I played thru all of Quake a few times at 4fps on my dad's 486 at 320x200. I wrote a special mod to the autoexec.bat file (remember that one?!?) to prevent a bunch of shit loading (Windows) just so I could load the game. Took me a while to catch on why it was taking me about 10-15 minutes a level but the game clock would only say 2-3 minutes. Was a totally different game, really fun on hard mode. I don't like it as much at full speed. 😛
@@MrJFBro Ah yes, the wonderful days of optimising DOS boot files to squeeze that few extra kilobytes. It was a sport in and of itself but it's one of those old tech things I completely don't miss (beyond a pinch of nostalgia when remembering it anyway).
Running MS-DOS and Windows 10 (almost flawlessly even) on the same motherboard with the same processor is something I never thought I'd see. This is a marvellous creation of a PC, we want to see more of this!
Wow, I liked everything featured in this video. I really liked how a more modern motherboard like this one has an ISA slot. I laughed when you mentioned using a CGA Card at the end though, and on such a powerful system. Can i just say you are a maniac/mad man for such an idea. DO IT.
Yeah, agreed. All he needs to do to get it to work is to shove another card in somewhere (I'd say PCI, maybe even both VGA and Voodoo), which'll even allow for dual-head.
Just like Daikatana I never much played Quake II that much, but it was fun porting it to MS-DOS. DJGPP had all the DLL heavy lifting in there, and the platform code from Quake 1 pretty much worked as needed, the first big trip was how the palette was encoded, which took a little longer to figure out than it should have. It's always fun to see Quake 2 on DOS run in videos like this!
thanks for the awesome port :) Yeah DJGPP makes protected mode DOS development simple/fun, I used it in RUBYISA32 (after trying TC and being annoyed by how fiddly real mode PCI register hacking is). Should investigate Watcom sometime...
@@TheRasteri Frank did a tonne of work for the 3DFx additions, give them a whirl some time, you'll love it! I'm recently farting around on some real mode stuff, and I hate to say it OpenWatcom kinda sucks, try the released v10/v11 since it was actually debugged. Or go all the way back to Microsoft C 5.1! Thanks again for the vid, I never heard of an ISA capable Xeon, that's still pretty amazing! Although like you've seen, we found out quickly that gaming on 95 was actually faster than native DOS. I know, mind blown!
@@ozzyp97 As much as they wanted to, Intel couldn't kill off x86 because their Itanium architecture was an abysmal failure. It never got close to what they had expected, even after a decade of work. Intel hadd already tried to stop AMD from further development of x86. AMD came up with their own x86/64 extensions, but if Intel had made Itanium work, and killed off x86, AMD would still require licencing from Intel. Would Intel have renewed that licence? Perversely, Intel have to licence those x64 extensions from AMD. Irony at it's best.
@@gearfriedtheswmas Intel would have loved to cast off the vestiges of original x86 compatibility. If you knew the lengths Intel and AMD have to go to just to make their CPUs backwards compatible, you'd realise how amazing it really is. Internally, modern x86 CPUs are nothing like their early ancestors, but a lot of (very expensive) silicon die space is used just to keep that compatibility and still run old code many magnitudes faster than the original Intel 8086 designers could ever have imagined.
noice. have a look at later ESS PCI cards, they have a mode where, as I understand it, they snoop writes to the 8237 DMA controller and implement it on their own, allowing legacy sound to work without the special SB-LINK or any funky TSRs. I have not tried it yet. they patented the technique (TDMA) and I think this is why others did not get to implement it.
I knew ESS PCI cards had good SB compatibility but I didn't know that's how they did it.... I did always wonder why PCI cards didn't just emulate the 8237 directly, I mean it's just another memory-mapped peripheral after all...
I remember not needing a TSR for my ESS audiodrive - it'd work with soundblaster pro games no problem - but you needed the ESS drivers loaded for Soundblaster 16 FM compatibility
Genius move on the usage of GRUB to get the soundcard initialized, thats the kind of stuff you could easily automate from there even if you did want to use it primarily as an XP machine.
There is a huge difference in between ModeX and VESA in the way the graphics are drawn. ModeX uses a series of speed and data transfer optimizing tricks, whereas VESA requires hard on drawing pixel by pixel into a non-visible RAM area, and then use bank switching once a new image was rendered making it visible. Because of this, the memory and bandwidth required are much higher. That's actually were early GPU acceleration comes in, which tries to speed up drawing planes by e.g. geometric filling functions - the "2D" acceleration. 3DFX didn't do much more than that, actually, only it introduced bitmap based filling combined with the "Z-Buffer", giving video memory a virtual third dimension and therefore the means to quickly sort out overlapping pixels.
bank switching was only for vesa 1.x. vesa 2.0 and above had full 32bit flat access. the only plus mode-x had was using the vga latches to also do 32bit transfers, but it's not a trick, you could do that in any resolution except 320x200x1 256c (mode 13h). long story short, vbe2 had faster back-buffer draw and mode-x had faster front-buffer switch. but it doesn't make any perceivable difference since the highest resolution mode-x can do with 2 pages is 360x240 i think.
Great Build! For my "Fast Win98" Build I have something a bit more conservative, but still out the ordinary when it comes to Win98 and ISA compatibility! I run a Pentium 4 Northwood 3.06 on a Soyo SY-P4I845PEISA motherboard. IMO one of the most compatible ISA boards for CPUs not indented for Win98/DOS. It has 4x AGP, and 3 ISA slots all with full DMA compatibility. I run mine with a 5900XT for compatibility with Win98 games and it rips in DOS. Sound cards it runs a AWE64 Gold and a Yamaha SW60XG
Great work! Some time ago I also noticed very slow performance on modern machines but I never thought of *increasing* the resolution to get better framerates. I just said "meh, old game engine, wasn't supposed to run in this resolution anyway."
Thanks for keeping #DOSCEMBER alive. - For me, Dos games are Doom, Quake - and then loads of point-and-click - this would be an awesome way to relive Dos FPS.
Ah yes, the windows 98 answer file. Giving me flashbacks to when I set up one for our XP install at my old job. We sold kiosks that ran XP; it would take over an hour to run up a machine with a manual install, and we could only really do a few at a time since we would have to constantly switch back and forth on the KVM to click next or put in some setting. I got it down to something like 15 minutes, and it could run headless until the end when I just had to do a few things manually, so I could run up a lot more machines simultaneously. I think I ended up scripting that too so I would basically just have to test the box before packing it up ready for install into the kiosk.
I mentioned in another comment that you should be able to get ISA video to work by shoving in a PCI video card so the system will boot far enough for autoexec to configure the board, but it also would be interesting to just screw the board to the upright bit of an upside-down 'T' shape, cut a slot in the T where to two pieces of (presumably) wood meet, and snake some sort of "ISA extender" cord through there so that you can have maybe 5 ISA cards through the use of an ISA backplane. At that point you'll just need a PCIe extender so you can do the same with PCI, add in some cards for USB 3 and Firewire, and you'll have the "ultimate peripherals PC". I'll admit that it sounds borderline useless, _but you could do it!_
Love this! Absolutely fantastic! That case 🤩The only quip is that it should have had one of those excellent good ole sound cards. A Gravis Ultrasound would have aced the video! GP1 and later GP2 were notorious for really straining the computer when upping the detail levels. edit: Also, that DOSGrub was a new thing!
You nutter. Like, I totally understand the endeavour of getting the ISA sound card working in Win98 on this system but installing Windows 10 was a proper plot twist. You do realise your life won't be complete until you've got that ISA sound card working in Windows 10. Don't you?
Have to say, having the ability to run MS-DOS up to Windows 10 is quite something. I guess that having MS-DOS working, means you can have Windows 1.0 to Windows 3.11 work too, right ?
Cool build! I'm impressed that the Quadro works so well in VGA and VESA modes. A bunch of questions come to mind: - Do the latest generations of AMD and Nvidia cards still offer good VGA and VESA compatibility? - Are there PCIe video cards that give better framerates in Doom and 640x480 Quake? Would a PCI VGA card be faster? - Are there any PCIe video cards that have hardware accelerated Direct-X support in Windows 98? It would also be amazing to see a CGA card running!
1. I dunno - but I have access to an RTX3090 over xmas so I'll certainly try it. 2. No, PCI video cards are significantly slower, even under pure DOS. 3. Yes there are, Geforce 7 series work quite well under Windows 98
Radeon X800/X850 cards allegedly work fine in Windows 98 as well, still need to test that for myself. Funny thing is that fastest DOS gaming PC can be faster than a proper Win98 gaming PC, due to DirectX 3D acceleration compatibility.
@@pawelw3000 Yes they do, I use an x850 Pro AGP in my 98/XP rig. It's a bit funky with pre-DX5 stuff due to drivers but the majority of 98 games scream with that card.
Alright, now off to find a PCI Express Voodoo 5500 ;) This is exactly the reason why I decided against getting such a board and settled for Epox EP-D3VA. If you manage to get a 5500, here's a protip. Some DOS games (GTA1 and Carmageddon Splat Pack most notably) are dynamically linked against the Voodoo driver, so it's perfectly possible to fit the Windows 98 driver for Voodoo 5500 for these games. And it works fine. Also, with regards to those SD card adapters, those actually require that you place a special partition at the beginning of the block device. You should be using CF cards to remove this requirement and to remove the latency of interfacing between SD and IDE. CF is native IDE, just different form factor.
what a throwback, i remember fighting to get my stupid Soundblaster AWE 32 ISA working with the cdrom, because they plugged into each other. what a nightmare.
@TheRasteri Great video and great idea for a project. Something I have noticed appears to have been mostly forgotten (and you don't mention it explicitly in this video) is the varying speed of graphics cards for DOS performance. Having watched multiple recent builds the builders appear to believe one of two things: 1. Choice of card makes no difference on DOS because dos games don't use accelerator chips. 2. The faster the card runs Windows the better choice it is for DOS too. As I remember, both of these beliefs is incorrect and in fact, especially when Windows accelerator cards were primarily for the the Windows GDI, DOS performance often slumped for cards with good accelerators. A number of explanations was given for this at the time. The explanations included these: 1. Some Windows cards do not also have fully compliant VGA adaptors. DOS VGA programs run through a translation layer which slows down DOS programs. 2. Card memory access becomes heavily weighted in favour the accelerator and video chips at the loss of reliable CPU access, so writing over the bus in VGA mode with the CPU is slow. Whatever the explanation it seems to me a lot of graphics card for DOS wisdom has been lost over the intervening decades. This troubles me as many games I have seen are terribly slow and use graphics cards known in their day to be great for Windows but terrible for DOS. Last time I looked (which was some time in the 1990s) the Windows oriented cards were worse for DOS games than DOS oriented cards. The leader of the pack then for DOS were those based on the Tseng ET4000i (I think). This chip does not top Windows benchmarks but does excel in DOS benchmarks. I think a worthwhile addition to the retro knowledge would be a deep dive into this anomaly to find out what really is the best graphics card for unaccelerated DOS games treated separately from cards for Windows / GDI / DirectX acceleration and separated also from 3D accelerator cards for DOS. In short: What really is the fastest DOS graphics card for pre-Quake games?
My P4 2.8ghz system, Athlon-XP 3000+ system and Core2 E7600 system all performed within error of each other in game benchmarks, seemed a lot of it depended on how fast the GPU's memory interface was to DOS. At some point, the bottleneck becomes things other than the CPU. In fact, the GeForce 2 Ultra beat everything else in my benchmarks, including all the later cards, and determined DOS performance to a greater degree than CPU past about the P3 800mhz. I think the only games that really pushed through this were simulation games, which of course always do better with a faster CPU. I love retro rockets, good find! That said, there's a ceiling that is hard to push past, so cranking up the CPU doesn't always give better results.
I did a video a few years ago showing a more modern Core 2 Celeron vs 386, and if you know that video, you know who I am. Guy has to have many accounts. Modern hardware does not perform like you would expect with DOS. The fact that I was able to disable ( haha ) the cache on the Core 2 Celeron and it equal the performance of a 386 shocked me, but full performance the FPS in DOS was not what I expected. Your benches reflect what I found to be the case years ago.
You know so much sir, I wish some of this stuff was written down step by step because my brains tiny and im tired and old and it would be nice to have a really thorough guide on many of these really cool tricks you use to get things working.
This was fantastic, and I love the ultra realistic thumbnail. People always ask if a PC is fast enough to run something, so I'll flip the question on it's head. Can it be slow enough to run wing commander? ;)
That mobo OP bought is not suited for OC. It has crappy G41 chipset. Most likely all clock generators on it are tied together so he can damage other HW when raising FSB a little.
I used the same grub DOS trick when I accidentally wiped the DSDT table of my laptop using a dodgy hacked bios - trying to OC the processor - the tables were empty and I couldn't boot a modern enough windows to run the flash software. I used a DOS program to push the needed tables into place from a file I had constructed in Linux then I used grub to boot XP and run the flashing program. Took me weeks to reach that stage!
You know a computer is a real gaming battlestation if it can handle DOS, Windows98, Windows10, old and new(er) hardware as well as games from all through the 80's up to modern days native without the need of DOSBox or pcem.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure ISA still technically exists as one of those weird vestigial interfaces that's so trivial to access that you might as well throw some low level hardware on it for bring up.
LPC? A lot of IO space and stuff is firewalled off, the writes/reads just never arrive, so soundcards shouldn't work. But may be worth trying more i guess?
I'd love to see TES: Arena running on this machine. If only to see how unplayably fast it would be 😆. I believe the clock speed of the chip determined how fast the game actually ran instead of just how fast the screen updated. Masters of Orion and Masters of Orion 2 could sometimes take quite some time to calculate the AIs actions, especially on large maps. The original Warcraft might be fun and any of the chess games that had settings around how much time to spend calculating a turn. Fantastic video and I'm jealous of this setup.
for using really old OS on an SSD you might wanna make sure that the partition table is properly aligned, you can do that manually in fdisk or just format it on a modern computer. If not it'll really shorten the life of the drive.
@Mr Guru These chipsets support SATA IDE compatibility mode and probably have it enabled by default so Windows 98 just thinks it's a regular IDE controller.
I remember that VESA-LB cards (particularly the original ET4000) could do VGA framebuffer access *far* faster than the PCI, and even most PCIe cards, that followed.
Very cool! I wonder how hard it would be to patch the BIOS and add the rubyisa code to it? Then you could do native XP without needing the dual boot grub trick. (don't get me wrong though, that's a very clever trick)
@@ianhanschen that would also have been my idea. There are tools to replace option roms in the BIOS and he could for exampke replace the PXE ROM for the network card. If the code is small enough he could also put it in the MBR or VBR
and..... just like that you have a sub. I was laughing my ass off when you pulled that grub trick. I thought, no way is he gonna boot to W98 then chainload. Sound works!! Magic!
Man, a couple days ago, I didn't know the ruby board existed, and now I'm thinking about throwing handfuls of cash at ebay to get one. I don't even need it (my current DOS machine is already too fast and has 3 ISA sound devices), but it's just so friggin awesome.
Check out the dissapoint project in the Vogons forum. It's a project to add ISA slots using the LPC pins on the TPM header that some motherboards feature. I'd look at that before spending a huge amount on an older board. Anyway, the guy who designed it is saying he might start selling the adapters if there's enough interest.
...Hmmmm, have you tried fastvid? Should help with the high res Build engine games. I remember running Blood in 1600x1200 at 30-40fps on a mere 3.06GHz Northwood, on the top of a 845PE/ISA m/b, single channel DDR-333. Also with Quake benchmark. Though Quake seems to run nicely already.
I picked up a GVC ESS Maestro-1 ES1948F PCI Sound Card off of ebay. These ESS PCI card chip sets, starting with ESS ES1946 Solo-1E, support three means of compatibility with DOS legacy programs that require ISA card DMA like behavior: 1) Transparent DMA (TDMA), 2) Distributed DMA (DDMA), 3) PC/PCI using a Physical SB-LINK connection Am looking especially for support of the Transparent DMA (TDMA) approach. In theory a currently manufactured PCI-based motherboard might very well accept this card and thereby also work with DOS legacy software using sound via the TDMA feature. Can still get motherboards with PS/2 for keyboard and mouse (and those devices are still available on Amazon, etc). Will have to noodle some way to support compatible storage for the old DOS stuff. And not sure what will get using modern PCI Express graphics cards. But I do have some PCI graphics cards that are over ten years old so those might work better. Well, worse case is might have to write a modest hypervisor that does a wee bit of virtualization on behalf of the ancient 16-bit real-mode DOS code. But that hypervisor could do pass-through where ever feasible (e.g., might be the best way to provide EMS memory). And with a wee bit more effort it could become a MS-DOS multi-tasker - similar to those that cropped up when the 80386 first appeared. The final worry is how would some of this software behave on a CPU running at multiple gigahertz...
Amazing find on the motherboard and cool video! After ISA Sound with DMA (which kept me away from anything post-440bx), isn’t the next limitation drivers? It’s my understanding Win95/98 don’t play well with PCIe or any video card that would plug into it.
I have a FirePro W5100 I picked up for about $25, it's single slot, no external power, and it looks like it might fit in that slot, it only comes back about an inch from the end of the slot Also, you should try MechWarrior 2
He should running come truly ancient games like sopwith or sopwith2 to see how completely insane they would be. they were borderline unplayable even with a PII 266 without DOS slomo. It would be kinds funny to see it running.
8:05 Wait 640x480 is a standard VGA mode but only in 16 colors, is SVGA considered VGA in this context? I'm just curious since the specs I found on VGA are typically only 400 wide for 256 colors? That aside, you find some very curious motherboard variants, wonder what that one was made for besides fun heh.
Man, that win 98 install was awesome. Seeing something that you know takes some times and seeing it go much faster is mesmerizing. Would it be too much to ask for a real time video of the full installation, with a clock besides it ? A couple more things to mention: - did the sound settings maybe can be set from BIOS ? I assume you already checked but did not mention anything in the video, so I have to ask. On this regard, in another comment I also asked if this maybe can be set from DOSBox, though I guess it's the same as trying to run it from a command prompt. I know that in windows 95 you could manually assign IRQ ranges and stuff like that. In windows 98 too, but less so. Maaaybe it can still be done with some registry entries or something in windows XP or later ? Or maybe someone knowledgeable enough can replicate in proper way (a driver maybe ?) those settings for NT-based windowses. - if I'm not mistaken, in general software rendering (which is what I assume you did in doom, quake, shadow warrior and the like) is just very poor at scaling with resolution. I think it's because everything is computed by your CPU, in single thread fashion, which cannot really do much in parallel. I do remember running Quake on my i7 6700HQ and it ran just as bad, something like 20-30 FPS for 1080p resolution. - in the msdos benches, at times it showed either 300 something MHz or 700 something MHz. Any more thoughts on that ? Maybe it's actually running at that speed for some compatibility reasons and maybe that's why the scores are not that high. While we're at it, general performance bottlenecks on these kinds of things would be interesting, who knows, you might find and fix a problem and see a literally 10x performance increase (at least I wouldn't be surprised) - since MS-DOS runs natively, does that mean that Windows 1.0 to Windows 3.11 also work natively ? While on that, any chance to do a have all of Windows versions (from 1 or 95, whomever is the oldest it can natively run) installed at once (and showcased) ? Or maybe install the oldest one and upgrade from one version to next until Windows 10 ? (I remember there's a guy on YT that did that)
I wonder if you could create a lightweight version of DOS with an EXEC.bat and a build of grub. it's a bit like a rube goldberg machine but I think you could do it with not that much effort.
I would look into patching the ruby's bios to setup the ISA bus correctly at boot. Maybe a talented bios hacker out there could be the hero and make this mainboard legendary.
I was able to boot DOS on a Ryzen 5600x + B550M + RTX3060. I tried to use a CMI8738 with PCIe to PCI bridge, but PC crashes after playing sound for few seconds. I think there is an issue with IRQ. I have checked newer MB (I think I saw some with ISA supporting 2nd gen Core CPUs, can't remember exactly ) with ISA but they are super expensive.
Grab one of those PCI-E risers that the mini-itx modders use so you can relocate the GPU away from the RAM and try a GTX 1080ti. I'd be interested to see if you could get a machine that could handle the latest AAA titles and still perform well with DOS games. I'd also be interested to see if you could boot your other operating systems from a network drive so you don't have to worry about partitions and the stability issues they cause.
There is a MSI MS-98A9 motherboard socket 1155 that has ISA. I've used it in my industrial PCs. I7-3770k + ISA works quite well. I do not know abou the DMA thingie
I played a lot of games on freedos on my i5 4570 with audio with the. Sbemu project many games work flawlessly :) but no win 98 there for now :) still nice to see this build
In retrospect it's a shame PCI chipsets didn't have Soundblaster compatibility built in. After all they did have VGA support built in. VGA support just forwarded the legacy VGA ports to a PCI graphics card. Soundblaster support could theoretically have forwarded the motherboard DMA control IO ports to a PCI sound card. Incidentally it's not all that hard to write a kernel mode driver that just pokes the IO ports you need to enable sound on initialization. Since it's Windows XP you don't need to sign kernel mode code either.
@Mr Guru Those Realtek and Crystal chips are not Soundblaster compatible though. IIRC they're just the DAC/ADC part of the audio and the digital part is in the chipset. Unfortunatley that is also not SoundBlaster compatible, even though it could have been. Contrast that with VGA compatibility which most motherboards used to support for both onboard and PCI graphics cards.
Nowadays you don't need ISA slot/sound card for DOS gaming anymore. There are two DOS utilities available on Vogons: SBEMU and CPUSPD. SBEMU emulates a Sound Blaster on motherboards with integrated AC97 sound chips. CPUSPD slows down the CPU for speed sensitive DOS games, and it works on socket 370, 478, 775, AM2, and AM3 (K10 cpus). So the fastest DOS gaming PC that could run (almost) all DOS games would be the Core2Quad Q9650 or the Phenom II X6.
Also, Windows 98 cannot out of the box address more than exactly 768MB RAM due to how Windows interprets memory pointers (signed bit determines kernel and userspace segments) and how Windows vcache works. If you want to run Windows on something that has more RAM, you'll need to install it with 768MB RAM or less anyway, and then modify vcache settings so that Windows doesn't make more than 0x40000 memory pages. Should work fine. Also, since you've set out to build an overkill DOS PC, why didn't you get an AWE64 Gold?
GP2 engine is weird - you specify target fps in the game settings and it's locked at 25,6 fps maximum if I remember correctly. To check how the PC copes with it, you need to press O during gameplay and it will show you CPU Occupancy while button is pressed. If CPU can't handle your graphics settings, it will show over 100% and gameplay will slow down to reach fps target
Nice build, I ported rubyisa program to syslinux bootloader to make isa slot useable under linux and winxp, isa graphics card and sb64 sound still no dice due to lpc to isa bridge limits.
@@TheRasteri I am not familiar with isa graphics cards. If dma ranges required by isa graphics cards supported by Fintek F85226FG, worth give it a shot. More details you can ask Tiido (original rubyisa.exe author, quite nice guy), he didi a lot research in this lpc to isa bridge.
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people need to realize, running dos quake at 640x480 in software mode was considered basically impossible when it came out.
yeah, crysis paled in comparison to what quake was when it came out.
I played thru all of Quake a few times at 4fps on my dad's 486 at 320x200. I wrote a special mod to the autoexec.bat file (remember that one?!?) to prevent a bunch of shit loading (Windows) just so I could load the game. Took me a while to catch on why it was taking me about 10-15 minutes a level but the game clock would only say 2-3 minutes.
Was a totally different game, really fun on hard mode. I don't like it as much at full speed. 😛
It ran fine, just as a slide show, unless you had one of them new fangled pentiums.
@@MrJFBro Ah yes, the wonderful days of optimising DOS boot files to squeeze that few extra kilobytes. It was a sport in and of itself but it's one of those old tech things I completely don't miss (beyond a pinch of nostalgia when remembering it anyway).
I ran it at 1024x768 when it came out. Ran at 27 - 30 FPS. Then I got a 3DFX Voodoo card and it went up to 62 FPS at 1024x768.
Running MS-DOS and Windows 10 (almost flawlessly even) on the same motherboard with the same processor is something I never thought I'd see.
This is a marvellous creation of a PC, we want to see more of this!
This is awesome! Still trying to wrap my head around a motherboard with DMA-ISA, PCI and PCIe 😀
15:22 That felt personal! Good one ha-ha.
Wow, I liked everything featured in this video. I really liked how a more modern motherboard like this one has an ISA slot.
I laughed when you mentioned using a CGA Card at the end though, and on such a powerful system. Can i just say you are a maniac/mad man for such an idea. DO IT.
Yeah, agreed. All he needs to do to get it to work is to shove another card in somewhere (I'd say PCI, maybe even both VGA and Voodoo), which'll even allow for dual-head.
Just like Daikatana I never much played Quake II that much, but it was fun porting it to MS-DOS. DJGPP had all the DLL heavy lifting in there, and the platform code from Quake 1 pretty much worked as needed, the first big trip was how the palette was encoded, which took a little longer to figure out than it should have. It's always fun to see Quake 2 on DOS run in videos like this!
thanks for the awesome port :) Yeah DJGPP makes protected mode DOS development simple/fun, I used it in RUBYISA32 (after trying TC and being annoyed by how fiddly real mode PCI register hacking is). Should investigate Watcom sometime...
@@TheRasteri Frank did a tonne of work for the 3DFx additions, give them a whirl some time, you'll love it! I'm recently farting around on some real mode stuff, and I hate to say it OpenWatcom kinda sucks, try the released v10/v11 since it was actually debugged. Or go all the way back to Microsoft C 5.1! Thanks again for the vid, I never heard of an ISA capable Xeon, that's still pretty amazing! Although like you've seen, we found out quickly that gaming on 95 was actually faster than native DOS. I know, mind blown!
@@TheRasteri 6:20 is that a steamed ham reference in windows 98?!? i love it!
I love this! Having the same PC run DOS through Windows 10 is such a testament to backward compatibility from Intel and Microsoft :)
Or lack of innovation
@@gearfriedtheswmas Nah, in this case having such far backwards compatibility requires effort, not just laziness
Intel would've happily killed x86 for Itanium, you should thank AMD for putting a stop to that with x86-64.
@@ozzyp97 As much as they wanted to, Intel couldn't kill off x86 because their Itanium architecture was an abysmal failure. It never got close to what they had expected, even after a decade of work. Intel hadd already tried to stop AMD from further development of x86. AMD came up with their own x86/64 extensions, but if Intel had made Itanium work, and killed off x86, AMD would still require licencing from Intel. Would Intel have renewed that licence? Perversely, Intel have to licence those x64 extensions from AMD. Irony at it's best.
@@gearfriedtheswmas Intel would have loved to cast off the vestiges of original x86 compatibility. If you knew the lengths Intel and AMD have to go to just to make their CPUs backwards compatible, you'd realise how amazing it really is. Internally, modern x86 CPUs are nothing like their early ancestors, but a lot of (very expensive) silicon die space is used just to keep that compatibility and still run old code many magnitudes faster than the original Intel 8086 designers could ever have imagined.
noice. have a look at later ESS PCI cards, they have a mode where, as I understand it, they snoop writes to the 8237 DMA controller and implement it on their own, allowing legacy sound to work without the special SB-LINK or any funky TSRs. I have not tried it yet. they patented the technique (TDMA) and I think this is why others did not get to implement it.
I knew ESS PCI cards had good SB compatibility but I didn't know that's how they did it.... I did always wonder why PCI cards didn't just emulate the 8237 directly, I mean it's just another memory-mapped peripheral after all...
cool I must get get one of those cards. Then really the fastest pc is any that still has any pci slot.
I tried it on my fastest dis rig, a socket 479 Pentium M but without ISA. It works.
wow, a PCI sound card implementing 8237 DMA could launch a competition to see who can build the ultimate, fastest DOS gaming PC - what madness!!!
I remember not needing a TSR for my ESS audiodrive - it'd work with soundblaster pro games no problem - but you needed the ESS drivers loaded for Soundblaster 16 FM compatibility
Genius move on the usage of GRUB to get the soundcard initialized, thats the kind of stuff you could easily automate from there even if you did want to use it primarily as an XP machine.
There is a huge difference in between ModeX and VESA in the way the graphics are drawn.
ModeX uses a series of speed and data transfer optimizing tricks, whereas VESA requires hard on drawing pixel by pixel into a non-visible RAM area, and then use bank switching once a new image was rendered making it visible. Because of this, the memory and bandwidth required are much higher.
That's actually were early GPU acceleration comes in, which tries to speed up drawing planes by e.g. geometric filling functions - the "2D" acceleration.
3DFX didn't do much more than that, actually, only it introduced bitmap based filling combined with the "Z-Buffer", giving video memory a virtual third dimension and therefore the means to quickly sort out overlapping pixels.
bank switching was only for vesa 1.x. vesa 2.0 and above had full 32bit flat access. the only plus mode-x had was using the vga latches to also do 32bit transfers, but it's not a trick, you could do that in any resolution except 320x200x1 256c (mode 13h). long story short, vbe2 had faster back-buffer draw and mode-x had faster front-buffer switch. but it doesn't make any perceivable difference since the highest resolution mode-x can do with 2 pages is 360x240 i think.
From DOS to Steam, absolutely amazing machine.
Great Build! For my "Fast Win98" Build I have something a bit more conservative, but still out the ordinary when it comes to Win98 and ISA compatibility! I run a Pentium 4 Northwood 3.06 on a Soyo SY-P4I845PEISA motherboard. IMO one of the most compatible ISA boards for CPUs not indented for Win98/DOS. It has 4x AGP, and 3 ISA slots all with full DMA compatibility. I run mine with a 5900XT for compatibility with Win98 games and it rips in DOS. Sound cards it runs a AWE64 Gold and a Yamaha SW60XG
sounds like a great setup! much easier/cheaper to source all the components
@14:10 It's always fun to see a wizard at work.
The 4 games that come to mind that'd be interesting to see running are Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Minecraft, and the PC port of Super Mario 64
Oh daaaamn I forgot there was a dos port of sm64, I'd definitely have tried that
@TheRasteri I'm surprised there isn't a port for IRIX yet, considering it was developed on that OS
Great work! Some time ago I also noticed very slow performance on modern machines but I never thought of *increasing* the resolution to get better framerates. I just said "meh, old game engine, wasn't supposed to run in this resolution anyway."
Thanks for keeping #DOSCEMBER alive. - For me, Dos games are Doom, Quake - and then loads of point-and-click - this would be an awesome way to relive Dos FPS.
Ah yes, the windows 98 answer file. Giving me flashbacks to when I set up one for our XP install at my old job. We sold kiosks that ran XP; it would take over an hour to run up a machine with a manual install, and we could only really do a few at a time since we would have to constantly switch back and forth on the KVM to click next or put in some setting. I got it down to something like 15 minutes, and it could run headless until the end when I just had to do a few things manually, so I could run up a lot more machines simultaneously. I think I ended up scripting that too so I would basically just have to test the box before packing it up ready for install into the kiosk.
Wow, I'm impressed. I almost expected to see the industrial Xeon motherboard you showed in the old Retro Rocket computer. But this is even better!
I mentioned in another comment that you should be able to get ISA video to work by shoving in a PCI video card so the system will boot far enough for autoexec to configure the board, but it also would be interesting to just screw the board to the upright bit of an upside-down 'T' shape, cut a slot in the T where to two pieces of (presumably) wood meet, and snake some sort of "ISA extender" cord through there so that you can have maybe 5 ISA cards through the use of an ISA backplane. At that point you'll just need a PCIe extender so you can do the same with PCI, add in some cards for USB 3 and Firewire, and you'll have the "ultimate peripherals PC".
I'll admit that it sounds borderline useless, _but you could do it!_
Love this! Absolutely fantastic! That case 🤩The only quip is that it should have had one of those excellent good ole sound cards. A Gravis Ultrasound would have aced the video!
GP1 and later GP2 were notorious for really straining the computer when upping the detail levels.
edit: Also, that DOSGrub was a new thing!
Nice video!
Also refreshing to see a sponsor on youtube that is not a scam.
You nutter. Like, I totally understand the endeavour of getting the ISA sound card working in Win98 on this system but installing Windows 10 was a proper plot twist.
You do realise your life won't be complete until you've got that ISA sound card working in Windows 10. Don't you?
Have to say, having the ability to run MS-DOS up to Windows 10 is quite something. I guess that having MS-DOS working, means you can have Windows 1.0 to Windows 3.11 work too, right ?
Cool build! I'm impressed that the Quadro works so well in VGA and VESA modes.
A bunch of questions come to mind:
- Do the latest generations of AMD and Nvidia cards still offer good VGA and VESA compatibility?
- Are there PCIe video cards that give better framerates in Doom and 640x480 Quake? Would a PCI VGA card be faster?
- Are there any PCIe video cards that have hardware accelerated Direct-X support in Windows 98?
It would also be amazing to see a CGA card running!
1. I dunno - but I have access to an RTX3090 over xmas so I'll certainly try it.
2. No, PCI video cards are significantly slower, even under pure DOS.
3. Yes there are, Geforce 7 series work quite well under Windows 98
Radeon X800/X850 cards allegedly work fine in Windows 98 as well, still need to test that for myself.
Funny thing is that fastest DOS gaming PC can be faster than a proper Win98 gaming PC, due to DirectX 3D acceleration compatibility.
@@pawelw3000 Yes they do, I use an x850 Pro AGP in my 98/XP rig. It's a bit funky with pre-DX5 stuff due to drivers but the majority of 98 games scream with that card.
VBE 3 Bios
-------------------------------------
ATI 9800 PRO VESA Modi 128 MB
-------------------------------------
4 8 15 16 24 32 Matrix
-------------------------------------
109 132 x 25
10A 132 x 43
130 132 x 44
182 10D 10E 10F 120 320 x 200
192 193 194 195 196 320 x 240
1A2 1A3 1A4 1A5 1A6 400 x 300
1B2 1B3 1B4 1B5 1B6 512 x 384
1C2 1C3 1C4 1C5 1C6 640 x 350
100 183 184 185 186 640 x 400
101 110 111 112 121 640 x 480
102 103 113 114 115 122 800 x 600
104 105 106 107 108 123 1024 x 768
107 119 11A 11B 124 1280 x 1024
-------------------------------------
ATI X800 PRO VESA MODI 256 MB
-------------------------------------
4 8 15 16 24 32 Matrix
-------------------------------------
109 132 x 25
10A 132 x 34
130 132 x 44
10D 10F 320 x 200
193 194 196 320 x 240
1B3 1B4 1B6 512 x 384
1C3 1C4 1C6 640 x 350
100 184 186 640 x 400
101 110 112 640 x 480
133 134 136 720 x 400
103 113 115 800 x 600
105 116 118 1024 x 768
153 154 156 1152 x 864
107 119 11B 1280 x 1024
143 144 146 1400 x 1050
173 174 176 1600 x 1200
1D3 1D4 1D6 1856 x 1392
1E3 1E4 1E6 1920 x 1440
-------------------------------------
NVIDIA GF 4 Ti4200 VESA Modi 64 MB
-------------------------------------
4 8 15 16 24 32 Matrix
-------------------------------------
108 80 x 60
109 132 x 25
10A 132 x 43
10B 132 x 50
10C 132 x 60
130 10E 10F 320 x 200
134 135 136 320 x 240
131 132 133 320 x 400
100 13D 13E 640 x 400
101 111 112 640 x 480
102 103 114 115 800 x 600
104 105 117 118 1024 x 768
106 107 11A 1280 x 1024
147 148 1400 x 1050
145 146 1600 x 1200
-------------------------------------
NVIDIA GF 6800 GT VESA Modi 256 MB
-------------------------------------
4 8 15 16 24 32 Matrix
-------------------------------------
130 10E 10F 320 x 200
134 135 136 320 x 240
131 132 133 320 x 400
100 13D 13E 640 x 400
101 111 112 640 x 480
102 103 114 115 800 x 600
104 105 117 118 1024 x 768
106 107 11A 11B 1280 x 1024
145 146 1600 x 1200
147 148 1400 x 1050
152 2048 x 1536 QXGA/SUXGA 4:3
-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------
Colorfull Geforce GTX295 VBE modenumbers
-------------------------------------
mode
number xres yres bpp
0100 640x480x8 VGA 4:3
0101 640x480x8 VGA 4:3
0102 800x600x4 SVGA 4:3
0103 800x600x8 SVGA 4:3
0104 1024x768x4 XGA 4:3
0105 1024x768x8 XGA 4:3
0106 1280x1024x4 SXGA 5:4
0107 1280x1024x8 SXGA 5:4
010E 320x200x16 CGA 4:3
010F 320x200x32 CGA 4:3
0111 640x480x16 VGA 4:3
0112 640x480x32 VGA 4:3
0114 800x600x16 SVGA 4:3
0115 800x600x32 SVGA 4:3
0117 1024x768x16 XGA 4:3
0118 1024x768x32 XGA 4:3
011A 1280x1024x16 SXGA 5:4
011B 1280x1024x32 SXGA 5:4
0130 320x200x8 CGA 4:3
0131 320x400x8
0132 320x400x16
0133 320x400x32
0134 320x240x8 QVGA 4:3
0135 320x240x16 QVGA 4:3
0136 320x240x32 QVGA 4:3
013D 640x400x16
013E 640x400x32
0145 1600x1200x8 UXGA 4:3
0146 1600x1200x16 UXGA 4:3
014A 1600x1200x32 UXGA 4:3
0160 1280x800x8 WXGA 16:10
0161 1280x800x32 WXGA 16:10
0162 768x480x8
017B 1280x720x32
017C 1920x1200x8 WUXGA 16:10
017D 1920x1200x32 WUXGA 16:10
-------------------------------------
-------------------------------------
Vesa Modelist Sapphire 7950
-------------------------------------
mode
number xres yres bpp
0100 640x400x8 C0000000 VGA 4:3
0101 640x480x8 C0000000 VGA 4:3
0103 800x600x8 C0000000 SVGA 4:3
0105 1024x768x8 C0000000 XGA 4:3
0107 1280x1024x8 C0000000 SXGA 5:4
0110 640x480x16 C0000000 VGA 4:3
0111 640x480x16 C0000000 VGA 4:3
0113 800x600x16 C0000000 SVGA 4:3
0114 800x600x16 C0000000 SVGA 4:3
0116 1024x768x16 C0000000 XGA 4:3
0117 1024x768x16 C0000000 XGA 4:3
0119 1280x1024x16 C0000000 SXGA 5:4
011A 1280x1024x16 C0000000 SXGA 5:4
010D 320x200x16 C0000000 CGA 4:3
010E 320x200x16 C0000000 CGA 4:3
0120 320x200x32 C0000000 CGA 4:3
0193 320x240x8 C0000000 QVGA 4:3
0195 320x240x16 C0000000 QVGA 4:3
0196 320x240x32 C0000000 QVGA 4:3
01B3 512x384x8 C0000000 4:3
01B5 512x384x16 C0000000 4:3
01B6 512x384x32 C0000000 4:3
01C3 640x350x8 C0000000 EGA 4:3
01C5 640x350x16 C0000000 EGA 4:3
01C6 640x350x32 C0000000 EGA 4:3
0133 720x400x8 C0000000 WVGA 18:10
0135 720x400x16 C0000000 WVGA 18:10
0136 720x400x32 C0000000 WVGA 18:10
0153 1152x864x8 C0000000 XGA 4:3
0155 1152x864x16 C0000000 XGA 4:3
0156 1152x864x32 C0000000 XGA 4:3
0163 1280x960x8 C0000000 VGA 4:3
0165 1280x960x16 C0000000 VGA 4:3
0166 1280x960x32 C0000000 QVGA VGA 4:3
0121 640x480x32 C0000000 VGA 4:3
0122 800x600x32 C0000000 SVGA 4:3
0123 1024x768x32 C0000000 XGA 4:3
0124 1280x1024x32 C0000000 SXGA 5:4
0143 1400x1050x8 C0000000 SXGA+ 4:3
0145 1400x1050x16 C0000000 SXGA+ 4:3
0146 1400x1050x32 C0000000 SXGA+ 4:3
0173 1600x1200x8 C0000000 UXGA 4:3
0175 1600x1200x16 C0000000 UXGA 4:3
0176 1600x1200x32 C0000000 UXGA 4:3
0183 1792x1344x8 C0000000
0185 1792x1344x16 C0000000
0186 1792x1344x32 C0000000
01D3 1856x1392x8 C0000000
01D5 1856x1392x16 C0000000
01D6 1856x1392x32 C0000000
01E3 1920x1440x8 C0000000 4:3
01E5 1920x1440x16 C0000000 4:3
01E6 1920x1440x32 C0000000 4:3
01D1 1920x1200x8 C0000000 WUXGA 16:10
01D2 1920x1200x16 C0000000 WUXGA 16:10
01D4 1920x1200x32 C0000000 WUXGA 16:10
-------------------------------------
Alright, now off to find a PCI Express Voodoo 5500 ;) This is exactly the reason why I decided against getting such a board and settled for Epox EP-D3VA. If you manage to get a 5500, here's a protip. Some DOS games (GTA1 and Carmageddon Splat Pack most notably) are dynamically linked against the Voodoo driver, so it's perfectly possible to fit the Windows 98 driver for Voodoo 5500 for these games. And it works fine. Also, with regards to those SD card adapters, those actually require that you place a special partition at the beginning of the block device. You should be using CF cards to remove this requirement and to remove the latency of interfacing between SD and IDE. CF is native IDE, just different form factor.
Also, if and once you get a Voodoo, there are DOS backports of Quake and Quake 2 specifically to take advantage of the Voodoo. Cheers!
I'm still keeping my eye on a Voodoo 2 12mb.. but they are SOO expensive right now (like $350+).
the cut to him transporting the case on his bike 😂
haha "jokes on you" best ever :D
what a throwback, i remember fighting to get my stupid Soundblaster AWE 32 ISA working with the cdrom, because they plugged into each other. what a nightmare.
@TheRasteri Great video and great idea for a project.
Something I have noticed appears to have been mostly forgotten (and you don't mention it explicitly in this video) is the varying speed of graphics cards for DOS performance.
Having watched multiple recent builds the builders appear to believe one of two things:
1. Choice of card makes no difference on DOS because dos games don't use accelerator chips.
2. The faster the card runs Windows the better choice it is for DOS too.
As I remember, both of these beliefs is incorrect and in fact, especially when Windows accelerator cards were primarily for the the Windows GDI, DOS performance often slumped for cards with good accelerators.
A number of explanations was given for this at the time. The explanations included these:
1. Some Windows cards do not also have fully compliant VGA adaptors. DOS VGA programs run through a translation layer which slows down DOS programs.
2. Card memory access becomes heavily weighted in favour the accelerator and video chips at the loss of reliable CPU access, so writing over the bus in VGA mode with the CPU is slow.
Whatever the explanation it seems to me a lot of graphics card for DOS wisdom has been lost over the intervening decades.
This troubles me as many games I have seen are terribly slow and use graphics cards known in their day to be great for Windows but terrible for DOS.
Last time I looked (which was some time in the 1990s) the Windows oriented cards were worse for DOS games than DOS oriented cards. The leader of the pack then for DOS were those based on the Tseng ET4000i (I think). This chip does not top Windows benchmarks but does excel in DOS benchmarks.
I think a worthwhile addition to the retro knowledge would be a deep dive into this anomaly to find out what really is the best graphics card for unaccelerated DOS games treated separately from cards for Windows / GDI / DirectX acceleration and separated also from 3D accelerator cards for DOS.
In short: What really is the fastest DOS graphics card for pre-Quake games?
My P4 2.8ghz system, Athlon-XP 3000+ system and Core2 E7600 system all performed within error of each other in game benchmarks, seemed a lot of it depended on how fast the GPU's memory interface was to DOS. At some point, the bottleneck becomes things other than the CPU. In fact, the GeForce 2 Ultra beat everything else in my benchmarks, including all the later cards, and determined DOS performance to a greater degree than CPU past about the P3 800mhz. I think the only games that really pushed through this were simulation games, which of course always do better with a faster CPU.
I love retro rockets, good find! That said, there's a ceiling that is hard to push past, so cranking up the CPU doesn't always give better results.
Love this! Didn't know you could boot into Windows XP like that (already booted into DOS)
“… joke’s on you …” Savage! Lol.
Awesome. Brings back memories of good old games, LAN parties and an era when every generation was distinct from its priors.
Cool! I like that case. Also, laughed quite a bit about your steam game library comment. Good stuff!
The actual upper memory limit for Windows 98 is 1.5 GB, and the same limit applies to Millennium. Great video :)
I did a video a few years ago showing a more modern Core 2 Celeron vs 386, and if you know that video, you know who I am. Guy has to have many accounts. Modern hardware does not perform like you would expect with DOS. The fact that I was able to disable ( haha ) the cache on the Core 2 Celeron and it equal the performance of a 386 shocked me, but full performance the FPS in DOS was not what I expected. Your benches reflect what I found to be the case years ago.
You know so much sir, I wish some of this stuff was written down step by step because my brains tiny and im tired and old and it would be nice to have a really thorough guide on many of these really cool tricks you use to get things working.
This was fantastic, and I love the ultra realistic thumbnail. People always ask if a PC is fast enough to run something, so I'll flip the question on it's head. Can it be slow enough to run wing commander? ;)
Games aren't the only dos program that could be a good example. There are some really nice S3M players you could show in the next video
Yes, the excellent X5470. They also overclock insanely well, I have done benchmarks at 4.8 GHz on air using a Hyper 212 :)
That mobo OP bought is not suited for OC. It has crappy G41 chipset. Most likely all clock generators on it are tied together so he can damage other HW when raising FSB a little.
15:22 Slow clap... Loved that burn
Excelent video, thanks for motherboard inspiration for christmas...🤖
Liked for the incredible 98-Grub-XP boot process
I used the same grub DOS trick when I accidentally wiped the DSDT table of my laptop using a dodgy hacked bios - trying to OC the processor - the tables were empty and I couldn't boot a modern enough windows to run the flash software. I used a DOS program to push the needed tables into place from a file I had constructed in Linux then I used grub to boot XP and run the flashing program. Took me weeks to reach that stage!
You know a computer is a real gaming battlestation if it can handle DOS, Windows98, Windows10, old and new(er) hardware as well as games from all through the 80's up to modern days native without the need of DOSBox or pcem.
Neat! And some usefull info for a pc I'm trying to get an ISA soundblaster to work on.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure ISA still technically exists as one of those weird vestigial interfaces that's so trivial to access that you might as well throw some low level hardware on it for bring up.
LPC? A lot of IO space and stuff is firewalled off, the writes/reads just never arrive, so soundcards shouldn't work. But may be worth trying more i guess?
I had to stick with ISA computers well into the 2000s because I had an AWE64 Gold and 2 AWE32s.
This PC need an 3dfx Voodoo, this card was the most impressive piece of hardware launched EVER !! Nothing came close to it!!
Man seeing windows 98 install that fast was awesome. I also had forgotten it ran on so little ram.
I'd love to see TES: Arena running on this machine. If only to see how unplayably fast it would be 😆. I believe the clock speed of the chip determined how fast the game actually ran instead of just how fast the screen updated.
Masters of Orion and Masters of Orion 2 could sometimes take quite some time to calculate the AIs actions, especially on large maps.
The original Warcraft might be fun and any of the chess games that had settings around how much time to spend calculating a turn.
Fantastic video and I'm jealous of this setup.
Portwell boards are always fun.
that mobo is gold! nice find! the only thing is its missing AGP slot
0:48 missed opportunity for "when ISA was the industry standard architecture"
for using really old OS on an SSD you might wanna make sure that the partition table is properly aligned, you can do that manually in fdisk or just format it on a modern computer. If not it'll really shorten the life of the drive.
@Mr Guru These chipsets support SATA IDE compatibility mode and probably have it enabled by default so Windows 98 just thinks it's a regular IDE controller.
I remember that VESA-LB cards (particularly the original ET4000) could do VGA framebuffer access *far* faster than the PCI, and even most PCIe cards, that followed.
Very cool! I wonder how hard it would be to patch the BIOS and add the rubyisa code to it? Then you could do native XP without needing the dual boot grub trick. (don't get me wrong though, that's a very clever trick)
could also do as an option rom
@@ianhanschen that would also have been my idea. There are tools to replace option roms in the BIOS and he could for exampke replace the PXE ROM for the network card.
If the code is small enough he could also put it in the MBR or VBR
@@janhofmeier9427 yeah. I learned something new from this video - I didn't know I could launch grub as a dos app or that it supported chainloading.
and..... just like that you have a sub. I was laughing my ass off when you pulled that grub trick. I thought, no way is he gonna boot to W98 then chainload. Sound works!! Magic!
i loved this one! so good..thank you
Wouldn't take much to move the ISA enabler code into an option ROM image and embed that into the system BIOS
Launching GRUB from DOS in order to boot Windows XP with working ISA really caught me off-guard tbh
Man, a couple days ago, I didn't know the ruby board existed, and now I'm thinking about throwing handfuls of cash at ebay to get one. I don't even need it (my current DOS machine is already too fast and has 3 ISA sound devices), but it's just so friggin awesome.
Check out the dissapoint project in the Vogons forum. It's a project to add ISA slots using the LPC pins on the TPM header that some motherboards feature. I'd look at that before spending a huge amount on an older board. Anyway, the guy who designed it is saying he might start selling the adapters if there's enough interest.
There's always the more mundane solution of throwing in a PCI sound card as well.
...Hmmmm, have you tried fastvid? Should help with the high res Build engine games. I remember running Blood in 1600x1200 at 30-40fps on a mere 3.06GHz Northwood, on the top of a 845PE/ISA m/b, single channel DDR-333.
Also with Quake benchmark. Though Quake seems to run nicely already.
I picked up a GVC ESS Maestro-1 ES1948F PCI Sound Card off of ebay. These ESS PCI card chip sets, starting with ESS ES1946 Solo-1E, support three means of compatibility with DOS legacy programs that require ISA card DMA like behavior: 1) Transparent DMA (TDMA), 2) Distributed DMA (DDMA), 3) PC/PCI using a Physical SB-LINK connection
Am looking especially for support of the Transparent DMA (TDMA) approach.
In theory a currently manufactured PCI-based motherboard might very well accept this card and thereby also work with DOS legacy software using sound via the TDMA feature.
Can still get motherboards with PS/2 for keyboard and mouse (and those devices are still available on Amazon, etc). Will have to noodle some way to support compatible storage for the old DOS stuff. And not sure what will get using modern PCI Express graphics cards. But I do have some PCI graphics cards that are over ten years old so those might work better.
Well, worse case is might have to write a modest hypervisor that does a wee bit of virtualization on behalf of the ancient 16-bit real-mode DOS code. But that hypervisor could do pass-through where ever feasible (e.g., might be the best way to provide EMS memory). And with a wee bit more effort it could become a MS-DOS multi-tasker - similar to those that cropped up when the 80386 first appeared.
The final worry is how would some of this software behave on a CPU running at multiple gigahertz...
Amazing find on the motherboard and cool video! After ISA Sound with DMA (which kept me away from anything post-440bx), isn’t the next limitation drivers? It’s my understanding Win95/98 don’t play well with PCIe or any video card that would plug into it.
pcie geforce 6 and 7 series are known to work well with win98
I have a FirePro W5100 I picked up for about $25, it's single slot, no external power, and it looks like it might fit in that slot, it only comes back about an inch from the end of the slot
Also, you should try MechWarrior 2
This is art. ❤️
For a moment i thought this looked like a Sega Lindbergh motherboard because of the compact flash header.
3d studio 4.1c might be fun running on that machine.. web archive has all the versions and plugins
He should running come truly ancient games like sopwith or sopwith2 to see how completely insane they would be. they were borderline unplayable even with a PII 266 without DOS slomo.
It would be kinds funny to see it running.
15:23 I don't but I do have 1,5k games on steam, that surely makes up for it... right?
Yes
didnt expect id see doom and crysis on the same machine in the same video 😛
8:05 Wait 640x480 is a standard VGA mode but only in 16 colors, is SVGA considered VGA in this context? I'm just curious since the specs I found on VGA are typically only 400 wide for 256 colors?
That aside, you find some very curious motherboard variants, wonder what that one was made for besides fun heh.
Man, that win 98 install was awesome. Seeing something that you know takes some times and seeing it go much faster is mesmerizing. Would it be too much to ask for a real time video of the full installation, with a clock besides it ?
A couple more things to mention:
- did the sound settings maybe can be set from BIOS ? I assume you already checked but did not mention anything in the video, so I have to ask. On this regard, in another comment I also asked if this maybe can be set from DOSBox, though I guess it's the same as trying to run it from a command prompt. I know that in windows 95 you could manually assign IRQ ranges and stuff like that. In windows 98 too, but less so. Maaaybe it can still be done with some registry entries or something in windows XP or later ? Or maybe someone knowledgeable enough can replicate in proper way (a driver maybe ?) those settings for NT-based windowses.
- if I'm not mistaken, in general software rendering (which is what I assume you did in doom, quake, shadow warrior and the like) is just very poor at scaling with resolution. I think it's because everything is computed by your CPU, in single thread fashion, which cannot really do much in parallel. I do remember running Quake on my i7 6700HQ and it ran just as bad, something like 20-30 FPS for 1080p resolution.
- in the msdos benches, at times it showed either 300 something MHz or 700 something MHz. Any more thoughts on that ? Maybe it's actually running at that speed for some compatibility reasons and maybe that's why the scores are not that high. While we're at it, general performance bottlenecks on these kinds of things would be interesting, who knows, you might find and fix a problem and see a literally 10x performance increase (at least I wouldn't be surprised)
- since MS-DOS runs natively, does that mean that Windows 1.0 to Windows 3.11 also work natively ? While on that, any chance to do a have all of Windows versions (from 1 or 95, whomever is the oldest it can natively run) installed at once (and showcased) ? Or maybe install the oldest one and upgrade from one version to next until Windows 10 ? (I remember there's a guy on YT that did that)
Quality content. Subscribed.
That computer needed voodoo 2 sli!
Tomb raider 1 and tomb raider unfinished business were hard in software mode at max res.
Great video... thank you
I wonder if you could create a lightweight version of DOS with an EXEC.bat and a build of grub. it's a bit like a rube goldberg machine but I think you could do it with not that much effort.
I would look into patching the ruby's bios to setup the ISA bus correctly at boot. Maybe a talented bios hacker out there could be the hero and make this mainboard legendary.
I was able to boot DOS on a Ryzen 5600x + B550M + RTX3060. I tried to use a CMI8738 with PCIe to PCI bridge, but PC crashes after playing sound for few seconds. I think there is an issue with IRQ. I have checked newer MB (I think I saw some with ISA supporting 2nd gen Core CPUs, can't remember exactly ) with ISA but they are super expensive.
Grab one of those PCI-E risers that the mini-itx modders use so you can relocate the GPU away from the RAM and try a GTX 1080ti. I'd be interested to see if you could get a machine that could handle the latest AAA titles and still perform well with DOS games. I'd also be interested to see if you could boot your other operating systems from a network drive so you don't have to worry about partitions and the stability issues they cause.
There is a MSI MS-98A9 motherboard socket 1155 that has ISA. I've used it in my industrial PCs. I7-3770k + ISA works quite well. I do not know abou the DMA thingie
Great video
Great video.
Any chance you could try Screamer or Fatal Racing on that system?
I played a lot of games on freedos on my i5 4570 with audio with the. Sbemu project many games work flawlessly :) but no win 98 there for now :) still nice to see this build
In retrospect it's a shame PCI chipsets didn't have Soundblaster compatibility built in. After all they did have VGA support built in. VGA support just forwarded the legacy VGA ports to a PCI graphics card. Soundblaster support could theoretically have forwarded the motherboard DMA control IO ports to a PCI sound card.
Incidentally it's not all that hard to write a kernel mode driver that just pokes the IO ports you need to enable sound on initialization. Since it's Windows XP you don't need to sign kernel mode code either.
@Mr Guru Those Realtek and Crystal chips are not Soundblaster compatible though. IIRC they're just the DAC/ADC part of the audio and the digital part is in the chipset. Unfortunatley that is also not SoundBlaster compatible, even though it could have been.
Contrast that with VGA compatibility which most motherboards used to support for both onboard and PCI graphics cards.
Nowadays you don't need ISA slot/sound card for DOS gaming anymore. There are two DOS utilities available on Vogons: SBEMU and CPUSPD. SBEMU emulates a Sound Blaster on motherboards with integrated AC97 sound chips. CPUSPD slows down the CPU for speed sensitive DOS games, and it works on socket 370, 478, 775, AM2, and AM3 (K10 cpus). So the fastest DOS gaming PC that could run (almost) all DOS games would be the Core2Quad Q9650 or the Phenom II X6.
15:23 That was brutal...
...but true! 😐
Also, Windows 98 cannot out of the box address more than exactly 768MB RAM due to how Windows interprets memory pointers (signed bit determines kernel and userspace segments) and how Windows vcache works. If you want to run Windows on something that has more RAM, you'll need to install it with 768MB RAM or less anyway, and then modify vcache settings so that Windows doesn't make more than 0x40000 memory pages. Should work fine. Also, since you've set out to build an overkill DOS PC, why didn't you get an AWE64 Gold?
Don't blink or you'll miss the human finger inside the LCD screen at 15:09!
You could use some kind of pcie riser or extension cable to plug in any GPU.
GP2 engine is weird - you specify target fps in the game settings and it's locked at 25,6 fps maximum if I remember correctly. To check how the PC copes with it, you need to press O during gameplay and it will show you CPU Occupancy while button is pressed. If CPU can't handle your graphics settings, it will show over 100% and gameplay will slow down to reach fps target
15:22 - Jokes on you I have a boyfriend with a massive steam library we play together.
I think id probably have just fpga'd it
However this was a fascinating build
Can you access the BIOS utility? Try to look at the ISA settings there. 😉
I was thinking the same!
Tecnicly a core 2 duo is built on the p3 architecture so it is basically realy high preformens dule p3 system
4:15 They exist, but they're pretty expensive comparatively. Cost me a good $150 for my matched pair.
Nice build, I ported rubyisa program to syslinux bootloader to make isa slot useable under linux and winxp, isa graphics card and sb64 sound still no dice due to lpc to isa bridge limits.
I was thinking of trying to get MDA/Hercules/CGA working, do you think that would be possible with an option rom or something?
@@TheRasteri I am not familiar with isa graphics cards. If dma ranges required by isa graphics cards supported by Fintek F85226FG, worth give it a shot. More details you can ask Tiido (original rubyisa.exe author, quite nice guy), he didi a lot research in this lpc to isa bridge.