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A great "old and new" board to look for is the Iwill KK266+. It supports Athlons up to 1700+ or so, and has an ISA slot. Plus, it has 6ch (5.1, I guess) onboard sound with great DOS SB/Adlib support (I have the older KK266 with 4ch sound). Just set the GUS and "SB" to different DMAs/IRQs/ports, and init the GUS first, and they get along with each other just fine.

There were a few other Athlon boards, with the tried-and-true KT133A chipset (SDRAM only, no DDR), that had an ISA slot. Abit KT7A was one, and Epox had one too. They were made last year, but you can still find them for sale if you look hard. You're not going to find a Pentium 4 board with an ISA slot though.

I can't use my GUS in my new PC, no ISA port.
I had one of those Athlon boards with ISA port (KT7A), and it didn't work either (that's the reason why most boards don't have ISA anyway?).

I have Win98 on my new PC, but I barely use it, because it gets unstable, especially when you're coding, and messing up. WinXP doesn't care about that.
And my SB Live! 5.1 doesn't work very well in DOS/Win98 either... It emulates an SB16, but I only get noise from it. For me it only works with regular Sound Blaster stuff.

I just never threw out my old PCs. And that's how I can still watch pretty much any demo out there.
If you really want to watch those old DOS demos, I suggest you just get an old Pentium or something. They cost peanuts these days.
Just install DOS and Win98 on there, and use it for demoing only. And get a GUS ofcourse :)

The main point here is that the operating system architecture has changed too much. Running old dos-stuff under NT in emulation would require the emulator to emulate it entirely, as vmware would do, since the poor memory handling in dos resulted in programs using sloppy control of their memory usage. This is what takes the emulator in windows to its knees. And such an emulator as we have seen gets to slow. After all, demos really pushed the limits back then. The only real solution is to dust of the old hardware. Also, modern emulation drivers for dos uses to much ram to be really useful, 40k less of conventional ram and you're stuck...

By the way, many old demos can be found on mpeg these days...

DEMODVD! :)

I'm just wondering: Why are people so upset about this DOS version (7.10) that comes with win9x?

I have never had any problems with it, and making a dual ("triple") boot NT/Win9x/DOS is a walk in the park. Just install Win9x before any NTs, and voila--a bootmenu. Then you just edit a bit in msdos.sys, and then you create a Win9x bootmenu in your config.sys. Anyone with some DOS-experience from the old days remember this by heart :)

As for usage, as I said, I've not experienced any problems with DOS 7.10 and old demos. I can run about everything there is on my machine. No problems.

Hell--I even managed to run Stars with Video Thief loaded! :)

I tried that VDMSound (that Jcl recommended), but every demo and game i tried crashed the whole OS (had to reboot). Impulse Tracker didn't crash, but refused to understand my keyboard (mouse worked, but it's a bit hard to track with that :). It worked fine with Win98 though.

Anyone have any idea how to configure it so that it works ok?

I have Win2k and SB128PCI, I even have GUS, but i don't have ISA slot :(

The problem with emulation is always the same. It is impossible to emulate the thing 100%. I got VDMSound to work sometime, and it did seem to work, but for less than half the things I tested.

I now have a P200 here and I only need a GUS to be happy. My old one just died a few years back. When not displaying demos, the P200 is my firewall/proxy btw (dual boot) :-)

I have put my autoexec.bat and config.sys for msdos 7.1 on my homepage together with some useful tools that you can download. You probably know the page already (more than 400 hits on the link at ojuice), but here is the link

FractalAGP: The problem with MS-DOS 7.10 is that it is quite large. Some demos require an extreme amount of low memory to be available (I've seen them demand up to 620k or so), and no memory managers.
So in MS-DOS 7.10 it is basically physically impossible to load certain demos.
Other than that, yes... I run demos in DOS 7.10 at times.

Then again, that doesn't solve all the problems of modern PCs not having (working) ISA slots, various timer/division by zero/etc bugs on PCs that are way faster than people could ever imagine, and stuff like my PCI SoundBlaster refusing to emulate the SB16 correctly.

FOR DOS-SOUND COMPATIBILITY UNDER
NT/2K AND XP GO TO THE FOLLOWING PAGE:

ntvdm.cjb.net/

IS IT A WRAPPER? AN EMULATOR? DONT KNOW :)
BUT IT WORKS.....

zaphod, you should get your keyboard fixed. there seems to be some problem with caps lock or shift.

zaphod, i've been running VDMSound for quite a while, but it fails with all Midas applications. It works, but the music timing is slooooooooooooow as shit. Have you ever had this problem or know how to fix it?

Maybe some of you with working VDMSound could send me your config?

zaphod, that could be your CPU brand that causes this. I had the same trouble with some of my older demos running on my intel celeron machine (under dos).

jcl: i *heard* that vdmsound has trouble with sb live cards and some other soundcard i can't remember.

robotriot, maybe SB128PCI? Because I have that and vdms doesn't work :)

might be. at least i can confirm that it sounds like crap with sb live, and i thought the emulation was that bad :)

robotriot: i have it working with my SbLive with no single problems (using Impulse Tracker). Check my "Running Impulse Tracker on 2K/XP" tutorial at http://modulez.escena.org (the link is on the left column). However still can't make proper timing with Midas applications. Works fine for the rest (managed to run even an old adlib (OPL2) tracker I made ages ago.

I've also been able to run old games with it and compatibilty modes, with aboslutely no problems. Midas and in general, most demos (I guess the IRQ 0 timing isn't working accurately on XP/2K for emulation, and that's the way most module players worked on DOS), are being a pain in the ass. I contacted Vlad Romanascu (VDMSound creator) for that, but seems he can't tell where the problem is, probably is something to do with 2K/XP DOS emulation, and not with VDMSound itself.

For the keyboard being slow, there's a trick on 2K/XP, which is turning off NumLock when you don't need it. This is not VDMSound fault, but 2K/XP's one, and it works even on a MS-DOS console (without VDMSound) running any old fullscreen dos application (try Impulse Tracker, for example).

Good luck, everyone, and any information you can get, send me to jcl (at) unknownproductions.org, I'll be glad to add it to my IT tutorial, or to contact Vlad Romanascu myself to ask him for inclusion on future versions of VDMSound :-)
Thanks :)

Weird.

I made something exactly as told in Jcl's tutorial, and when I started Impulse Tracker, it didn't recognise any soundcard (just internal speaker) and keyboard didn't work. I turned num lock off before starting, but it went automatically back when I started IT. I had to go to windows with CTRL+ESC, and when i did that and closed IT, clock started moving like two minutes in one second :D

I don't know if I got into some timewarp, but I really doubt it ;)

something == everything

lug00ber: you're all talk and no play - the gus you are using is MINE, and you know it. bwahahaaa! :) (yes, i've got three, and no; you people can't have any! mo-ahahaaa!)

Anyone tried
http://dosbox.zophar.net/
?

It's still under development, but it seems to be quite nice.

Zophar's dosbox is in a very young stage. I didn't get anything out of it :)

I'm afraid it'll take a while to implent more features.

Darn it! I lost my other post when Pouet.net complains that I need to be logged in to post when I am.

IWill KK266+ does have DOS drivers for onboard audio (what phoenix said), and for Windows, it has AudioRack app, so I suspect that it's from ESS. I experienced good DOS sound support from ESS, but I don't know how well it can perform on IWill KK266+ motherboard.

Anyone got a hands on ESS Canyon3D-2? It has dos drivers, and the box said that it supports legacy sound in three ways: PC/PCI, TDMA, and DDMA. What is TDMA and DDMA? And how does it work? I'm hoping that it would work since today's motherbaord tries to eliminate legacy stuff.

win2k/xp kill dos demos.