz.
Perhaps a 100MHz DX4 'overdrive' CPU may work in your Tandy?
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It depends on his motherboard. He might not have jumpers to change the bus speed. If he got a DX4-100, it would run at 75 MHz in his system the way it is currently set up. He currently has 25 MHz with a double-clocked CPU, making the CPU run at 50 MHz.
About 80% of all DOS-based programs will run rather well on that CPU. Just make sure you have 8 MB or more of RAM and know how to use LOADHIGH and DOS=HIGH, UMB and all that junk, and try to use MS-DOS 6.22 if possible.
His other limiting factor would be the video card, it's probably a built-in deal or he only has an ISA expansion card. You CAN get some ISA-based video cards, but most of them will only be "windows accelerators", meaning they don't do jack for DOS or VESA-mode gaming, but they accelerate the drawing of Windows primatives like dialog boxes and... lines. Wooo.
The best DOS-based gaming cards were PCI or VLB based, #9 Imagine128, Matrox Millennium, and perhaps some old Diamond Weitek-based VLB card.
IF he can get that sucker upgraded to a 66 MHz CPU via messing with the bus speed, and maybe throw in some more RAM, that's probably the extent of what he can do without better gear or more specialized knowledge.
If you have a better system, you might want to just use DOSBox. But if you don't want to go that route, I'm there with ya... I have several old 486-class systems myself.
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Follow what BlackMonk says, and to reiterate:
If it says "DX2" on the chip, it's _DEFINITELY_ not a chip that runs at a 50Mhz *BUS* clock (I'm not talking about the internal/core speed). Those chips were very rare and they were marked as DX-50, not DX2-50. They ran at 50Mhz BUS frequency (very fast) and 50Mhz CORE frequency.
Now, the DX2 chips used either a 25Mhz or 33Mhz or 40Mhz BUS frequency and they had a fixed internal multiplier like BlackMonk listed. The bus frequency was determined by the motherboard (and this infact means that you could even use a 16Mhz or 20Mhz clock, which would severely underclock the chip - I've done that in the past while trying to figure out what the jumpers do).
So if you want you system to be the fastest, no matter if you use the DX2-50 or the DX2-80, set the frequency to 33Mhz (or higher if it allows) and see what happens. Of course use a fan, to make sure you don't have any melt-down, but in general the 486s where tough - never seen one melt (internally or externally - usually the melt-down is internally, which makes the CPU just not work - like a brick). Next best thing to do to find out the actual CORE frequency is to use some software for benchmarking (either dhrystones or somesuch, but it's been a while since I've run some to remember names - also, some cache/memory testing programs will give you Mhz rating via using either CPUid instruction or doing instruction timing -- come to think of it, the easiest way is to use a bootable Linux distribution, like Knoppix and seeing the Bogomips of the booting kernel -- or faster yet, a boot disk from Slackware will do the same thing as soon as it boots the kernel)
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Thank you all for your comments, and help. I checked an old 1994(?) post from a DOS newsgroup and it stated the fastest CPU that the Tandy 4850 EP can handle is a DX4 75Mhz (DX4's are triple-clocked the system bus speed). My system BUS is apparently locked-in at 25Mhz, so my CPU is definately running at 50Mhz so I went ahead and switched out Cyrix I put in, and put back-in the default Intel 486 DX2 50Mhz chip.
The mainboard has a riser slot, so I have 3 ISA slots via a riser card. As for graphics, it is currently 512k on-board SVGA graphics, I can upgrade it to 1mb via on-board ram chips if I chose too for 1024x768x256-colour. The system doesn't have any VLB slots.
For now i'm happy with the system, I am just curious, as for now I am currently looking for a total of 32mb 30-pin SIMM's so I can max-out it's ram. I'll probably just get 8 4mb 30-pin SIMM's so I can fill-up all the SIMM slots, thus have 32mb RAM.
As for Dosbox, yes I have a modern PC... 64-bit AMD Dual Core, and all the bells & whistles... however just emulating the Amiga, Commodore, etc... nothing can beat having the real thing. :-D
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Old DOS and 486 systems are obscure and require an obsolete set of knowledge
Ah yes, one of my various areas of obsolete expertise :)
If you were to install a DX4 in place of a DX2, you may run into a problem with voltage or with write-back cache (which needs to be supported by the BIOS). That's what those adaptor boards that fit between the CPU and socket were for, to drop the voltage to 3.3 or 3.45V and disable the write-back cache. Then the DX4 or AMD 5x86 (and sometimes the Cyrix 5x86) can be used in an old board.
There is also the Pentium Overdrive chip (IIRC you need socket 3 for that, as socket 1 didn't have all the pins)
You'd have to try hard to cook a 486 chip. I ran a 3.3V Cyrix 486-100 (which has write-through cache) in a 5V board for quite some time before I learned that it wasn't supposed to work, yet it didn't have a problem.
40 and 50MHz VLB boards were not uncommon, though sometimes the higher speed settings were undocumented, and in practice there weren't as many CPUs around that officially supported those speeds anyway. But the 5x86 and Intel DX4 CPUs supported different multipliers, 2x, 2.5x, 3x, and 4x, depending on the paricular model CPU. I have a couple of VLB socket 3 boards that support 60 and 66MHz bus. I had a Cyrix 5x86-120 in there running at 60x2 with a Trident 9440 and it could do 50MB/sec. That combo wasn't completely stable though. Later I got a PCI socket 3 board and ran the Cyrix chip in there also at 60MHz x2 (had to divide the PCI clock down to 30MHz, else the onboard IDE would crap out). That one was stable, and the L2 cache was faster on it but the video and IDE was not as fast.
Your onboard video may be faster than what the ISA bus can manage. ISA cards max out around 5MB/sec. You can check with the program SVGASPD http://www.hyakushiki.net/junk/memspd.zip
I have at least one set of 4 4MB 30-pin SIMMs in my pile, as well as various 486 motherboards, VLB and ISA cards, and CPUs
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@DamageX
If you are willing to part with anything (4 4MB 30-pin SIMMs in my pile, as well as various 486 motherboards, VLB and ISA cards, and CPUs) how much would you like for each? Also what type of ISA cards? I'm hoping to hook myself up with a Sound Blaster 16.
Thanks. :)
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@invisix
I have an SBPro 2 ISA and SB Vibra 16 ISA card you can have for post if you want 'em.
I'll look and see if I have any spare sims from that era.
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To make things more difficult, you need to keep in mind that Cyrix was using a PR-rating. It was an unrealistic hope as to how fast the chip was in comparison to an Intel chip. So, if the chip is labeled as an PR-80, it is likely not an 80Mhz chip.
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koaftder wrote:
@invisix
I have an SBPro 2 ISA and SB Vibra 16 ISA card you can have for post if you want 'em.
I'll look and see if I have any spare sims from that era.
:-o :-o :-o Dude, that would completely rock! PM me with details on how much shipping (post) would cost to Tampa, FL USA for them, i'm definately interrested in SIMM's too if you have any.
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I found the box of SIMMs. I don't remember much about them. Some are 32 pin, others 72. I only remember seeing the 32 pin ones on 386 machines. Do you have 72 pin SIMM sockets? I'm guessing the EDO variety doesn't work on most 486's? I snapped a picture of them. Is there an easy way to identify them?
Picture of old ram modules (http://koft.net/pix/junk.JPG)
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koaftder wrote:
I only remember seeing the 32 pin ones on 386 machines. Do you have 72 pin SIMM sockets? I'm guessing the EDO variety doesn't work on most 486's?
Many of the earlier 486s used 30 pins (not 32 pins) simms, and mostly had 8 slots (divided in two banks) for them, although I also owned and old 486 which could handle 12 of them. Later 486s were built for 72 pins simms, in which case you only need 1 simm per bank and could use (much) larger simms. Although some 486 mobos would work well with EDO (I owned one such board), it would not take advantage of it, as it would work as if it was fastpage memory.
I owned one of the last incarnations of a 486 motherboard, which therefor was pretty advanced: it could handle 128 MB of ram (two 64 MB simms), had three PCI-slots (and two or three ISA), two IDE-connectors and could handle 8 GB harddrives. It has served me well over the years with a P24T/83 as its cpu, running Windows NT4 very reliably.
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don't forget that Cyrix FPU's were "slower" than the other one's
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CLS2086 wrote:
don't forget that Cyrix FPU's were "slower" than the other one's
True. Intel was the FPU king back then. The extra MHz should compensate for that, and add some extra integer performance, compared to the Intel 66 MHz.
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@koaftder
You have a PM. 8-)
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Cyrix didn't use the "PR" for socket 3 CPUs, that nonsense began with the 6x86 (socket 5). The performance of their 486 CPUs is pretty close to the other manufacturers', while their 5x86 easily beats the intel DX4 and AMD 5x86
I could part with an SB16 and 4 SIMMs for $20 shipped (perhaps an ethernet card too if you want)
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@DamageX
How many megs are the SIMM's?
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4MB per stick = 16MBytes total
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Invisix:
I wouldn't worry about the CPU speed, honestly. 50 MHz is decently fast for DOS games of the time.
You might be able to find a cheap ISA video card, but it may not be worth messing with. And upgrading the onboard RAM, again, might not be worth the effort.
For DOS-based games, you may only care about getting VESA compatibility. VESA BIOS Extensions TSR, basically a program that runs in the background and makes your video card more compatible with games:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE
I don't know where offhand to snag that, but you may be able to find a source. If you do run into VESA games, it might make sense to upgrade to 1 MB of video RAM, but most games won't care. Doom certainly won't!
If you get some 30-pin SIMMs, remember to make sure you get all the same type. Parity versus non-parity. Basically, if there are 8 chips on the SIMM, it's non-parity. If there are 9 chips, it's parity. You won't want to mix them up.
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Belial6 wrote:
To make things more difficult, you need to keep in mind that Cyrix was using a PR-rating. It was an unrealistic hope as to how fast the chip was in comparison to an Intel chip. So, if the chip is labeled as an PR-80, it is likely not an 80Mhz chip.
DamageX wrote:
Cyrix didn't use the "PR" for socket 3 CPUs, that nonsense began with the 6x86 (socket 5). The performance of their 486 CPUs is pretty close to the other manufacturers', while their 5x86 easily beats the intel DX4 and AMD 5x86
whabang wrote:
CLS2086 wrote:
don't forget that Cyrix FPU's were "slower" than the other one's
True. Intel was the FPU king back then. The extra MHz should compensate for that, and add some extra integer performance, compared to the Intel 66 MHz.
To that, I wish to add that up until the end of the 486 days, AMD and Cyrix actually licensed the designs straight from Intel. It was after Intel moved to the Pentium line (so named instead of 586 because they couldn't trademark a number, which is why the offical name of the 486/80486 turned into the i80486--the addition of a letter made it trademarkable) that they stopped licensing some of their CPU tech, though the CPU bus was still licensed (and still is) to other companies to make compatible CPUs, I believe.
I know that AMD and Cyrix FPU's were weaker than Intel but I believe that happened post-486. The AMD/Cyrix 586's were basically tweaked 486's and going against Intel's new Pentium line which had excellent FPU for the time. When Cyrix rolled its own with the 6x86 (I had one of these!) and AMD popped out the K5/K6, is when the two companies really got the reputation for having weak FPUs. But the 486s? I think they are ok.
I kinda wish I had a NexGen 586. Just for the novelty value.
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BlackMonk wrote:
I kinda wish I had a NexGen 586. Just for the novelty value.
Then get an Athlon, they are a direct descendant of this design... Via the K6...
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I like old hardware! Sorry for bumping the topic.
You may wish to look for some old demos, too:
http://scene.org/
I do not know if you will find old DOS ones there, but stuff from Future Crew should work. That's how I got into the mod/demo scene, through my ol' DOS machine. The BEST sound card for mods and demos is probably the old Gravis UltraSound (GUS). But for games, the SB16 is golden.
I wish I still had my GameBlaster/Creative Music System (CMS). It was an AM-based sound card, the one that Creative Labs made RIGHT before the SoundBlaster which was FM-based. You could even buy CMS chips for the earlier SB's that added GameBlaster compatibility.
SB16+WaveBlaster (or WaveBlaster 2 or that Yamaha one) was pretty hawt back in the day, too.
My preferred audio setup was SB16ASP + WB2 and a GUS ACE (later a GUS PnP Pro with 8 MB of RAM). Ah the SB16ASP. Back before Creative Labs got sued for the ASP part of the name and had to call it CSP instead. Plus, mine had a crappy proprietary CD-ROM interface!
Hardware back then was cool. Hell, ever heard of the 3DOBlaster? Or that Stacker card, was for hard disk compression with hardware-based compressor? Or even a hard drive on an ISA card (HardCard by Quantum)? Hardware was esoteric and useful. Want to get some hardware-assisted audio compression and decompression? Install an ASP/CSP chip into your SB16! Want a MIDI synth engine? Install a WaveBlaster add-on card! Had some old 30-pin SIMMs that you wanted to use in a 72-pin SIMM system? Get a crazy converter!
The stuff nowadays is just... boring. It's been the same as it has been for 10 years, just faster. On one hand it's nice that things are faster, more efficient, and standardized, but on the other hand there's little sex appeal left for hardware nerds.
Quad-core CPUs? Awesome, yeah! But... I find it cooler to dink around with an old dual-CPU 386 system. Ya, you know they had those? Crazy! Or the old Intel modems, you know they used to make modems? On their high-end ones, they actually had a 186 CPU doing the work. A 186! Or tri-CPU POWER2 systems. And this was all stuff you could get your hands dirty with, go in and add the stuff, tweak it to your heart's content. Take 5 hours to load drivers in DOS and try to get everything working. Now it's install the card and install the driver; it either works or it doesn't. No tweaking, really. It's just not exciting.
Ah well, I'll stop ramblin'.
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bloodline wrote:
BlackMonk wrote:
I kinda wish I had a NexGen 586. Just for the novelty value.
Then get an Athlon, they are a direct descendant of this design... Via the K6...
Not the same! I'm running on an Athlon 2800+ (gift from AMD, thanks guys!) right now, it just don't have that same old-school not-quite-normal feel that a NexGen would.
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BlackMonk wrote:
I like old hardware! Sorry for bumping the topic.
You may wish to look for some old demos, too:
http://scene.org/
Ah, and old DOS demo-scener! Should have figured it so...
I like old hardware as well, although to be honest I like old non-DOS hardware better (with some exceptions, like GUS, hehe)
BlackMonk wrote:
from Future Crew should work. That's how I got into the mod/demo scene, through my ol' DOS machine. The BEST sound card for mods and demos is probably the old Gravis UltraSound (GUS). But for games, the SB16 is golden.
Future Crew! Ah, good days! (what's going on Trug and PSi ?? BitBoys?)
I've got a couple of those GUSs still, and SoundBastards...
BlackMonk wrote:
I wish I still had my GameBlaster/Creative Music System (CMS). It was an AM-based sound card, the one that Creative Labs made RIGHT before the SoundBlaster which was FM-based. You could even buy CMS chips for the earlier SB's that added GameBlaster compatibility.
You mean the "Adlib" cards? :-)
Got a programmer's manual of that somewhere, still... I think...
BlackMonk wrote:
SB16+WaveBlaster (or WaveBlaster 2 or that Yamaha one) was pretty hawt back in the day, too.
My preferred audio setup was SB16ASP + WB2 and a GUS ACE (later a GUS PnP Pro with 8 MB of RAM). Ah the SB16ASP. Back before Creative Labs got sued for the ASP part of the name and had to call it CSP instead. Plus, mine had a crappy proprietary CD-ROM interface!
Got some of those GUSs and SBs. I think I also have one or two with the propriatery not-quite-IDE CDROM interfaces. Maybe even have such a CDROM. Not sure. Also have a PAS sound card with a SCSI interface on it.
BlackMonk wrote:
Hardware back then was cool. Hell, ever heard of the 3DOBlaster? Or that Stacker card, was for hard disk
Yeah, some of it was cool. Never had the Stacker card :-( Just tons of floppies!
BlackMonk wrote:
compression with hardware-based compressor? Or even a hard
drive on an ISA card (HardCard by Quantum)? Hardware was
Hahaha! Got one, with a 20MB drive on it :-) Anyone want to buy it, it still works!
BlackMonk wrote:
The stuff nowadays is just... boring. It's been the same as it has been for 10 years, just faster. On one hand it's nice that things are faster, more efficient, and standardized, but on the other hand there's little sex appeal left for hardware nerds.
I feel the same way many times... Not sure if it's age though or some hard "fact", meaning: things have changed that even a newbie (as we were then) wouldn't find them as appealing. I dunno. I feel sometimes kids feel the same way about their "old" Pentium4, now that they've upgraded to Core2Duo... but perhaps that isn't so. Perhaps it's just a different "kind" of feeling they get with their old tech. Not sure. Perhaps asking the Homebrew Computer Club guys about their past and their feelings for it might help clarify perspectives... Ah well, gotta wait until next VCF to do that! ( Or during the Trammiel talks on December 5th or 9th is it!??! anyone going? wanna buy a carton of eggs just in case?? :-D )
Ramlbing over
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da9000 wrote:
Future Crew! Ah, good days! (what's going on Trug and PSi ?? BitBoys?)
I've got a couple of those GUSs still, and SoundBastards...
Purple Motion, musician, went to school in Ireland and then went into soundtrack production for some movies, I think.
The guys who formed Bitboys and never released the Glaze3D video card ended up being bought by ATI, I think for their mobile/cellphone 3D tech, and of course AMD owns them now.
I didn't pay too much attention to the rest, I think some ended up at Remedy Entertainment and worked on Max Payne? And maybe some 3D benchmarks, FutureMark or something?
da9000 wrote:
BlackMonk wrote:
I wish I still had my GameBlaster/Creative Music System (CMS). It was an AM-based sound card, the one that Creative Labs made RIGHT before the SoundBlaster which was FM-based. You could even buy CMS chips for the earlier SB's that added GameBlaster compatibility.
You mean the "Adlib" cards? :-)
Got a programmer's manual of that somewhere, still... I think...
Same tech, AM synthesis, but different product. Um here's a random reference to it:
http://artofhacking.com/IET/AUDIO/live/aoh_gameblst.htm
I believe it did not have any digital output like the later SoundBlaster, so it was pretty much the same as the Adlib.
da9000 wrote:
Got some of those GUSs and SBs. I think I also have one or two with the propriatery not-quite-IDE CDROM interfaces. Maybe even have such a CDROM. Not sure. Also have a PAS sound card with a SCSI interface on it.
Ah yes! There was also a SB16 SCSI as well. Pro Audio Spectrum 16 was supposed to have the best digital sound, less noise. Back then it was PAS16 = clear sound, GUS = best quality, SB16 = worked with everything.
The proprietary CD-ROM interface was for a Matsushita 2x drive though it had some crazy buffer on it so doing speed tests would alternate between 300KBps (2x) and 1500KBps (10x). But it'd only do 10x for .01 seconds at a time, every 2 seconds, so... heh.
Same CD-ROM I think was matched up with the 3DOBlaster.
da9000 wrote:
BlackMonk wrote:
compression with hardware-based compressor? Or even a hard
drive on an ISA card (HardCard by Quantum)? Hardware was
Hahaha! Got one, with a 20MB drive on it :-) Anyone want to buy it, it still works!
Don't ask me how, but on a 486 system I used to have just to mess around with, I actually got Win98SE installed on the HardCard AND it booted! It is a 120 MB HardCard (I still have it) and my GOD was it slow to boot up Windows. I'm still not sure how the BIOS figured out to boot the system from an ISA slot, but hey, whatever works... Oh, I do remember that Windows told me that the hard drive was working in 16-bit compatibility mode instead of the high-performance normal 32-bit mode, but when you're booting from an ISA slot, just be happy it's workin'!
da9000 wrote:
BlackMonk wrote:
The stuff nowadays is just... boring. It's been the same as it has been for 10 years, just faster. On one hand it's nice that things are faster, more efficient, and standardized, but on the other hand there's little sex appeal left for hardware nerds.
I feel the same way many times... Not sure if it's age though or some hard "fact", meaning: things have changed that even a newbie (as we were then) wouldn't find them as appealing. I dunno. I feel sometimes kids feel the same way about their "old" Pentium4, now that they've upgraded to Core2Duo... but perhaps that isn't so. Perhaps it's just a different "kind" of feeling they get with their old tech. Not sure. Perhaps asking the Homebrew Computer Club guys about their past and their feelings for it might help clarify perspectives... Ah well, gotta wait until next VCF to do that! ( Or during the Trammiel talks on December 5th or 9th is it!??! anyone going? wanna buy a carton of eggs just in case?? :-D )
Ramlbing over
Yeah, but then you'd have to hear them bellyaching about vacuum tubes and punchcards... ;)
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I wish I still had my GameBlaster/Creative Music System (CMS)
You mean the "Adlib" cards?
The Adlib uses an FM synthesizer, the YM3812 (OPL2), which is also used on SBs, and early SB Pro cards which had two. The Game Blaster on the other hand, is just a bunch of sine wave and white noise channels (4x YM2149 IIRC, think Atari ST sound chip).
I'm still not sure how the BIOS figured out to boot the system from an ISA slot
The Hardcard has its own ROM on it which is called by the BIOS after POST. Just like an Amiga SCSI zorro card or modern PCI RAID card.
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@BlackMonk
I love old hardware also! I don't know if it's because I grew up with that stuff or what, but I adore older hardware. I honestly prefer my older 486 DX2 over my modern Dual Core AMD 64-bit PC! :crazy:
I think I feel this way about the 486 because A) DOS and Win 3.11 are pretty stable and a hell of alot safer for internet use than modern systems (due to OS flaws, holes, 'bugs', etc) and B) Nostalgia reasons. :-D
My absolute favorite computers of all time though are the Commodore 64/128 computer and Amiga computer(s).
I also dig the older PowerPC Mac's even though some; namely Power Mac and Performa 5200-53xx & 6200-6320 had bottlenecks; usually due to shoddy motherboard design. The 64-bit PowerPC CPU on a 32-bit data bus severely crippled the CPU from it's full potential. However replacing the default motherboard with a Power Mac 6360 motherboard and power supply resolved these bottlenecks.
I own a Mac Performa 6320CD for classic mac software.
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DamageX wrote:
The Adlib uses an FM synthesizer, the YM3812 (OPL2), which is also used on SBs, and early SB Pro cards which had two. The Game Blaster on the other hand, is just a bunch of sine wave and white noise channels (4x YM2149 IIRC, think Atari ST sound chip).
Ah, the ol' OPL2/3. I always heard the GameBlaster as an AM-based synth and the later SB's as FM-based. I'm guessing that was the case though I might have mis-labeled the Adlib as being AM-based instead of FM.
"Yamaha used the YM-2149 core to produce a whole family of music chips which were used in mobile phones, video games etc. For example, the YM-2203 (also known as OPN) is a YM-2149 plus FM. (However, its successor, the YM-2612 (also known as OPN2) inherits only the FM part of the YM-2203.)"
Thanks for jogging the memory. I remember now that the older SB Pro's had two OPL2's for stereo. Hah!
Then there was the printer-port DAC, Covox Speech Thing, and that DISNEY sound system? And Windows sound system? I remember WSS was curious because it offered 48KHz sound instead of the 44.1KHz but was pretty much useless nonetheless.
DamageX wrote:
I'm still not sure how the BIOS figured out to boot the system from an ISA slot
The Hardcard has its own ROM on it which is called by the BIOS after POST. Just like an Amiga SCSI zorro card or modern PCI RAID card.
Yeah, I get how that works and all, it's just that I didn't think that thing had a boot ROM. The documentation I found seemed to indicate that it did not and to get the drive to even be viewed by DOS required some driver/TSR to be loaded.
http://www.driverguide.com/boards/storage-devices10/142.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/88078
The support docs from Quantum/Maxtor are gone, I think, now that Seagate bought them out.
But hell, reading the microsoft link:
"Exclude the Hardcard XL's ***BIOS*** address range (the default is C800-C9FF), using either a memory manager (EMM386.EXE) or the EMMEXCLUDE= statement in the SYSTEM.INI file."
Learn somethin' new every day...
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A good game that uses adlib:
Catacomb Abyss
(http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/catacomb.gif)
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Invisix wrote:
My absolute favorite computers of all time though are the Commodore 64/128 computer and Amiga computer(s).
I also dig the older PowerPC Mac's even though some; namely Power Mac and Performa 5200-53xx & 6200-6320 had bottlenecks; usually due to shoddy motherboard design. The 64-bit PowerPC CPU on a 32-bit data bus severely crippled the CPU from it's full potential. However replacing the default motherboard with a Power Mac 6360 motherboard and power supply resolved these bottlenecks.
I own a Mac Performa 6320CD for classic mac software.
I never got into the C64 stuff, a little with the Atari ST. I got into Macs later on and so got old ones cheap. I have a few Mac IIci's, a IIsi, a Quadra 950, a Umax C600 (I think a 180 MHz 603 or 603e), and a B&W G3. I've only messed with the B&W G3, really, and I just broke it somehow like a month ago. Doh! Once I figure out what's wrong with it, it should be good to go again. I... hope.
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koaftder wrote:
A good game that uses adlib:
Catacomb Abyss
A good one that uses CMS/GameBlaster:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/silpheed
http://www.mobygames.com/game/silpheed/trivia
Hrm, I guess that's where I got the game:
"This game came free with the CMS Game Blaster sound card."
I was straight pimpin' with an EGA card and monitor, back in the day. Loved the music, too. Most games that used CMS I remember really enjoying the music on, Death Track was another one.
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Wow, lots of good posts!
Let's disect...
@BlackMonk:
You're right about the where-abouts of the Future Crew crew :-)
I've got a one degree connection to Purple Motion (makes music for my friend's game company), and some of the other guys (good friends with Gore).
Indeed the BitBoys were bought out by ATI for $11-30 mil., I forget right now, as a "reflex motion", when NVidia bought out another Finish mobile 3D company, Hybrid, for about the same price (I'm friends with the two founders). All in all, they did pretty well even if they didn't have any success in the consumre hardware sector :-(
CMS: now that you and DamageX explained it in detail, I remember it! It was the competitor to Adlib. Indeed not the same.
SB16 SCSI, huh? Don't think I've seen it, or at least my memory doesn't say so!
Very interesting info about the propriatery CDROM with the wacked out through-put rate. All I can say is WTF!? :-)
Scary experience, your Win98SE on a ISA hard-card! I refuse to punish myself like I did back in the M$ days! :-p
Punch cards & tubes: see what I mean? :-D
Sliphead was a great game! I remember my friend had it and we used to play it. And DeathTrack was great too! I remember the day a friend and I went to a computer show and bought it, and took the bus to get back home eager to play it! Ah, those were good times!
@DamageX:
Thank you for the low-level details on sound cards! You seem to have some very good knowledge on this arcane subject. It'd be nice to see it added to your site! (hint, hint)
Now I'll add some of my own low-level details for anyone like BlackMonk looking to refresh their old skool memory :-)
These hardcards had their own ROM (much like SCSI cards, or even Ethernet cards, etc), which was usually mapped onto the low 1MB memory space (C0000-F0000, where A0000-BFFFF=video card buffers and F0000-FFFFF=IBM PC BIOS, like Amiga Kickstart in a way) via a jumper set (and possibly IO ports, I forget right now). Then you had to instruct the "OS" (DOS or Windows was a joke not an OS) or relevant memory expanders (EMM386), to avoid using that memory area as it was mapped to the ROM of the card. No such thing as AutoConfig in the crappy PC architecture :-) Afterwards the BIOS would communicate with the card's ROM for accessing the disk(s) on it, and your software would talk to the BIOS to do its work, so in the end it was transparent.
As an aside, this is why "BIOS Shadowing made those old computers and their crappy software faster (shadowing copies the ROM chip contents onto RAM, which is much faster - like Amiga BlizKick in a way), because they relied on the BIOS to do their work, and didn't have direct hardware access, aka drivers - and at the same time it's yet another reason BIOS Shadowing won't help you when you're running a modern OS, like Linux for example.
@koaftder:
If I'm not mistaken that (16 color EGA game) was John Carmack's first entry into the 3D labyrinth / FPS genre, and the precursor to Wolfenstein 3D!
EDIT: memory still functions: check!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_3D
@Invisix:
I would agree with your B) reason for enjoying playing with these old systems, but you are insane if you think this is true: "A) DOS and Win 3.11 are pretty stable and a hell of alot safer for internet use than modern systems (due to OS flaws, holes, 'bugs', etc)" :-D
I won't even comment. It's a troll-bait waiting to happen. Suffice to say: you need to either LAY OFF'EM DRUGS SON, or study a bit more about computer operating systems technologies :-)
To add to the validity of the nostalgia feelings: I was very impressed recently, after seeing again my old 3D code doing 30+ fps with 1k gouraud polys on a completely unacccelerated crappy architecture like a 486 PC. Today's CPUs are 100x faster and multi-core, but you could still do a "decent amount of work" with those old boxes.
Now as for Macs, all I'll say is that they were cool little machines. Lots of good stuff in them, and the OS even though technically crap, feature-wise and UI-wise was excellent. I wish some of the UI features, the resolution game, font-stuff and "UI consistency" was brought to the Amiga. Other than these the Mac had nothing going against the Amiga. (PS. I have lots of Mac stuff if anyone's looking for parts, and some rare accelerators too)
Ataris were somewhat cool as well (especially when the Carebears demo group got their hands on them), but not much point to them when an Amiga was there at the same time, and far superior hardware and software wise.
And of course the King of Kings (no, not Alexander the Great), or the Queen of Queens (no, not Cleopatra of Egypt), was and is the venerable Amiga.
Cheers to all the old skoolers!
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koaftder wrote:
A good game that uses adlib:
Catacomb Abyss
(http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/catacomb.gif)
Wow! That screen shot brings back memories, this was one of the 1st 3D FPS, this came out in 1991 --- even before Wolfenstein 3D which was released in 1992.
Catacombs Abyss was the 1st in a series of 3 games, and was created by none other than the infamous John Carmack (creator of Doom), John Romero (Wolfenstein 3D), and Jason Blochowiak.
The trilogy is as follows:
Catacomb Abyss
Catacomb Armageddon
Catacomb Apocalypse
:-D
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I'm a big FM fan so I know the Yamaha chips. There's a ton of info on Japanese pages like http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM音源 but in English http://www.soundshock.se/ would be a good resource.
On the subject of win3.11 on the internet I will say one thing "ping of death" :)
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@da9000
Okay, okay I admit it, my A) comment was "off the wall" so to speak, however I still stick with my "I honestly prefer my older 486 DX2 over my modern Dual Core AMD 64-bit PC! :crazy:" comment. As I stated earlier in this thread... I only have a 486 for nostalgia, and classic gaming, it's not really used for anything "serious". Serious use comes from my Amiga 1200 (the system specs are in my signature).
Absolutely nothing can ever convince me to not prefer an Amiga system over any other system. AMIGA computers are simply THE most amazing computers of all time, period! Commodore 64/128 computers come second place in my heart. :-D
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I still have an pentium 133 for my dos games, but really, I think it's obsolete. DosBox has almost 100% DOS compatibility (if you know how to configure it correctly), and that's more than that pentium 133 can achieve, because older games run too fast on it (moslow didn't work for me), or for one game you need emm386 and the other not... fussing around with one game to be needed to installed on C:, and the other in another directory of it's own, messing it all up for you.
No, Dosbox + dbgl is all the way for me considering dosgaming, (except for one old 8086/80286 with monochrome monitor, for dust sniffing purposes)
Just accept this wisdom from an old MS-DOS veteran. ;-)
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Well... you can use DOS 6.22's multi-config booting option to have various bootup configs. I did that, had like 3 or 4 configs for various amounts of RAM and memory managers. For instance, Wing Commander liked EMS, I believe. However, many demos didn't want ANY XMS or EMS, just raw memory. Zone66 I think didn't want any EMS. DOS was fast enough booting that it wasn't too much of an issue to reboot when you wanted a different config.
Using DOSBox is like using WinUAE. There's many people who just prefer the real thing. Sure, DOSBox or WinUAE are more accessible, less prone to breaking, portable, and work just fine. But they just don't have as much sex appeal. :D
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For the SB16 SCSI, I got a refresher myself from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_16
Sound Blaster 16 SCSI-2
Sound Blaster 16 MCD
Sound Blaster 16 Value Edition
Sound Blaster 16 IDE
Sound Blaster 16 ASP (this is what I had)
Sound Blaster 16 WavEffects
Sound Blaster 16 PCI (really an Ensoniq card)
If I recall, the SCSI-2 and IDE interfaces wouldn't boot. So it was a SCSI interface for pretty much only attaching CD-ROMs. I think I read about some people trying to use scanners or tape drives, but I don't recall much in the way of success. Same with hard drives and hard drives on the IDE card.
The MCD/ASP versions had a proprietary CD-ROM interface that did Matsushita and... I think Toshiba and also Panasonic? I think the drives that worked with those cards did not actually work with a "real" IDE interface. If you didn't have the SB16, you were out of luck.
Oh, hey, more digging:
http://www.irlp.net/owners/sb_cards.html
"Panasonic, Mitsumi, Sony interface"
Panasonic = Matsushita, durrr. I knew that. Yeah, those were the propietary drives. Not sure if other sound cards jumped on that bandwagon, maybe the Pro Audio Spectrum or some such.
Windows 3.11 stank. I'm happy to not have to deal with Winsock stuff anymore, or set up PPP internet connections. Blargh! Even if it's dog slow, I always try to get Win95 at least as an OS on an old DOS machine mainly for networking ease of use. I'm not quite brave enough to mess with Netware or LANtastic or some of the opensource things like FreeDOS or OpenDOS or whatnot.
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Matshita/Matsushita/Panasonic.
Why couldn't they decide on one name?
CD-563 is the 2x CD-ROM I had.
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~theom/electronics/panapcfaq.html
From memory, the reason it had whacked out performance results was because it had a 64KB memory buffer on the drive itself, so as soon as it filled that it dumped it and you got 1.5 MBps. Then it went back to 300 KBps. Good times!
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All this talk about Sound Blaster, and GUS (Gravis Ultra Sound) cards, but... what about the mighty Roland LAPC-I cards?
Roland LAPC-I cards produced the best wavetable MIDI, music in games sounded like their actual instruments, one hell of an amazing soundcard. GUS is simular with emulation, but doesn't take the cake... a real Roland LAPC-I is amazing.
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Because the MT32/LAPC-I sucked for games. Now don't get me wrong, the music was nice, but there were no DIGITAL effects.
I think I have/had an MT32 for a short time and recall playing some games where the sound effects of, say, the guns or whatever were drum hits. That you had to try and hear over the regular soundtrack.
Here's a trip down memory lane for some game names:
http://members.chello.at/theodor.lauppert/games/roland.htm
By the time I got ahold of a MT32, I already had experienced general MIDI with a SB16+WaveBlaster and of course a GUS doing general MIDI and doing realtime mixing of arbitrary samples like with MODs. Before then, the MT32 was just too dang expensive.
I had heard for a while how awesome it was but when I finally got to try it out, I was really disappointed. For some reason the games I recall trying to use the MT32 with would work with only one sound card at a time. I could either do SB16 (or SB original) for digital sound and FM synth, or I could do MT32 for wavetable synth, but I couldn't assign the digital sound to the SB16 and the music to the MT32. But it's been enough decades that I couldn't tell you particulars, maybe I was just trying the wrong games or retarded in my setup at the time.
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Well... you can use DOS 6.22's multi-config booting option to have various bootup configs. I did that, had like 3 or 4 configs for various amounts of RAM and memory managers. For instance, Wing Commander liked EMS, I believe. However, many demos didn't want ANY XMS or EMS, just raw memory.
Yes, and that fussing around, I hated.
Using DOSBox is like using WinUAE. There's many people who just prefer the real thing.
Oh yes, I normally prefer the real thing above others, but I see dosbox more like a tool for the real thing, rather than being an emulator.
But, considering a 286 with a monochrome display, I'd say you're right. :-)
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Quick question... on my 486 DX2 50Mhz system, I recently installed a Sound Blaster 16 Value, and at random intervals the system's floppy and/or IDE bus and sometimes the mouse and keyboard seems to "halt" for about 5 or 10 seconds and then continues to run as usual, this needless to say is annoying when trying to play a game. The audio however continues to play as normal, without skipping a beat.
Any ideas what this problem could be? I took the card out, and it still does it, this is a new happening.
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@DamageX:
Interesting info. You win the crown for most esoteric and arcane subject matters ;-)
@Invisix:
I agree with your 486ophilia :-) And of course your Amiga comments! :-D You have a nice Amiga system there, for this side of the pond. I've still not managed to procure anything faster than an 040 :-(
As for the Roland cards, like BlackMonk said: just too damn expensive at the time, so I never got one, never heard it, and so never ever looked back :/ SB was cheap and it did more than the speaker so it was good enough. But then when I got a hold of a Gravis Ultrasound with the extra RAM for the wavetable samples and 32 voice hardware mixing - man, that was it! I was done! I actually couldn't afford it at the time, but on one computer show I found it in a used parts bin for $40 (at the time it was around $140 or so), and I almost jumped in the box to grab it :-D
As for your halting problem, I can't think of anything. Try to notice if anything else happens (ex. is it only when certain games play, only when music is playing, only when drivers are loaded, what happens when you use a mod player like Cubic or something? how about any demos like Second Reality? etc)
@BlackMonk & Speelgoedmannetje:
I have to agree with BlackMonk: DOSbox is great, but it ain't the real thing for me either. I believe the diffence comes with people's personalities. 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 (round and soft with an inverted dimple at the center, har har har). For me DOSbox is great when I'm on a Mac and have nostalgia withdrawals, but if I have a real DOS box next to me, I'll prefer using that. 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.
@BlackMonk:
It's interesting you mention Zone66. It was coded by Thomasz Pytel (scene nick Tran!), when he was still a teen, for Tim Sweeney (who went on to make Unreal/Unreal Tournament fame) of Epic MegaGames, who's also a long time friend, and he used his PMode32 code in that game, which was a "DOS extender" allowing software to use 32bit flat memory mode in DOS under protected mode (so true 32bit coding). Made a decent amount of cash by selling PMode32 (he and DareDevil) - because it was way faster and smaller than DOS4GW and any other alternative.
Also I agree with your other points. Win 3.11 vs Win95, etc. As for Novell's stuff, it wasn't that bad! It's mostly autoexec/config setup and some DOS based menu-driven config stuff. It was my first networking experience, with IPX and Doom of course ;-)
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Tonight, I have achieved what I once thought was impossible... I installed a 1.2GB Quantum brand HDD on my 486. I say "impossible" because before, the system was only seeing ~200 megs of the overall total due to typical year 1992 BIOS hdd size limitations. I think the max the BIOS supports is 514 megs.
I whipped out my Maxtor Max*Blast Plus 1.44mb Disk which is actually a re-labled EZ-Drive software customized for Maxtor, but it works with any drive. It partitioned, and formatted the HDD, I installed MS-DOS 6.22 and low and behold DOS sees the entire 1.2GB! I ran scandisk with no bad sectors.
So yeah, my 486 DX2 is now officially sporting a wicked 1.2gb HDD; which was unheard of in those days. :lol:
Oh so everyone knows, the issues I was having with the 5-10 second "halting" were I believe a failing HDD. I could literally hear the poor thing "churn / grind" sometimes during idle times, HDD access, and during the Johnny Castaway screensaver, which it never did before; it started the other night.
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@Invisix : seek in the bios a '15-16mb hole memory' option and turn it on. SB Cards love it (even PCI ones !!!).
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Good thread. This post is bringing back memories. Someone put it very well, hardware just isn't as exciting anymore. I can remember my first 'modern' computer back in the mid 90's. It was a Tandy 2500/sx 386/33 I bought when I was 14. I can remember the day I bought a sound blaster and a 2x cd-rom for it. I was da man! Later on, I managed to get Win95 running on it, with a total of 10mb of ram. SSSLLLOOOWWW. I remember when I first saw a demo of Quake running with the 3dfx Voodoo card, and I had to have one. I think it was the bi-linear filtering that hooked me, because every other 'accelerator' out there still made everything look blocky. I still think the best CPU I ever had was my K6-233. I found out that the motherboard I had had the 83 mhz bus speed, but it was an early board, so the PCI bus ran at 1/2 of the system bus, so my PCI slots were running at 41.5mhz, and my CPU was running at 250mhz! I used to play Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries online, and with that setup I was ALWAYS the first to drop into the game, even faster than guys with dual P2-333's and twice the ram. Plus, the Voodoo2 looked killer with everything. Man, I miss the good old days. That K6 is still soldiering on in my mother-in-laws computer, even though I overheated it on many occasions (forgetting to plug the fan back in). OK, I'm done rambling as well. :-D
Joel
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Ok, not quite done rambling. Doing some reflection on the state of hardware nowadays, I know now why hardware isn't as exciting anymore, at least for x86 hardware. When I got into hardware in the mid-late 90's, there were only a few different types of motherboards. The most popular was the socket 7. Remember when you could get an Intel, AMD, Cyrix, or even IDT winchip or Rise MP6 processors in socket 7 variety? The performance of the processor had to stand on its own merit, because one could test different processors on the SAME motherboard with the same peripherals. Wanted to go to a different processor from a different manufacturer? Just lift the lever, take the old one out, put the new one in, close the lever, and move a few jumpers. Now, one socket is for one manufacturer and one socket is for another. Going to a different processor from a different manufacturer (or heck, even socket. Look at AMD with sockets 754, 939, 940, F, AM2, AM2+, upcoming AM3) requires a change in motherboard. It seems to have divided the consumers (hardware guys), not giving them as much variety as before (or, too much variety, depending on how you look at it). I SWEAR I'm done rambling now!
Joel
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FYI, I've got a Extended ISA GFX board from those days, plus some ISA serial/parallel port cards and a few other things (386 CPU somewhere) of anyone can make use of them.
Hodgkinson.
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@jnordness
Thanks for your post, I have to agree with what you stated in your "rambling", but I would also like to add that the lackluster of todays hardware also is that NOTHING has changed in the x86 world except for faster speeds, don't give me that "64-BIT!" which is utter bull, considering 98% of companies still code in 32-bit code. There are more 64-bit Linux users than 64-bit Windows users. "DUAL CORE! QUAD CORE!" *yawn* we had those since 386 days, just it was dual CPU, or quad CPU instead of all being on one die. Further more dual core, quad core, etc are all HYPE, it's not as if, for example, that a 3Ghz dual core CPU is running at 3Ghz each core, no it means each core is running at 1.5Ghz for a combined speed of 3Ghz. You'll be suprised the amount of people that are fooled into thinking that their system is running at 6Ghz. :lol:
The same goes for 3d accelerators; but I admit 3d accelerators are finally to a point where games are starting to look more like CGI quality but has along ways to go... due to x86 architecture limiations. I wonder when graphic card companies are going to finally come to the conclusion that the cards theoretical specs could be realtime specs if modern day CPU's were actually designed specifically for graphics hardware.
My opinion is this... the industry needs to go back to the custom chip set-ups of yesteryear for PC gaming... no wait... those already exist, they are called gaming consoles. :lol:
Seriously though, my theory is that PC 3D gaming is going to reach it's peak in a few years, and it's going to call for a drastic update in CPU arch in order to push on. 8-)
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I do believe that one of my friends told me that Pentium processors were actually something like 4 Intel 8080's strapped together...No wonder he hates x86 processors over 68k's...
Hmmm. Does that imply that modern Pentium processors could in fact just be a few thousand 8080's strapped together...lol...? :-D
Nah...But I wouldn't be surprised if great chunks of modern processors are still like 8080's...
Hey, re dual core/quad core processors...I wonder how much processing power the extra software is using to control the two cores? And what improvement does having 2 cores at 1.5Ghz have over 1 at 3Ghz :roll: ???
Besides, turning a core off when its not in use is nothing new...my Dell 400Mhz laptop just throttles back the processor to save power...
Oh, that reminds me...Why are features on the dies having to be made smaller and smaller? Why not just make larger dies?
Hodgkinson.
EDIT: Theres got to be a limit to how many cores you can actually use...Either you're going to have more cores than applications (Errm...having said that the "Processes" list in XP is rather long...), or the processing power required to split a application over more cores is larger than the benifit of using the multiple cores...
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Applications are not split across several cores, the software has to emplore several threads that can get distributed across the cores - OS overhead is low, but if thread interdependance grows it can become a real problem.
The cost of a die is largely proportional to the area of the die (growing a bit faster due to lower yields with larger area dice) - that's why currently Intel's 45nm CPUs can easily beat AMD's 65nm CPU range in respect to pricing.
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Ah. I thought cost might have somthing to do with the die size.
Re multiple cores, since I've got a few 68020 PGA's on boards in the garage, I tinkered with the idea of somehow using the two CPUs to double the system speed by staggering the clock pulses. I instantly ditched the idea as many commands need multiple clock pulses to execute/load/output data, and any on-chip memory would create real problems.
It would probably need a full kickstart rewrite, as in the A5000 system.
Shame I've heard so little of the transputer system. Sigh. If only you could just strap pins on processors in parallel and get twice the processing power :-)
Hodgkinson.
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Hodgkinson wrote:
Hey, re dual core/quad core processors...I wonder how much processing power the extra software is using to control the two cores? And what improvement does having 2 cores at 1.5Ghz have over 1 at 3Ghz :roll: ???
Besides, turning a core off when its not in use is nothing new...my Dell 400Mhz laptop just throttles back the processor to save power...
Hodgkinson.
That was my point, why it I said multiple core CPU's are nothing but hype... there is no improvement of having multiple CPU cores over a single core with the same Mhz/Ghz. It's a marketing gimmick. :rtfm:
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OK guys, nostalgia is good, but ignorance is also not bliss, it's poverty (of the mind and the intellect in this case).
I don't know of any dual core that is rated as low as 1.5Ghz. If it's sold as 1.5Ghz then that means BOTH cores run at that speed. Most dual cores are around the 2-2.5+ Ghz range right now, and that gives an ADDITIVE or TOTAL speed of 4-5Ghz.
Now, the issue is not that those machines aren't 4-5Ghz fast. They *ARE*, if you have the RIGHT software. Thus the problem is with software. You see, hardware has advanced much faster than software. Although the hardware advance, to be honest, wasn't an advance that required as much intellect - just take 1 CPU core and stitch it together with another on the same die - big wooptie doo.
Now back to software: software is DUMB DUMB DUMB (disclaimer: I'm a software engineer). You see, even though these monster machines have 2 or 4 or 8 or however many cores, the software isn't at the stage of intelligence where it can distribute itself all over those cores to take advantage.
This is the current state of how multi-cores are being utilized:
Normally, when you run a modern OS, you have multiple applications running. They usually run on different cores (sometimes they migrate between cores, which is time consuming and wasteful - forcing them to a certain core gets rid of this waste - this is called CPU affinity). This works well for servers where multiple version of a web server (ex. apache), or other software is run (for dynamic pages you'd run multiple Python, PHP, Ruby, Lua, etc. scripts, one for each page that gets "hit").
But if you're a desktop user, you don't normally run many power hungry apps. Even if you run 10 programs "at the same time", like office productivty tools, they're still just WAITING for you to type or move the mouse. When you *really* want performance is when you've got one power hungry app, like a hardcore game, like Crysis, Quake 4, etc.
Like previously mentioned, one way to utilize more than 1 core in such a circumstance is to use threads. Threads basically allow a program to run parts of itself as separate processes, thus on more than 1 core. The problem though is that thread programming is 1) hard (very error prone to what are known as race and deadlock conditions) 2) wasteful as you need to spend a lot of time synchronizing threads (because they must communicate their results with each other, or the main thread) and 3) there's only so much you can do with threads before things get unwieldy.
An example for 3) is a game where it uses thread A for main game logic, thread B for sound, thread C for graphics. If most of your execution time is spent (typically this is the case) on thread C, and you have 4 cores, then it's not good enough to only have 3 threads. You really want to break thread C into multiple threads again, so that it gets divided among all CPUs. But even with 4 threads, you soon realize that sound processing doesn't really fully use its core. So you want to break down the expensive graphics thread to even more sub-threads. And thus the nightmare begins: should it work on 2 cores? 4 cores? 8 cores? Heck, you say let's make it dynamic to adjust depending on cores. But then, as already mentioned, you hit the dreaded "iso-efficiency" problems: more "overhead work" versus "useful work", because you're spending all your time distributing the work, which is in too small packets for too much effort, while it would have been efficient to keep larger packets of work on fewer cores. This is known as the granularity level. Too fine granularity and you've got more overhead than actual work being done. Too coarse granularity and you're under-utilizing your cores because the chunks aren't split in enough pieces to fill the cores.
This was also in effect a real problem with PPC Amigas as well: without the extra effort by the programmers to split the work between the 68k and the PPC, there was no benefit to the "dual CPU" PPC cards. And also very real was the fact that switching between the PPC and the 68k had a lot of overhead time.
As you can see, this is soon a nightmare of huge proportions. So people thought: why not make the computers solve this problem. Onto the next section:
One of the *real big* problems that a major portion of the software industry and lots of us computer science majors are facing today, as far as advancing towards the multi-core/super-parallel future, is in the compilers. If compilers were smart enough to break down execution of code so that the programmer doesn't have to spend tons and tons of hours to write parallelizable code, then you could simply recompile your code to use more cores and it would work faster and better. Unfortunately due to the some of the reasons mentioned above such compilers are extremely hard to get right, and there isn't really any one that has accomplished this to a great extent, as of yet.
Now some theory (ramblings). Part of the problem I believe is in our programming paradigms. We view programming like we always have, and using languages that we always have used. Like common speech, I believe language is an enabler and an inhibiter. If your language isn't capable of letting you express a certain class of thoughts, you might never ever have thoughts of such a class in your brain. It can hold you back. On the other hand, if the language enables you to have thoughts of higher levels, due to higher levels of complexity and expression, then I believe you will be endowed with more expressive and thus more complicated and possibly more intelligent thoughts. This I believe holds for computer languages as well.
We're currently stuck with some very very bad technologies, as mentioned before. Although I enjoyed my x86 years, and I did years of intel assembly, the instruction set was horrible compared to the 68000. As a programmer I always wanted to have the 16 general purpose registers offered by the 68000 - but only got 8. This stupid x86 ISA is *still* here, in all 64bit chips (although they are internally RISC-like, they convert x86 ISA to micro-ops, and execute those). Another major problem is the Von Neuman architecture. Computers work on the principle of Fetch instruction - Decode instruction - Execute instruction - Store result. This limits us to certain subsets of problems or approaches to problem solving (ex: SIMD by default operate on multiple data chunks - this changes the way you program when using SIMD - you think in parallel by default). Think of anti-machines as a totally inverted example of how computing can be achieved (this field seems ever more hopeful a future with the advent of FPGAs and reconfigurable chips). Then there are biological computing devices which work on different principles (just to give a small example, the neurons in your brain not only work based on a "flat model" of connections, but depending where on the neuron's surface, which is 3D dimensional, a connection is made, makes a real difference in the results), and even quantum computing devices on yet other principles. Another major problem in my opinion is the stagnation of the masses, pioneered by none other than Microsoft and their technologies. They have dominated the software market for decades with C++, which is an extremely unclean and really retarded object oriented language, which has shown very little innovation and ability to literally break through the old programming paradigm expressions onto a new playing field.
Anyways, enough about the non-existant "multi-core hype". It's no hype. It's real. We've got idling screaming machines and "don't know what to do with them" as far as normal desktop use is concerned. Server people and internet companies know very well what to do with them. So do all the physicists and scientists that do massive data crunching. For the desktop, it's primarily games that will be pushing the envelope. From my personal experience I also believe Apple is heading in the right direction with all their new apps and APIs (Core Animation as a small example) exploiting more and more the underlying hardware architecture (not just Time Machine, but LLVM used in the OpenGL core and other parts).
Now I *really* feel very nostalgic about the good ol' SIMPLE days of single-core, single-CPU non-memory protected multitasking! ;-) Sigh.....
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15 bucks, considering that it would have cost them more than 50 to have it hauled away I would have held out for $25, afterall you are saving them the effort of carrying it out to the kerb as well.
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@da9000
Very good description - and I, too miss the good ol' simple days... ;-)
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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.
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@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.