Re: Video card for a Pentium 60

Posted on 2023-10-25, 10:04

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

For something really special for a socket4, go for a "number 9 ticket to ride" real early pci card that was aimed at the wintel workstation market of early 1994. Failing that, cornerstone did a pci version of the cirrus 5402 aimed at the DTP market, thus real crisp, sharp image guaranteed.

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What is this thing? A motion sensing joypad for Dos games?

Posted on 2023-10-25, 09:54

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Thought this might be quite interesting to the gamers on vogons... Video of it in action, the video description covers some tech/info that I've scraped together in the past year https://youtu.be/cW7fqGYG51g Another clip of the joypad itself: https://youtube.com/shorts/sEz_EBRVHqk?si=OD0MdfohB05rRgaQ …

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Re: List of Windows 3.x games that use gameport joysticks?

Posted on 2023-10-09, 22:38

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I remember that comix zone and ecco pc had 4button joystick support, so maybe all the early sega pc line did. Toy story might be another, since that was on the mega drive as well. Try searching for all the WinG games, since WinG was much like DirectX it might have some kind of "DirectInput" protocol …

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Re: Old games that specifically rely on high clock speeds for performance?

Posted on 2023-08-15, 20:58

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Milliways

in Milliways

I seem to remember reading that some NFS games had issues with running on Hyperthreaded processors without patches - I don't know if those would perhaps run faster on single-core chips

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Re: Best Graphic Cards for a 486DX4-133 System

Posted on 2023-08-15, 20:37

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I'd go for any PCI video card made between 1994-1997 for a 486 The best balance between price/performance will include chips from S3, Cirrus, Trident. those with cash to (literally) burn can go for the ATi, Tseng, Matrox, Hercules and the very 1st gen nVidia chips in that time gap. ATI Rage is dirt …

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I solved the mystery of a no-name CD-ROM drive

Posted on 2023-08-15, 20:32

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Somewhere in late 2013 or early 2014 i bought my first CD-ROM drive, it as for my first ever PC - a Toshiba T2110 laptop It's a PCMCIA unit, which seemed to be the common standard for laptops before the advent of USB. it works "out of the box" under windows 95 but DOS users will need to load the …

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Re: Best Graphic Cards for a 486DX4-133 System

Posted on 2023-08-15, 20:07

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I'd go for any PCI video card made between 1994-1997 for a 486 The best balance between price/performance will include chips from S3, Cirrus, Trident. those with cash to (literally) burn can go for the ATi, Tseng, Matrox, Hercules and the very 1st gen nVidia chips in that time gap.

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Re: What's the best LCD of DOS gaming? (re: 21" CRT is too big!)

Posted on 2023-03-04, 08:02

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

good makes of lcd monitors from 1998-2004 are philips, benq, taxan, fujitsu siemens, liteon, goodmans and samsung. look into them

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Re: Japanese retro computers - do you own any?

Posted on 2023-03-04, 04:30

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

anyone checked out this cool homesite? http://www.cybergarage.org/ that FMtowns on the far right - love those early cd-rom loaders!

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Re: Windows XP systems, do you 4:3, 5:4 or 16:10?

Posted on 2023-03-02, 18:00

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

I seem to remember Taxan making those artist CRT monitors in the 1990s/2000s that could be rotated 90* so one would have that arcade game-esque resolution...

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Re: list of speed sensitive windows games (NOT DOS)

Posted on 2023-02-26, 02:58

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

You mean slow down the rendering loop by switching to software (if the game supports it, which for the early DX titles might be a reasonable assumption), leaving less cycles for the game logic to burn? I guess that might bump a machine that's only slightly too fast down into "working" territory. …

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Re: list of speed sensitive windows games (NOT DOS)

Posted on 2023-02-23, 12:57

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

when it comes to earlier directX titles, i wonder if somethings might be fixable when hardware acceleration is turned down from the control panel>my computer...

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2023-02-23, 12:53

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in the light of all these flashcarts and thingamyjigs, i still use the old fasioned swap-trick to play CD-R games on my sega saturn https://youtube.com/shorts/A1yOz0fm9Yk

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Re: How to enter old 80286 Phoenix Bios??

Posted on 2023-02-16, 03:17

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Agghhhh! this is reminding me of the IBM setup bios diskette i've been searching for my Panasonic CD-V21P - an absolute curse!

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Re: Scaleo 400 = 2002 gaming on a budget (full log)

Posted on 2023-02-16, 03:01

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

About the combo unit: searching google doesn't do much, so i'll let the AI pick this text up for others to find. It's BTC branded and it's called a "Digital Dual" - it writes CD-RW discs and should read SDcards upto 2GB in size, but no more than that. It's model number is BCE5232Ia. Some of you …

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Re: Scaleo 400 = 2002 gaming on a budget (full log)

Posted on 2023-02-16, 02:44

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

And here are my upgrade options: In keeping with the "Budget gaming in 2002" title, i imagined that i would of bought 2 creative products from last year at a discount, a creative nVidia geforce mx400 and a Live! 5.1 (SB0100) both are from 2001 and should tick all the feature requirements of the era …

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Re: Scaleo 400 = 2002 gaming on a budget (full log)

Posted on 2023-02-16, 02:28

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Original stock components: RAM, modem and all 3 drives.

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Re: Scaleo 400 = 2002 gaming on a budget (full log)

Posted on 2023-02-16, 02:22

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

And here it is, the micro-ATX tower case of the scaleo 400! I've worked out that it was purchased late november 2002.

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Re: Another question about Windows XP videocard

Posted on 2023-02-14, 07:36

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Windows

in Windows

Had an acer SA90 in early 2008, as a representative of my first time vista experience = awful hardware. My condolences. 😔 It seems to have had a "Vista Basic" sticker, too. Which translated to "Vista makes it to the desktop; PC can barely run XP, either." The success of Windows 7 was largely based …

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Front panel option for soundblaster live! 5.1 without livedrive?

Posted on 2023-02-13, 13:48

by

by Vic Zarratt

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I'm interested in hooking up the front panel audio of my https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=92594 build to a SB0100 creative live card. now this card does have the header for a live drive, so i know that this clearly can be done if i simply modify the pins of my case header... somehow. does …

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