What is an idea setup for playing classic DOS games?

[jaybird3rd]

Have one of these sitting around at work ...

Nice! I've got an original IBM Personal Computer Model 5150 in my collection, complete with two full-height 360K floppy drives and one of those AST SixPack cards (which combined 384K of expanded memory, a battery-backed clock and calendar, serial and parallel ports, and two other features that I'm forgetting into one full-length ISA card). A pretty fancy system, for its time. Just a few weeks ago, I brought it into the class I teach at my university so I could show my students a "live" early computer in operation, and how its design influenced the machines that followed it, including the Windows desktops and laptops that they use every day. It has an IBM CGA card with a composite video output, so I was able to hook it up to the overhead projector in my classroom for my presentation, which was nice. I also have a mint-condition Atari PC-4 (a 286 computer) in my collection, complete with the original manuals for MS-DOS, GW-BASIC, and Windows/286 2.11.

 

As far as sound cards go, I've got a bunch of ISA Sound Blaster cards, but they're mostly Plug-and-Play models (AWE64 cards, I think). They do require an AUTOEXEC.BAT utility to configure them, but as I recall (and I could be wrong about this), it doesn't remain resident in memory; it just initializes the hardware and exits.

[Seob]

Have one of these sitting around at work ...

Nice! I've got an original IBM Personal Computer Model 5150 in my collection, complete with two full-height 360K floppy drives and one of those AST SixPack cards (which combined 384K of expanded memory, a battery-backed clock and calendar, serial and parallel ports, and two other features that I'm forgetting into one full-length ISA card). A pretty fancy system, for its time. Just a few weeks ago, I brought it into the class I teach at my university so I could show my students a "live" early computer in operation, and how its design influenced the machines that followed it, including the Windows desktops and laptops that they use every day. It has an IBM CGA card with a composite video output, so I was able to hook it up to the overhead projector in my classroom for my presentation, which was nice. I also have a mint-condition Atari PC-4 (a 286 computer) in my collection, complete with the original manuals for MS-DOS, GW-BASIC, and Windows/286 2.11.

 

As far as sound cards go, I've got a bunch of ISA Sound Blaster cards, but they're mostly Plug-and-Play models (AWE64 cards, I think). They do require an AUTOEXEC.BAT utility to configure them, but as I recall (and I could be wrong about this), it doesn't remain resident in memory; it just initializes the hardware and exits.

How did the students react to the computer?

[jaybird3rd]

How did the students react to the computer?

Well, some of them were probably thinking "Yeah, whatever, can I go home now?", but I think most of them--especially the ones who are already "into" computers--found it intriguing. They were especially shocked at its limitations (how little memory it had, how little you could store onto a floppy disk, how primitive the graphics and sound were, and so forth), and also at how expensive it was when it was new. I opened it up and showed them the interior, and I explained how the massive number of through-hole TTL chips inside have been condensed into the tiny chipsets on modern motherboards, and they thought that was neat.

[gdement]

Years ago, I had the Roland Sound Canvas SCB-55 Add-On "Daughter Board." The Sound Blaster 16 has provisions for that card, and there were several companies that made daughter boards specifically FOR the Sound Blaster 16. Back in the day, I needed the money, and since I already had a seperate Roland Sound Canvas, I no longer needed the SCB-55 since it conflicted anyway, so I sold it on eBay.

I vaguely remember when I was buying my AWE32 at Best Buy, I think they had a 3rd party SB16 daughterboard like that. It might not have been the same as what you're talking about though, I think it was a wavetable card. I don't know much about the Roland world but I assume the SCB-55 is one of their synthesizers, compatible with the Roland MIDI option that many games had?

I've never owned a Roland anything but I've heard recordings of them, and they're definitely awesome. I never really made a serious effort to track one down, but from the little ebay searching I did at one time, it seems like they're hard to find and pretty valuable.

 

[...]You can install the ASP chip which gives you 48khz (DVD quality sound)

Don't all SB16's support 48KHz? Or maybe it's only 44, I don't remember. Either way, 44KHz seems just as well to me.

Unless I've misunderstood all this time, I thought the ASP chip just accelerates ADPCM compression? That chip was on my AWE32, but it never seemed very useful. I had a few .wav files I compressed that way, and now I can't play them anymore. At the time, I noticed the "Creative ADPCM" codec was much faster than the "Microsoft ADPCM", apparently because the Creative version was using the ASP chip.

I never thought that chip affected the max sampling rate, but I could be wrong.

 

There were some DOS games back then which made use (natively) of the ASP add-on chip on the SB16

[...] Ascendancy (I believe), if I've got the games right, was a space exploration game that made use of the ASP functionality. It would play the MOD music files at 48khz and sounded much better. It used the ASP chip natively.

Interesting. Never knew of any DOS games that used it, but I probably wasn't paying much attention in the late DOS days. My 486 was hopelessly unstable in most DOS games so I eventually gave up buying them (turns out it was a crap motherboard). By the time I got a newer board, DOS was dead.