MS-DOS clones for watching demos with later-day PCs
category: general [glöplog]
Do you have experiences of watching MS-DOS demos by installing some MS-DOS clone to a PC of this millennium? How large share of MS-DOS demos they run well under such setting? Would you recommend any MS-DOS clone for demo watching purposes?
It's been some time ago so I don't remember what I was running, but I got Pocket8086 and Pocket386sx and I love it. I might have run some good 386 demos on the 386, it's SX but at 40mhz, so it kinda performed better than I hoped. It almost even runs Doom with the performance you'd expect. Screen was good and scrolling smooth. It only has adlib internally but was fun to run bbstros and musicdisks that play adlib.
I also got some peripherals then, It has some ISA external output through a cable with different pins, but I got PocketGUS that fits and I also a Covox player. I remember some negatives, something was off with the battery metter in the device, I sometimes had to keep it plugged in to not think it has no battery, I remember few issues. But it does play a lot of demos really nicely from what I recall.
I also got some peripherals then, It has some ISA external output through a cable with different pins, but I got PocketGUS that fits and I also a Covox player. I remember some negatives, something was off with the battery metter in the device, I sometimes had to keep it plugged in to not think it has no battery, I remember few issues. But it does play a lot of demos really nicely from what I recall.
One of the main problems with "PCs of this millennium" is the missing ISA bus because that's where the resources (Port 2x0, DMA 1..7) belong which you usually use for sound cards.
There are some PCI sound cards which try to emulate resources for a Sound Blaster with TSRs but that often requires EMM386 to be loaded which rules out many earlier demos and after all you want a GUS for MS-DOS demos anyway.
From the very early millenium there are some Pentium3 and Athlon boards which still have ISA and also some industrial boards from the I3/5/7 area.
There are some PCI sound cards which try to emulate resources for a Sound Blaster with TSRs but that often requires EMM386 to be loaded which rules out many earlier demos and after all you want a GUS for MS-DOS demos anyway.
From the very early millenium there are some Pentium3 and Athlon boards which still have ISA and also some industrial boards from the I3/5/7 area.
Side note, the millennium was a quarter of a century ago. Yes, we're that old.
Note that while some newer industrial boards still feature ISA slots they do so only behind an external PCI2ISA bridge which does not provide full ISA DMA support - and is thus more or less useless for running DOS stuff relying on it.
GUS module playback poking the samples byte by byte via individual port writes might work, but not streaming playback or players uploading samples via DMA.
Thus, for full compatibility look out for boards which support ISA directly within the chipset - AFAIK Pentium 3 boards were the last ones.
However, some newer chipsets are said to still have full support for the LPC interface, so an LPC2ISA adapter might still fully work. See here: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=93291
GUS module playback poking the samples byte by byte via individual port writes might work, but not streaming playback or players uploading samples via DMA.
Thus, for full compatibility look out for boards which support ISA directly within the chipset - AFAIK Pentium 3 boards were the last ones.
However, some newer chipsets are said to still have full support for the LPC interface, so an LPC2ISA adapter might still fully work. See here: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=93291
The question was about MS-DOS clones, so the answer is obviously FreeDOS.
