486dx2 System Question

[BlackMonk]

"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.

[BlackMonk]

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.

[BlackMonk]

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.

[BlackMonk]

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.  

[BlackMonk]

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'.

[BlackMonk]

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.

[BlackMonk]

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...

[BlackMonk]

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...

[BlackMonk]

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.

[BlackMonk]

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.

[BlackMonk]

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.  

-----------------

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.

[BlackMonk]

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!

[BlackMonk]

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.