pouët.net

I need to correct myself. On the picture you see a SL2U4 / 350 MHz @ i440BX and the GUS memory upgrade was 2x4MB, so 4 MB is ok. Dunno if 60 or 70 ns makes a difference in compatibillity. Sorry, it's my curse, to mess things up by knowing it. Last AMD-CPU based ISA-boards are able to boot USB-drives, also from PCI add-on cards with internal USB 2.0-connections . That can make things much easier and quiet to handle, without needing LAN or floppy.

It's funny. About 3 weeks ago I took 1 of my old monsters to the tip.
A dual cpu (p3 at 500mhz from memory) with 768mb of ecc mem and a pci-x slot at the top which I had nice virge s3 card sitting in.
It ran debian with xfce like a shower of shit. Only problem really was the fact that it weighed 50kgs. You could see the guy at the recycling depot grinniing from ear to ear at the thought of so much steel!

A good alternative for that is the GUS Extreme. It has both the GF1 and an ESS AudioDrive chip on board (for SB-compatibility). The ESS AudioDrive has good Windows drivers.

Looking into the GUS Extreme. Can it run as a 100% compatible GUS Classic w/ 1MB RAM (yes, I know it has a GF1)? Or is it not quite fully a GUS classic equiv? And, as a bonus, it's effectively a SB Pro (in hardware). Hmm, not bad if true, for only 1 ISA slot...

bp

Yes, it's fully compatible with a GUS Classic. The ESS AudioDrive also delivers very good SB compatibility (but with crisp sound quality, unlike the real SBs of that era).
As a bonus, it's a jumperless design, so you can change addresses, IRQs and DMA's with a commandline config tool.

The PNP Pro has 512 KB ROM / 1MB RAM onboard and is uupgradable to 8 MB / 16 MB additional RAM by modding it. It runs well for adlib and sb-stuff if needed a fallback. It's 'hardware detected' by good demo software. Afaik the most compatible card of the series.

curse error detected - 512 KB RAM / 1MB Sample ROM

Hmm, is the PNP Pro a compatible with GUS Classic as the GUS Extreme? It has an Interwave on it, not a GF1... Extreme has to be more compat, right?

As said, the Interwave is 100% register compatible to the GF1, I've never seen anything written for the old GUSes that didn't run on the PnP.

Pentium 2, ~300 Mhz, SB AWE 64-Gold Ed. maybe.

If you need drivers you can find a lot of download sources, also archive org etc. here is one of the good filled ftp spaces for easy going: ftp://ftp.tcrc.edu.tw/Hardware/multimedia

nYx: Adding RAM by modding it? It has 2 SIMM slots, is adding it there not all that is needed? Or is the mod to allow RAM added there to expand the GF1 Classic mode RAM to 1MB? That's what I'd be interested in - having a full 1MB for Classic mode. Is the SB emu hardware and full compat? SB Pro? Tnx.

Just use the SIMM slots and it will be fine.

There seems to be a mod which allows to install twice as much memory, but I´ve never seen anyone using it or software explicitly supporting it. Maybe some trackers do, but definitely no demo I´m aware of.

About SB compatibility - if you want 100% hardware compatibility you´ll need a real SB (pre PCI/Vibra ).
Doesn´t make much different for post 1995 releases, the compatibility provided by ESS and other chips which work without a TSR driver should usually be sufficient. Note that most only offer SB Pro compatibiity, only a few (like ali 100) provide SB16 compatibility with 16bit dma

Most clone cards claiming to support "SB Pro" forget to implement the SB Pro hardware filter which is necessary to hear SB Pro digital sound in stereo. Creative's own SB16 does this. Something to keep in mind if you have demos that only output stereo digi through SBPro.

blakespot: Yes it is a hardware mod for 2 more SIMM-slots. It was just a proof, I wont do it to my card because I love it too much as it is. 4 MB RAM is, as T$ told, enough. Most demos use 512 KB RAM only, because of the UltraSND-Classic. 8 MB is more for "highend DOS4GW gaming" with 8 MB soundbanks. The wdm-drivers are working in Windows XP, SB-emulation is an optional device in the device manager that works better in Win98SE afaik. You wont need it anyway in my opinion. I used the Ultrasound together with an SB Live! in one PC a long time. In DOS u can use MegaEm/IWSBOS for SB-emulation and it runs well 99%, sometimes needs some trying arround with high memory/DMA/IRQ settings. Some software/trackers runs the ultrasound without any drivers and configs. I love that kind of. I'm just a lamer, no elete like the ones that laughs now reading this, so don't believe any of my guesses without proofing it 4yourself. haha :)

Hi, I receently scored a P233MMX with 64MB RAM added my GUS Classic, SB64WE and RivaTNT/S3 Trio. Is it normal that some prods, e.g. Sunflower by Pulse graphics runs ridiculously slow on my PC while the others (like TBL Stash) go smooth and fast? I use Win98SE with real DOS mode, clean boot with only GUS initialized. Any suggestions?

Have you tried using UniVBE?

@mccnex: afaik sunflower's readme suggest you to use banked modes (which in turn require you to use "-setup" key) because of the way linear buffers are managed; I remember it ran slow with p200mmx/s3 in linear mode
still it's weird to draw directly to frame buffer while having huge poly overdraw and struggling PCI\AGP bus, local RAM buffer is much better as it L1/L2 cached :)


oh. by the way about OP question - any decent i440BX motherboard with 2+ ISA slots (for GUS and SB16/AWE64), P3-800 or faster, 128..256MB RAM and any NVidia card up to GeForce 4/FX (+ S3 for 15bpp/VESA-troublesome/univbe-demanding stuff) is more than enough for running almost every late DOS or early (pre-'02/03) Windows stuff, mind you :)

Yes, univbe 6.7 is there + S3 Virge 4MB, however I only enabled it by simply executing command univbe.exe, maybe some options need to be on/off...? I wouldn't know, that time I was still an Amiga user.

"univbe.exe LFB OFF", but it will disable LFB for every application

also SDD 6.7 had a plenty of compatibility issues, try SDD 5.3a or 6.53 (they are free now, by the way :)

Yepp, I downloaded it all from VOGONS last night togeter with 6.7... Now tried it... no changes...

... and you know what, I just started Sunflower demo from Windows 98 SE and gfx runs like a charm, playing music with SB...

So definitely must be something with my DOS environment.

Right now I'm planning to make full installation of PC DOS 7 and continue the fight there.

Think that's a good idea?

Thanks for your tips, I'm slowly getting somewhere :)

Yepp, I downloaded it all from VOGONS last night togeter with 6.7... Now tried it... no changes...

... and you know what, I just started Sunflower demo from Windows 98 SE and gfx runs like a charm, playing music with SB...

So definitely must be something with my DOS environment.

Right now I'm planning to make full installation of PC DOS 7 and continue the fight there.

Think that's a good idea?

Thanks for your tips, I'm slowly getting somewhere :)

Just want to share with you - all my gfx issues (and not only that) disappeared after updating my BIOS to the latest available. Riva TNT 1 (Diamond Viper V550 PCI) seems to be working fine with VBE 6.7. Now I can enjoy Sunflower demo at its best quality, beautiful music, fluent animation and so, and so... :-)