some retro hardware stuff

[66671d4827caechickenhead]

Don't forget that the assets and graphics actually improve.

And if you have cancer it will be cured.

Older hardware is the digital embodiment of Jesus.

[66671d4827f15Kolya]

You're joking but for a long time (after the end of EAX support and before NewDark and OpenAL) SS2 sounded really flat. People were introduced to it that way.

[66671d4828363RocketMan]

The timing of this project is such a coincidence as I just happened to tear into one of my old machines recently.  Now I don't have the massive hardware repository Voodoo does but I have a decent stack of computer crap to rummage through and I've been "upgrading" my old rigs over the years.  I have a 133 MHz machine that I am trying to uberfy so it will play stuff like Q2 and UT.  I had it working a while back but now can't seem to get my network card to work and the OS crapped out so I'm stuck until I get my replacement network card.  I just bought an intel 1000 gt or some such off ebay and am waiting for it to arrive.  Running win95, 32 mb ram, mach64/Voodoo2 combo and AWE64 sound.  Should be pretty sweet when it's done.  Also, I'm running full DOS 6.22 and plan to use this rig for SS1 the way it was meant to be played.  I can't wait.

[66671d48287c1voodoo47]

might want to throw in some more ram, and maybe consider that ide->SD card adapter - they are dirt cheap and the performance vs any old hdd you might have running there is just beyond comparison.

the massive hardware repository Voodoo does (have)

I do know a few people that actually have such repositories, they would laugh seeing this statement. "hey, can you get me a bunch of performance comparisons of gf7900 vs x1900?" "sure, just tell me which chip revisions you want to see."

150 graphics cards might seem like a lot, but it's essentially just three big boxes that would all comfortably fit on a standard size (1x2m) single bed. any girl's regular wardrobe would take more space, I'd imagine.

[66671d4828b40RocketMan]

but it's essentially just three big boxes that would all comfortably fit on a standard size (1x2m) single bed. any girl's regular wardrobe would take more space, I'd imagine.

Maybe you should free up some space on the bed and you can fit the girl there instead

[66671d4828c42voodoo47]

pretty sure I could fit a girl in three boxes, I just don't want to. for now.

[66671d4828d7aAl_B]

Well this thread ended up creepier than expected...

[66671d4829003Marvin]

They always do.

[66671d4829275voodoo47]

so lets steer it away from serial-killer-creepy back to old-hardware-obsession creepy, shall we?

with my V1 8MB nowhere to be found, I've snooped around a bit and managed to contact a collector that has acquired a rare V1 more than a decade ago, and to my surprise, he still had it, and was also willing to sell. so sometime later next week, I'll be receiving this:

this is a Quantum 3D Obsidian 100DB-4440, a twin card, quad pcb, 800*600 and multitexturing capable Voodoo1 running in SLI, 20MB total - pretty much as far as you can go with a Voodoo1, a '96 equivalent of today's GTX1080 running in quad SLI. about 5 of these setups are known to exist.

woop woop?

[66671d48293c7chickenhead]

excellent hardware arouses me.

excuse me for a minute......

[66671d48294f0Valet2]

voodoo47, so where are you from?

[66671d4829603voodoo47]

central Europe - Germany, according to steam.

[66671d48296ebValet2]

I hope you drink beer, because I'm willing to visit your videocard in-house museum. If you don't mind of course.

[66671d48297b9voodoo47]

not much of a beer/booze/going out person.

[66671d48299c1voodoo47]

anyway, popped a diamond monster V2 12mb in today, and niceness and smoothness ensued. all three graphics cards work properly together, can switch between apis as needed (though as mentioned earlier, powervr d3d needs to be off, as it screws up whatever the primary card tries to render if enabled).

some more hw info:
- the ide->sd adapters don't like ide cables that have just one device connector (i.e. no master and slave). must use a normal ide cable or the pc won't boot to windows. also, attaching a secondary device to the cable with the adapter is not recommended (vogons).
- no idea why, but the ide->sd adapter with a bracket works fine, while one without it causes lockups. they do report differently in BIOS, so it's probably not the same chip.
- a vga splitter cable can serve as a makeshift vga pass-through cable, but this will screw up your monitor (and Voodoo) resolution detection - a proper pass-through cable, or a vga extension (male->female) cable (even if a bit too long for this purpose) is highly recommended.

some quick notes about games:
-V2 is on par with Savage4 in certain situations as far as speed is concerned.
-Q3 will be painfully slow on V2 if the texture resolution is maxed out.
-some games issues with Voodoo gamma, manual tweaking required.

[66671d4829b9cRocketMan]

Question you can probably answer in 2 seconds...

I'm trying to boot to a dos prompt on my machine (which is currently loaded with win95) but when I do, I can't access any of the hard drive letters.  I can only get A: and R: (which is the arbitrary letter assigned to the CD-ROM in config.sys).  99% of my searches on google have returned answers saying "you can't access NTFS from dos stupid" but this doesn't apply to me in this case because on this old rig, all my partitions are FAT32 so they should be visible.

Is there something I have to do in the autoexec or config when booting from a floppy in order to address/map the hard drive letters?  Do I need some IDE device driver? 

Basically my end goal is this.  Some games and software don't like running in windows... so I tried "rebooting in dos mode" and I get the familiar prompt but it's not real dos because it didn't load from scratch... it just came out of win95 so nothing is loaded properly.  Even the games recognize that it's shitty win95 dos and not real dos.  I want to be able to load real dos with all my device drivers correctly installed but first I need to figure out this boot floppy issue because I can't read my C drive and that's where I need to go to get at my folders that have all my device drivers in them.  Any ideas?

[66671d4829e33Olfred]

Which DOS Version are you running?

[66671d482a018JDoran]

RocketMan, you should ask your questions on VOGONS, which is a forum dedicated to old PCs, new PCs that you want to run old games on, old games themselves, DOS (both real DOS on a real PC, and also DOSBox), Windows, old hardware, and that sort of thing. It's also one of the few forums I know of that's free from trolls and idiots.

It really is a great resource for old hardware, old operating systems, old games, etc. Another good site for game fixes (which is off topic, I know) is The PC Gaming Wiki.

[66671d482a135Valet2]

Win95 dos (which is DOS7) is a good dos. I didn't have any problems with it using a variety of software. It works with fat32, which is unsupported by msdos6.22.

[66671d482a27eRocketMan]

Wait... so, prior to windows 95, there was no dos support for FAT32 partitions?  What was it, FAT16 only?  Well if that's the case, I have to change my boot order to launch win95 dos first so I can exploit the autoexec and config files.  I'm a bit wary about trying to invoke drivers after quitting windows to dos.

I assume I will be able to find a dos7 boot disk capable of giving me a c prompt so I can actually install my drivers first.  Win95 complained when I tried to install the dos version of my AWE64 drivers.

Olf:  It was a boot floppy with 6.22.

JDoran:  You're absolutely right.  I was just being sloppy.  Noted for future issues.

[66671d482a5a9Olfred]

Make sure to get at least MS-DOS 7.1, it was the first one to fully support FAT32.
It comes with Windows 95B and upwards to 98SE

JDoran:  You're absolutely right.  I was just being sloppy.  Noted for future issues.

Well, so far we managed to solve all your problems

[66671d482a6a2RocketMan]

But I like 6.22.  It's Bonafide (like Popeye's chicken)!  Isn't there some driver I can use to get around this limitation? 

[66671d482a77bOlfred]

Actually, no.
Also, there shouldn't be any drawbacks to use 7.1 over 6.22.

[66671d482a84bRocketMan]

Oooookay