Building myself a Pentium

[leech]

4 hours ago, The Usotsuki said:

Maybe PacifiST?

 

I know Genecyst can do full speed on a 486SX2/50 - because I've done it.

Hmm, never heard of Genecyst, been a long while since I heard of PacifiST.  I think the first ST emulator I ever used was STonX.

[leech]

9 hours ago, Keatah said:

Coming straight off the Apple II and Amiga, none of it was a pain in the ass. It was a whole world of elegance and quite the wide-open landscape. The Apple II had run its course, having utilized it since the late 70's through early 90's.

 

I remember when I first took delivery of my 486 I was afraid of losing the capabilities of blitter chips, sound & graphics chips, and other specialized ASICs for other computery functions. All stuff heavily advertised as being the reason why Amiga/ST were better machines.

 

This new 486 had NONE of that. And so I kept the Amiga I had at the time on standby. Still using it occasionally for games and continuing on with PhotonPaint. FOMO you know.

 

Though that rapidly changed as I actually acquired the software I was lusting over. The astronomy stuff, the fractal stuff (fractint). Solid word processing. The magic of not swapping floppies. A terminal program as sophisticated as what I had on the Apple II. All of it was T H E  S H I T  !!  All of it pre-Doom. And pre-me-owning-a-soundblaster. Windows 3.1 was amazballs! It actually worked!

 

Once 90's PC gaming got underway, even pre-3D, I was firmly convinced Wintel was the best platform ever conceived of! One moment I could be doing mission-critical correspondence, the next.. playing arcade-like games. Just not having to trek 10-miles cross-country to GalaxyWorld was a huge savings, allowing me to buy moar gamez. What a moneysink those establishments were..

My first x86 was a Pentium 75 Packard Bell that I then overclocked to 100mhz, and it came with their shitty soundcard/modem thing that would work in DOS in sound or modem mode, but NEVER as both.  Ended up getting an SB16 and external 56k USRobotics modem to replace it.

[The Usotsuki]

2 hours ago, leech said:

Hmm, never heard of Genecyst, been a long while since I heard of PacifiST.  I think the first ST emulator I ever used was STonX.

(Clarifying: Genecyst wasn't an ST emulator, it was a Genesis emulator, but the Genesis also had a 68000 running at close to the same speed plus a lot of fancier chips, so I would think anything that can emulate a Genesis full-speed ought to be able to do so with an ST too.)

[Keatah]

<wrong thread>

Edited May 13, 2022 by Keatah

[zzip]

17 hours ago, leech said:

Huh, which emulator did you use on a 486 that would do a full speed ST?  Not that I don't believe you, just curious.

When I built my 486, there were only two ST emulators.   Gemulator which was a commercial product,  and STonX which was open source.

According to GEMbench,  A 486DX2/66 can emulate an ST at full speed under Gemulator.   I think this is what Gemulator's marketing claimed as well.

 

Now these early emulators weren't cycle-exact, and they accelerated VDI calls via native calls.  So that meant GEM apps felt blazingly fast because their screen draws were fast, even if the emulated CPU was slow at certain operations you might not notice.   

Outside of GEM apps things might be more hit or miss.   I seem to recall that STonX couldn't load boot-sector games. (but auto folder games no problem)

 

But soon after there was an onslaught of ST emulators that improved things...  Pacifist, Saint, WinSTon, Steem, hatari to name a few

Edited May 13, 2022 by zzip

[zzip]

8 hours ago, The Usotsuki said:

(Clarifying: Genecyst wasn't an ST emulator, it was a Genesis emulator, but the Genesis also had a 68000 running at close to the same speed plus a lot of fancier chips, so I would think anything that can emulate a Genesis full-speed ought to be able to do so with an ST too.)

Yeah I would think the Genesis would be more taxing than ST as well.

 

I remember the UAE Amiga emulator came out soon during my 486 days, but it couldn't run at full speed on any PC of the time. In fact at first UAE stood for "Unusable Amiga Emulator" 

[leech]

The Genesis and ST are rather similar in hardware, I think the two main differences are the sound chip being used, and there is a z80 in it, if I recall.  Though something in the recesses of my brain make me think the z80 was for playing SMS games with the converter.

 

Graphics wise, 32 colors on screen out of 512?  So it is a little closer to the original ST than an Amiga.

 

Gemulator was great for Gem programs... was pretty poor for anything else. 

 

Ha, I can only imagine attempting to run Hatari on a 486.  SDL overhead alone would make it kind of suck.  It is what makes it so slow on the Amiga.

[zzip]

28 minutes ago, leech said:

SDL overhead alone would make it kind of suck

SDL performance depends on certain things.   It can be really fast with hardware acceleration enabled, and a driver for it that supports your graphics hardware.   And if you store your graphics assets in a way to take advantage, etc.

 

The older Raspberry Pi's were similar in performance to a Pentium I think (give or take),   but I'm pretty sure they can run hatari pretty well if you with the accelerated SDL.   Without it SDL apps only get a few FPS on an old Pi with software rendering.       

 

I compiled some of my SDL apps on a Pi 2 and they ran terrible!   But once I got SDL set up right  things were much better

[+OLD CS1]

40 minutes ago, leech said:

The Genesis and ST are rather similar in hardware, I think the two main differences are the sound chip being used, and there is a z80 in it, if I recall.  Though something in the recesses of my brain make me think the z80 was for playing SMS games with the converter.

The Z80 serves two functions in the Genesis/MegaDrive.  It provides SMS compatibility, and in native mode it drives the YM sound chip.  In relative terms to the Atari ST, I would say the Genesis VDP is more complex.

[leech]

On 5/13/2022 at 10:58 AM, zzip said:

SDL performance depends on certain things.   It can be really fast with hardware acceleration enabled, and a driver for it that supports your graphics hardware.   And if you store your graphics assets in a way to take advantage, etc.

 

The older Raspberry Pi's were similar in performance to a Pentium I think (give or take),   but I'm pretty sure they can run hatari pretty well if you with the accelerated SDL.   Without it SDL apps only get a few FPS on an old Pi with software rendering.       

 

I compiled some of my SDL apps on a Pi 2 and they ran terrible!   But once I got SDL set up right  things were much better

Ha, maybe I am just basing that off of the SDL ports to the Amiga, they feel rather chunky.

[MrMaddog]

On 5/12/2022 at 5:18 PM, leech said:

Huh, which emulator did you use on a 486 that would do a full speed ST?  Not that I don't believe you, just curious. 

 

On 5/12/2022 at 7:06 PM, The Usotsuki said:

Maybe PacifiST?

 

I know Genecyst can do full speed on a 486SX2/50 - because I've done it.

 

I used PacifiST on a Pentium II for games and demos, according to the web site a 486 would work but it's "minimal requirement" with a P133 as required.

 

There was a commercial emulator called Gemulator that was primary for running GEM applications, it ran full speed on a 486SX but double on a 486DX and more on Pentiums.

 

Those were great when moving over to the "new" PC's which meant you can keep your old software while being able to use the latest and greatest ones from the computer stores...

 

 

[Keatah]

Not sure if I ever liked those minimum requirement stickers (in general). On one hand it was nice to see the label say a 386 was required, and having a 486 meant I would have a great experience. As time went on, the recommended requirements shifted upwards to "Pentium", and still having a 486 meant I could run it. But not optimally. Wasn't sure to be happy it would still work, or unhappy that I was missing out.

[leech]

1 hour ago, Keatah said:

Not sure if I ever liked those minimum requirement stickers (in general). On one hand it was nice to see the label say a 386 was required, and having a 486 meant I would have a great experience. As time went on, the recommended requirements shifted upwards to "Pentium", and still having a 486 meant I could run it. But not optimally. Wasn't sure to be happy it would still work, or unhappy that I was missing out.

Yeah, for the moost part initially tgere weren't any new features going from 486 to Pentium that software required.  Unlike the jump from 286 to 386.

[Keatah]

Yes. I suppose so. It all opens another discussion point. What aspect of PC ecology obsoletes software the most?

 

1- Changes in MHz/speed?

2- Software requesting new instruction sets from compilers & CPU combo, like requires MMX, SSE2, or AVX..?

3- Software requiring new APIs or OS version or general PC standards?

4- Something else?

 

Let's kinda forget security and marketing for the moment.

The industry uses "security" as a blanket excuse just to make changes.

And marketing is continually trying to make one feel bad about recent purchases by stating it's all obsolete.

[leech]

1 hour ago, Keatah said:

Let's kinda forget security and marketing for the moment.

The industry uses "security" as a blanket excuse just to make changes.

And marketing is continually trying to make one feel bad about recent purchases by stating it's all obsolete.

Security I understand because EVERYTHING is now connected or can make connections...  it is ridiculous.   A perfect example of this, if you use a modern version of Word, if you want Auto-Save to work, you have to enable One Drive...

[eightbit]

I recently tested Genecyst and Nesticle on my 486 DX4/100 and I can tell you that Genecyst with default settings does NOT run good. And this is no slouch of a machine either. Maybe tweaking the settings would gain some better performance but it was just not worth it to me to investigate it further. Back in the day I was running that on I think a P133 or P166 when it started running like a real Genesis in terms of performance.

 

Nesticle on the other hand runs perfectly on the DX4-100.

[zzip]

On 5/15/2022 at 3:48 AM, leech said:

Ha, maybe I am just basing that off of the SDL ports to the Amiga, they feel rather chunky.

Ah, yeah I have no idea if Amiga SDL supports hardware acceleration, or maybe the programs don't take advantage of it properly.

 

17 hours ago, Keatah said:

Yes. I suppose so. It all opens another discussion point. What aspect of PC ecology obsoletes software the most?

 

1- Changes in MHz/speed?

2- Software requesting new instruction sets from compilers & CPU combo, like requires MMX, SSE2, or AVX..?

3- Software requiring new APIs or OS version or general PC standards?

4- Something else?

You mean as in your old software is no longer useful?

 

Most programs are written to deal with changes in speed.  You might find some 1980s DOS games that are unplayable because they run too fast,  but things written in the late 80s and beyond were forced to deal with this issue.

 

I think changing content is a big one.  I can't tell you how many times Microsoft Office has changed their save formats, saving in the newest version by default, requiring everyone to update to the newest version to continue exchanging documents.    Also changing web standards has rapidly made old web browsers obsolete.

[leech]

22 minutes ago, zzip said:

I think changing content is a big one.  I can't tell you how many times Microsoft Office has changed their save formats, saving in the newest version by default, requiring everyone to update to the newest version to continue exchanging documents.    Also changing web standards has rapidly made old web browsers obsolete.

There were literal times when other programs were /are more compatible with older Office formats than newer Office itself was.  I can't remember the exact document, but for sure, I have ran into that.

 

1 hour ago, eightbit said:

I recently tested Genecyst and Nesticle on my 486 DX4/100 and I can tell you that Genecyst with default settings does NOT run good. And this is no slouch of a machine either. Maybe tweaking the settings would gain some better performance but it was just not worth it to me to investigate it further. Back in the day I was running that on I think a P133 or P166 when it started running like a real Genesis in terms of performance.

 

Nesticle on the other hand runs perfectly on the DX4-100.

This is what I was thinking to be about right.  Emulation not being great for 16bit systems until the later pentiums came out.

 

By the way, I have now successfully recapped my first motherboard!  Pentium 166 MMX, gonna put FreeDOS on it and some old DOS games, may even put my Voodoo 1 in it.

[Keatah]

5 hours ago, zzip said:

You mean as in your old software is no longer useful?

Yes something like that. Whether it be old vintage software or recent from the past 5 years.

 

I forgot to mention cloud connectivity and subscription models rearing their ugly heads. I like all my stuff work independent of any internet connection. A "survivalist" viewpoint if you will.

 

6 hours ago, eightbit said:

I recently tested Genecyst and Nesticle on my 486 DX4/100 and I can tell you that Genecyst with default settings does NOT run good. And this is no slouch of a machine either.

By the time I discovered Genecyst I was into the Pentium II epoch. Pretty sure it ran nicely on a PII-266.

 

I mainly skipped over the Pentium generation. Because things were moving rapidly. Funding, time, and I was buying software left and right at high speed. All reasons why. And I always have a tendency to get the most out the hardware I spent ohhh so much $$$$$$ on! Nowadays it's different, both the wife and I like to have several examples of the latest gen Intel whatevers. In small form factors.

 

Quote

Maybe tweaking the settings would gain some better performance but it was just not worth it to me to investigate it further.

You may be trying to go too deep into out-of-period software. And then it's the next thing and the next thing.. And soon the struggling machine loses its lustre.

 

5 hours ago, leech said:

By the way, I have now successfully recapped my first motherboard!

Very good. To me, the hardest (most tedious) thing is looking up the exact values of the replacement caps. The rest is a breeze.

Edited May 16, 2022 by Keatah

[leech]

1 hour ago, Keatah said:

Very good. To me, the hardest (most tedious) thing is looking up the exact values of the replacement caps. The rest is a breeze.

Right tools, and so forth.  Was WAY easy with the solder tweezers!  There seems to be a bit of 'fuzz' to the video display, I do not know if it is the monitor or crappy video though.  ?   Eventually I will hook up the CRT and see if that cleans it up.

[Keatah]

First thing to try is another videocard.

[leech]

1 hour ago, Keatah said:

First thing to try is another videocard.

Yeah, the other card I had tried had some issues with the screen I was testing it on for sure (different screen though).

 

Was funny, after I had soldered in the new caps, I figured I should measure them again, and got all paranoid that I screwed them up as they were measuring at ~4000uf and they are 1000uf, then it dawned on me that they are all part of the circuit... but the board went from zero post codes to fully working!  Pretty sure the onboard sis 5598 is just sort of crap video, or the ribbon to port is susceptible to noise.

[eightbit]

And so the build has begun as the case finally arrived over the weekend. Currently memtest'ing some random memory I found in my stash for this (32MB of FP and 32MB of EDO). They seem to be working fine together so I dunno...

 

3DFX and 3DLabs in the house!

 

I have no CD-ROM drive for this (yet, on the way) so for fun I installed Windows 95B from 22 floppy images....if you want to call that fun!

 

Funny that Windows 95B found the Rockwell WaveArtist sound card as a SB Pro 2.0. 

 

 

Edited May 17, 2022 by eightbit

[leech]

23 minutes ago, eightbit said:

And so the build has begun as the case finally arrived over the weekend. Currently memtest'ing some random memory I found in my stash for this (32MB of FP and 32MB of EDO). They seem to be working fine together so I dunno...

 

3DFX and 3DLabs in the house!

 

I have no CD-ROM drive for this (yet, on the way) so for fun I installed Windows 95B from 22 floppy images....if you want to call that fun!

 

Funny that Windows 95B found the Rockwell WaveArtist sound card as a SB Pro 2.0. 

 

 

One of the worst things about this era of PC is the case design.  Those hunks of metal that slide over with the top and two sides as one piece always made me miss the plastic cases of the Atari and Amiga wedge systems.

[Keatah]

Yes those suckadickus. Always had trouble aligning 3-sided covers, desktop or tower. But I always prefer the spacious open PC case compared to Amiga/Atari.