Sooo, testbenches with anti-static mats cannot test any powered devices? "Conductive" is not "shorting". Anti-static is high resistance to avoid static discharge which is BIG potential difference between PCB and operator. The idea is to SLOWLY discharge large voltages over more points than a fingertip (I think everybody had a discharge in their life). It's effects are negligible for 12V, even 220V applications. For higher voltages you should have proper training and already know this.
@@mateiberatco500 The silver bags are usually coated with aluminum. It's easy to punch a pin through the dielectric coating and hit the metal. If you are fine with running your electronics on aluminum then you could also use an anti static bag. The red/pink ones are dissipative those should not be able to hold a static charge but might still conduct to what they are placed on. To be safe I wouldn't power devices on either. Use the cardboard box instead. (Also don't wear rubber boots and a wool sweater while rubbing a cat.)
The red line on the cable indicates pin 1 BUT the way these cables are manufactured (in china) makes it difficult to know if the orientation was correct in the process. I have even some cables from the 90s that have the red line on the wrong side. One time i had a 40pin cable (that was most likely not even IDE) where the pin-rows! were switched on just one connector. In the end you have to make sure that pin1 on the device corresponds to pin1 on the mainboard. I tend to make my own cables to be sure. The onboard ES1938 is a nice PCI sound card with very good SoundBlaster and excellent AdLib emulation (if the lines for proper ISA-'emulation' are connected on the mainboard). A P166 MMX is a good fit for a 1996 System. The S3 Virge is good for 320x240 DirectX or even 640x480 with S3D enabled games. The Virge is a 2D beast and has very good dos compatibility. The CHIPS VGA Chipset graphics has good VESA support but is slow and may have problems with scrolling in older games, so maybe using the onboard graphics might be interesting if you want to install a 3DFX-card and have more of a 1996 3D system.
The red line on ribbon cables is supposed to indicate pin 1, not power. It's always been that way as long as I have been working with computers, and we are talking about going back as far as the late 80's, even though ribbon cables have been in use a lot longer than that! It could be that the cable has had the connectors put on backwards.
@@PIPERdotEXE There's a reason why I have no interest in original DOS hardware. I did my time on it back in the day, cracking open the case and rearranging the entire IRQ/DMA map every time I got a new game or piece of technology. While I'll grant that there are fewer components to worry about for "just" a game computer (no need for a modem or a handheld scanner), I still refuse to go back to crawling under the desk on a regular basis. DOS Emulation FTW!
Write your production schedule separately from your release/promo schedule, and keep your products produced ahead of your videos so you have content complete for release. Get ahead of yourself with a vault of more content than you have release dates yet. Like how Prince had like a thousand unreleased songs. That took a lifetime, so you won't hit a 1000 soon, but you got a bright future in this video stuff, just gotta tighten up those behind the scenes skills. Finish the DOS console and release another video. You're doing a lot right, and you got a lot going for you, just keep learning.
I randomly found your channel and Videos thanks to youtube Recomendations. Excellent Production quality. Really enjoying the vids. Keep up the great work!
just came to say thanks. Big fan of DOS gaming as I used DOS in my childhood.Thank you for your video! All this stuff is pretty cool! It made me wonder why there was no MS-DOS based consoles back in the day! That would be super cool!
Rather than the floppy disk smoke and mirrors setup, how about using a compact flash card as a 'cartridge' and have the system boot from it? They existed in the 90s so it isn't too much of a stretch. Could even make a hole in the top of the case and have it top loader style like the SNES / Megadrive!
@James Howard How about something like a miniature hard drive like what was used in the original ipod ? I'm sure that existed in the 90s although not popular I agree with the compact flash card idea that was used in late 90s MP3 players
The biggest issues I see with this setup is the lack of pci slots and non existing isa slots that really limit what you can add to the system especially in a dos gaming system also a floppy emu would be a good option for having multiple booting devices and cf harddrive adapter for internal storage they are similar enough to hdd interfaces of the Era ide and Pata and a keyboard emulation device for custom controllers.
Frustration is the most common thing in computer build projects before Pentium 2, and retrofit projects. You have to get used to the inevitable failure. I worked as a computer technician back in the day when this type of computer was common. It was hell, the internet was basic, there wasn't that facility that we have today in finding drivers, if you didn't have a cd with drivers, you were fucked. Lots of configuration with jumpers, components could burn just by touching your finger (the ESR protections were weaker) several times I burned the tops of my fingers touching VRM heatsinks when changing jumpers (it's excruciating pain), IRQ, bent ISA pins, dallas clock, cache chips, all this was a nightmare that most people nowadays have forgotten or even gone through. Today it is incredibly simple to assemble hardware, the pieces just fit in the right position, and there are protections that prevent them from being damaged if they fit wrong. The further into the past you go, the harder things get. Has anyone already reversed the P8 and P9 cables from the PSU to an AT? The whole thing explodes, burns out the motherboard, PSU and everything connected to them! Did you reverse the PSU AT switch wires? In addition to exploding, it catches fire, and you'll have your room in the dark. By that I mean it was really hell, some youtubers want to make it look like it's something simple and nice (like ordering a waveblaster and soldering everything to it) but in reality it's all hell. This type of project is not a hobby for those who want to relax on a weekend, it is something like "hardcore for Asians who like to be beaten with barbed whips".
Pretty good idea, will be interesting to see how close you get to feeling like a real console such as with the controls if you compare the same games such as mortal kombat.
The RAM module you bought is probably okay, you'll find it's actually incompatible with the board as it's single sided SD-RAM. Most boards of that era will only work with double sided SD-RAM. This is why the double sided 128MB module you installed originally works on that board. Single sided SD-RAM was made toward the end of that RAM type and requires board support to function. Even the i845 chipset P4 boards I have that use SD-RAM won't work with single sided modules.
For gamepad control, you might consider some one of the keyboard emulating ones like the Interact 3d Program Pad (easy to find on US eBay at least), or Act Labs 3D Powerramp Mite (harder to find, but can store button mappings that are selectable via a slider which could be handy). I used these a fair bit to get around the 4 button limitation of gameport pads, at least until USB gamepads finally took over.
I actually have a Rockfire Silver Shuttle that supposedly emulates a keyboard on PS/2, might have gotten it out, had I not run out of time on this, this could have been the alternative
I've had a project that went about as well as this one too. Its still parts sitting behind the island in my kitchen. I'll get back to it sooner or later, but yeah. Its just some tinkering. Don't push yourself too hard. I like the concept you're working with. I hope it pans in another part or two. Just subbed the channel, I enjoyed the video regardless.
Leaving in all the frustration is what makes this a good video at least for me. I like to see all the trials of a project and the thought process for fixing any problems. There's a lotta videos like "so I made a program myself and 3D printed this cool shit and everything just works after a few bumps in the road". And while those are cool, it's still nice to see a video end with a very human moment of just having to step back and strategize. PCBway sponsor so many videos it was almost a surprise to see someone actually use the service. Hopefully you can get the board populated and working.
Pin 1 is pin 1 is always the stripe. It has nothing to do with power. The SD adapter has correct pin1 marking. 44pin IDE is a shrunk 40-pin+power. Pins 1-40 are IDENTICAL to the big connector (as you should see on the adapter cable you unboxed..see how the molex connector is opposite to the stripe). Pin 1 is NOT POWER. Pins 41-44 are. Further confirmation: the missing pin is pin 20, but on the connector, on the side of the notch, you should see an arrow representing pin 1. The notch side has all the ODD pins, so empty pin is AWAY from the notch. You can check that with a newer IDE cable or motherboard that have the pin filled/missing with notch indication (i.e.: what you tried to do with 2.5" HDD...a 3.5" would show this). The HDD theory did surprise me, but I guess the 2.5" HDD was intended for laptops, where you either put it in a fixed connector on the MB or you have a proprietary cable that will fit in a single position. So a notch is irrelevant. Anyway, I never had "pin 1=stripe" rule break on me. The only pin 1 rule I found bad was on Serdashops WP32 McCake (2021 MT32 wavebalster card), where the square pin is in the opposite place, with no other markings. I think I got lucky because I used it first with their gameport-waveblaster adapter which went in a single way. Then I noticed the even rows (on adapter and sound cards) are VCC+GND which are easily noticed and confirmed the mistake.
Looking forward to part 2. Subscribed. Im doing something similar. Pos ( the till type 😊 ) its not much bigger than what you have. Has isa & pci. I’ve got the pico psu and most of the parts. Awe64 and voodoo banshee pci. Making a dos/win98 setup with either the amd k6/450 or down clock to 233 or even a p133. Its been on my todo for s VERY long time 😊
Ah the joys of old PC motherboards, jumpers, PATA/IDE drives and good old MS DOS configuration. I remember those days, but not especially fondly. 😁 My routine is: check you've got power first (you'd be surprised how many times I found someone forgot to plug it in!) then check the last device you added to the system. Then check all the cables, reseat the RAM, (one stick at a time, preferably a known working SIMM/DIMM), and try it in different sockets. Then look at the jumper settings and lastly the CPU. I would suggest having a keyboard attached when doing any power on testing, as those older BIOSs often required fettling to get hard drives up and running or disabling onboard graphics, setting IRQ's etc. And then you've got the joy of finding all the right drivers! Looking forward to part 2. 🙂
I love this idea! Last year bought a laptop as parts for next to nothing. The monitor was broken off, it lacked a hard-drive and RAM. So I took some RAM, installed them and I formatted a USB-stick to FreeDOS and then filled it up with games demos and/or sharewares. The concept was to create something that is 1. portable 2. completely legal. So now the laptop works as a console (or more like an arcade cabinet, since I had a cheap, simple DIY project out of a wardrobe with a CRT monitr installed in it), but I can take the USB drive and use it as a boot-disk on any PC as well. There is no sound compatibility, but hey, that's not necessarily a problem with office computers :D
I also had this idea a few months ago, I'm using a dell inspiron 7000 notebook as a base (ref. direct x box prototype), and a satellite receiver case, which is the face of the 90s. Take a look: th-cam.com/video/T5FWDZ9dQt8/w-d-xo.html
A tip, there were floppy drives that had a sensor to detect if you inserted the disk, but you can manually create this sensor with a simple button and a rod, so that when you put the disk, the rod is pushed activating the button, you takes the wires from the button to the serial or parallel port, and creates a small qbasic application that checks "true or false" on those pins on that port. This will tell the system when the disk was inserted. You can also create a frontend using colored ANSI characters, (I recommend NANSI.SYS) which allows you to change the date and time, and other things, just like the consoles of that era when they were turned on without a game inside.
Dremel has an attachment called "speedclic". These cutting wheels stand a lot lot longer! And you don't have to fiddle with washers and a tiny screw. More like a real angle grinder in small size.
They indeed are. Despite being proprietary dremel stuff, they are on another level, compared to the single screwed discs, which, in my opinion are just child toys.
Today I meet this channel and subscribed! Great! Just one thing (as a feedback) maybe the music is a bit to loud, - 3dBs for the soundtrack will help hearing your voice 👍
i just remember something, there was no DOS consoles ever made, but there was one Windows 3.11 console with 286 inside - Memorex VIS MD2500, rare thing nowadays
Seems like a good idea, but I do have a thought on how to improve it: go with a case with a 5 1/2" bay, get a bay adaptor for that will hold a 3.25" drive _and a card with PC Jr cartridge ports,_ and an ISA card to connect to that cartridge board. Then you'll just need games! Which, admittedly, is probably the hard part.
the red wire - pin 1 is not power, it's the reset signal. the ide doesnot carry any power for the device so connecting it the wrong way will not burn anything.
Cool project! That board seems to have ESS Solo-1 based onboard audio which supposedly works well with DOS, so if you don't manage to source the sound chip that could be an alternative. (If this doesn't work, you might be able to salvage the CS4237B from some ISA sound card on eBay. There are also some PC104 to ISA adapter designs around the Internet). For storage there's a DiskOnChip slot on the board - maybe that would work better? Those SD/CF to IDE adapters can have compatibility problems even with real PC motherboards, much less an SBC. Also, you can look up what those POST codes on the board mean - saves a bit of troubleshooting. C6 is indeed a storage problem. I wonder if there's a way to go without "smoke and mirrors" by hooking DOS file access routines to prompt for a floppy when the file the game needs is not on the current one (possibly with a RAM disk/temporary directory to store files from floppies already inserted). Maybe it could even be possible to make a fully diskless console?
I noticed that sound chip too (ESS Solo-1). If the right header can be found/made (I could only find a datasheet not a manual) then that thing should have good sound. There is also a socket for a GPS module on that thing too!
I feel the struggle... i’ve been working on some laptops (p133) and have had the same issues with cf and sd harddrive replacements. Try an ide hdd first... if that works.. look at raplacement options. For me a cf adaptor didn’t work but a delock 44pin ide to sd card adaptor did... the adaptors can be tested with an ide to usb adaptor on your modern mac or pc. First try to get it working like you did... with bare minimum cpu, ram and video... then one by one keep adding stuff like hdd, fdd, sound and so on. But it’s a lovely project mate 👍
Could cheat a little less by using some nebulous rewritable media such as a zip drive or an early DVD RAM drive [I believe I have one circa 1998] and have a small boot drive that basically loads the drivers and starts the program on the disk using some common batch file in the root directory of the media. FAT16 DVD RAM is limited to 2 GB due to the FAT16 format but that should be plenty of space for even a compilation of DOS games. I have been intending to build a number of the sound cards you mentioned in this video as I have a fairly large supply of the main chip and probably have most of the components for at least building 5 of them but I have been sidelined by other projects.
Didn't want to use a Zip Drive. I can see why you suggest it, they're bigger, but there's a few issues. 1. The whole concept is that the floppy disks are equivalent to game cartridges 2. The Zip drive would never have been able to fit in that case I understand the limitations of the storage media, I would only be able to use an 8GB card split into 4, but that's ok, SD cards are cheap, and likely I wouldn't fill even one up with all the DOS games I would have on it You will see what I'm trying to do when I fully demo this thing when it's finished I got enough bits for 4 but hit a snag when getting the chips
@@PIPERdotEXE yeah I don't think I know of any slimline zip drives. It might be possible to get a slimline drive that can read dvdram discs with DOS drivers. The old DVD ram discs would have a little over 2gb so fat16 would limit it to that. It's also an odd format that cannot be read after I think windows 98se.
@@PIPERdotEXE Yeah, I suppose size would kill that idea. SD and CF cards existed in that era, but one big enough to handle the larger 1996 games would've been insanely expensive, but I'd lean towards that way myself building a system nowadays. I will note, I actually find Zip disks far more cartridge like than floppy discs, with their beveled sides and the pull tab part, on top of being on the chunkier side. On top of that, I had a fairly small harddrive in my PC in that era and actually ran some games off a parallel Zip drive, so there's a bit of nostalgia with thinking of that option.
Your vud couldnt be more timely, accidentally discovered my dad has in storage 2 old pc towers, i am talking the stuff of retro wet dreams haha s3 virge, 5-pin din slot for keyboard on the motherboard etc. Thanks for the great vid
it was because it used OPENGL wrapper, it didnt have built in OpenGL support. It was Direct3d only card. In Direct3d , it had decent fps for it's price and age. No CPU could count faster, than with Virge under Direct3D. Except, when it was outdated. Some Pentium III could be faster, but in that time, S3 Virge was renamed to S3 Trio3D. So, when we count it's era, 1996-1997, and early 1998, when it was usable, and used, even most powerful PC of that era (Pentium II 300 mhz) could not count faster in software mode, than Virge, and thus, Virge wasn't decelerator... PC was faster with it, as without it. But who would buy Virge, when he could afford Pentium II 300. Most people with Virge, had usually socket 7 system. Pentium 90 - Pentium 233 MMX. And with that CPU, Virge was ALWAYS faster in 640x480x16 in Direct3d, than CPU alone. Important on Virge was to disable some features, to make it faster, particulary Z-buffer. It didn't have good Z-buffer, and it had performance hit with it. Important was also to use EDO RAM with Virge, not SDRAM or SGRAM, and overclock it. Some Virge's were terrible underclocked (like to 45/45 mhz). You could usually get to 60/60 or even slightly over. Virge had also big performance hit with bilinear filtering. Simply, wasn't too good with it. But CPU would be even slower, if it needed to count Bilinear filter. So, the trick was to turn it off... same as Mystique. You've got big performance boost , and could go for 640x480-16bit color mode. Now try Virge DX in direct 3d, with EDO RAM, overclocked to 65/65, turned off Z-buffer and Bilinear Filter. And you will see, HOW MUCH faster it is, than Pentium 233 MMX in 640x480, while looking the better (16 bit colors, vs 256 colors in software mode)
Really excellent content. It was a fun project to watch! I hope you get it fully operational soon. Your editing was great, but I feel like the music was a little overpowering. Hope you don't mind my saying.
oh seeing Recoil on the first shots of you using W98 instantly hooked me up. I still remember the cheat code for it, hemmit and cavalry. Hey nice video, I just subbed! Btw, is one of the capacitors near the cpu buldged?
@@PIPERdotEXE Maybe not, but that would have made it more interesting as you should be able to fit bigger games on them, giving you an experience closer to what you were after. Very good video, at any rate. Cheers. :)
I'm interested in the concept. From the title I imagined a system where the cf card sat in a 3d printed shell and that's where the installed game sat. The autoexec would just attempt to load game.bat on d else echo something like "please insert cartridge". Since we're already getting pcbs fabricated might as well make a card edge connector for the cf card and the cf to ide adaptor.
there is supposedly a PCI sound card that has compatibility to SoundBlaster andhas a way of emulating interrupts behavior such that MS-DOS games will see it as a legit ISA-bus SoundBlaster card the upshot is that it then becomes feasible to build a modern x86 PC that is able to run early 90s MS-DOS and DOS games in native instruction execution mode would insanely fast given modern CPU clockspeeds
Well, it seems a lot of sound cards, including the Sound Blaster Live in the 98 Machine that I was using to test, does have limited Sound Blaster support, though it's not perfect, for example I couldn't get General MIDI on there for some reason
What did you select for master slave on the IDE? Or were you using a cable select ? I had a similar issues with compatibility with 486 and Pentium boards. The early to mid 90’s tech could be complex to get ram and drives compatible with chipsets on the motherboard.
Very nice man, I ran apon your channel today. Good video but the music in the back round. Can you or anyone else tell me where I can get it from? Thanks
I have an LS120 drive. You can actually get slimline IDE drives and there is an adapter you can order from a guy on vogons to get an adapter to IDE. This would make your games actually store the games content on the disks and allow save data and everything A 20MB Clik drive would also be a great solution! (Being that the are available fairly cheaply and having a nice pcmcia card for polished
Using LS120 you also keep the backwords compatibility with 3.5 inch floppy drives! And with the way things boot. You could insert and boot from a ls120 and have a full DOS environment. Meaning you can actually treat them like cartridges and stick them in basically any comparable computer and boot rom them!
@@PIPERdotEXE or if you want to go slightly less exotic and cheaper. You could use ZIP disks. Those are available cheaply and even the zip 100 will store basically any DOS game.
Others have suggested this, but no. No zip disks. One of the specifics of this project is that it uses floppies. This idea will be discarded later for full hard disk loading
I used to have bootable floppy's with games on it. Only very small games will fit on that setup though. It should work in theory for CD's although a cd can only be written to once so no saving. Maybe a DVD-RAM would do the trick for DOS.
A couple of suggestions, don't know if you addressed them already or not, but worth mentioning. Make sure your hard disk jumper is set to master or cable select (since you are using a single connector ide cable, yes this does matter.) Try going into the BIOS before plugging in the IDE driver/adapter and checking the HD params to see if it set to auto or manual cylinders, heads, etc. This board has some weird quirk regarding HD compatibility regarding Hard disks. Then plug in the drive again. Try disconnecting the floppy cable/drive and then having the IDE disk only connected to rule out that the floppy is interfering. The floppy drive cable you used, may not be the correct type. There needs to be a crossover of the pins in the middle of the cable, if you don't it can cause all kinds of weird issues in booting (again your cable has a single connector on it, see if you can find a dual connector type with the cross-over) make sure it is pin one (red on both sides). If you have it incorrect the floppy won't do anything at all, or the activity light will stay consistent red. the other thing I can thing of is IRQ conflict. That board has a ton of embedded IO on it, and it is possible the graphics card is sharing an IRQ with something else (preventing it from booting. If you can get into the BIOS without anything connected except the graphics. The EDO ram may actually still work, but that board may not be fully compatible.
I don't know if anyone has asked this and if so whether or not you answered, but do you know what the name of that case is? If so, would you please tell me? Thanks!
Seems to be, the seller mentioned flaky power sockets, and I did notice that the caps near the CPU are a tiny bit "bulgy", they will need to be replaced at some point, they could be affecting power delivery
Honestly, I'm relieved when I see those on older boards. They're pretty much always dead, but at least they can hold their liquor. I bought a tube of sockets, and have a batch of home-made PCBs with SMD clock ICs and CR2032 holders on top, that drop right into the socket, and it's job done for another 10-25 years. Beats scraping rotted copper off a motherboard... :-)
Uh... put an SD card in your IDE to SD Card thingy... that might solve the issue. Also, start looking for a Voodoo; take into account it needs a display cable between Voodoo and the 2D card; S3 "does 3D", yeah, but only a few games made for it; the truly greats you want to use the GPU for from 1996; Quake / Tomb Raider, don't work with it.
It was tried with and without, you would also see at least some indication of hardware there, also this would not cause the non-POST issues I was having
I don't want to use a zip drive. In this project the floppy disks are merely triggers for the games that are stored on an SD card, much bigger even than a zip disk
The best solution is actively supporting a flashfloppy emulator. This means that it can AND WILL support using games from floppy, but also allows you to have multiple disks on a single usb stick. (indeed, since most floppy controllers will allow two drives, you can actually simultaneously support a real floppy AND a drive emulator. 3:46 Quake isn't actually all THAT big. the id1 folder is actually only about 50mb. A lot of floppies to be sure, though. What might actually work would be support for a CD-ROM/DVD ROM drive for bigger games. Indeed circa 96, many games still used the disk as copy protection and would support being played almost entirely from CD-ROM via a minimal install with only a token amount of save data winding up on the hard drive.
I feel you have missed the point of what this build was.... If I was just building any old DOS PC, I would be using a floppy emulator of some sort, I wouldn't be bothering with a real floppy drive (they suck). I only wanted one real floppy drive, as this is a fictional product from the early to mid 90s, as if there had been a console like computer that ran DOS and the games were on floppy. My reference to Quake, is pretty much what you mentioned, it's a lot of floppies, so you couldn't put the game on one, but you can put it on an HDD or SD card. There's a lot of artistic license in this project There is going to be support for a parallel port CD-ROM drive, all this will be in the later parts. Hope this all helps
Yeah, I mean with all the best will in the world, I can't fully target 1994, the CPU is about there, but the board is from 1996 I believe, with a BIOS from 1999, and the graphics card, is from 1995. Maybe the GUI shell I have planned for it which is from 1991 will balance things out lol
The S3 Virge is a really good video card, but the 3D acceleration is pretty useless. My experience back in the day is that the Pentium Pro could render Tomb Raider faster and cleaner than S3 Virge 3D acceleration. 3DFX is fairly late stage gaming anyway, so 2D should cover all the _cool_ games. 😉 The joystick emulator looks like an IRQ conflict. Likely the serial port you're using for the mouse is on the same IRQ as the joystick and you're just not aware. You will need to ensure that you set a good dead zone as the old pots on those drift a LOT, which is a huge problem if you're thunking to keyboard inputs. I'm surprised you used a non-boot disk for game launching. Back in my DOS days, first thing I did when I got a new game was to create a boot disk. That's because the mishmash of EMS/XMS, CD ROM drivers, mouse drivers, sound card drivers, and other hardware meant that nearly every game had to be tweaked to make the right amount low memory available along with the right amount of extended memory with the right drivers. Pretty easy to add the launcher script to the autoexec.bat of your boot disk after configuring the config.sys. Makes the disk more useful than a launch script too. Someone else mentioned a ZIP disk. That's actually a pretty good idea for a "console" like experience. Only problem is that you can't boot off it, but it's better than using the B: drive like you're currently doing. You could even detect and autorun file on the zip disk and boot normally if there's nothing in the drive. Overall, very neat project. I hope it works out well!c
i remember how much of a pain in the ass it was to get ultima 7 and 7 part 2 running without a boot disk back in the day, i could do it in my sleep now but back then dealing with the memory managers was so much of a pain in the ass that i always just used a boot disk then ran it off my primary drive.
@@kght222 Oh heck yeah. I mentioned in a comment below that there's no way I'm going back to period hardware. I'm perfectly happy with emulation, thank you very much. The clincher for me is the fact that there's no such thing as "period correct hardware". Back in the day you had what you had. If you had a 486 in 1990, you were almost certainly running everything too fast. If you had a 486 in 1996, you were almost certainly running everything too slow. I remember Carmen Sandiego running faster on a CGA PCjr than a much prettier EGA XT. Those experiences are all interesting memories, but they're a consequence of the landscape of computers. Not the way the games were "intended" to be played. (Hell, there probably wasn't a precise "intended" with many of them.) Today I can cycle up and down as needed to find the experience I want, and I'm happy with that. I've got too many other hardware projects to dick around with old PC hardware.
@@thewiirocks To be fair, most early 90s or even late 80s games aren't directly CPU sensitive, you're more likely to encounter physics bugs or sound issues than outright speedup, which can often be alleviated by disabling cache. Ultima 7/UW and XCOM are some big exceptions, both of which happen to be a pretty good fit for a 486DX33. Admittedly the opposite is more true, even Doom doesn't run all that great on a typical 486. If you did want to go hardware, you'd probably want a different PC for late DOS / early Windows, a P2 or even P3 could do. I'm not saying that it's easier or even better than emulation, but I do think you can get quite "period correct" results either way.
@@ozzyp97 Have to disagree with you, I’m afraid. In my experience it’s not just Ultima. Most Origin titles are CPU sensitive, with the Wing Commander series immediately popping to mind as an example. The original Wing Commander was so bad that there simply isn’t a “correct speed” to run it at. I played it on a 486 DX2/50, but that’s a very different experience to everyone who played it on a 386. Games of the time didn’t use the RTC for timing. If for no other reason that the use of high resolution clocks (i.e. millisecond or better) weren’t very common yet. Instead, many games attempted to use VSync for time control, using extra frame time for double buffering to smooth out spikes in frame rendering time. This approach makes many games of the time somewhat well-behaved, but it doesn’t mean they weren’t affected by CPU performance. DOOM for example, has a fairly famous story of how everyone in the ID office was running postage stamp sized viewports to try and keep up with the one guy who had gotten himself a 486. Despite DOOM being VSynced, the player with the higher frame rate had a massive advantage over everyone else. It was only well into the Pentium era that we started seeing games that would hit the 60FPS limit, leading to consistent experiences. And that was short lived as game designers pushed the hardware. This made the game speeds inconsistent again and by the late 90s games started employing game state update cycles independent of frame rate. This more effectively solved the problem and is a technique still in use today. Source: I lived through this period and was even responsible for a popular video game timing library known as GAGETimer.
You went the hard way, just use old correct pc cards from 1995/2000, I coud assemble a whole ms-dos console and make it running in less than 20 mintues all together... then running quake/doom/etc....
What I will say sounds heretical even for my own tastes. Although I have collected tons of retro hardware to make DOS PC projects, including some top notch hardware of that era that I purchased for dirt cheap prices the recent years, I ended up realizing that emulation is the way to go for all sorts of old hardware. Yes, I know, it is not original and we all like original, however the overhead of building an original system of the era with original old components could prove a nightmare given the condition of the capacitors and the incompatibility between old devices. Terms like "conflicting IRQs", "incompatibilities", "not enough high memory", "memmaker", "EMS", "XMS", "UMB" , "mouse driver", "inverted ribbon cable", "config.sys", "autoexec.bat" and all those things of the past are both things I totally love and totally hate at the same time. I truly admire the scope of this project and I do stand with you but if I would attempt to do something similar I would either use emulation within a more modern system or I would use a full size retro PC case. ITX wasn't a thing in those days and if ITX is somewhat niche market today, imagine what it was then... S3 Virge and S3 Virge DX did not have any sort of 3D acceleration. The only one that did was S3 Virge GX that was still shamefully slow. What S3 Virge had was great compatibility with DOS titles and it stands as reference point for modern DOS emulators. The most compatible soundcards for old dos games were Sound Blaster Pro 2 and Sound Blaster 16 that have been emulated almost perfectly with time. I subscribed only to see how this project goes. It really feels like something I would try! Good luck with it! I am looking forward to part 2!
Oh sure, normally I would be doing just that, I try and get the most I can out of my one main PC, I run DOSbox, and have a number of other tricks including source-ports, patches, wrappers etc. This is nothing but a headache, usually the hardware I deal in is late 90s to mid to late 2000s, and this avoids a lot of these problems, but on this project I decided to get a little fancy. I realise ITX wasn't, but there's not much outside of 3D printing, that would give me a "console-y" looking box. This S3 card does appear to have it, but it's weak, I've come to realise that there's precious few DOS games that do have 3D, and the ones that do, probably use Voodoo. Thanks, part 2 will be along when I can get it done, hopefully you will stick around for more than just this in time
@@PIPERdotEXE I will for sure stick around for that. It brings a smile to my face when I find such endeavours. My first PC was a 486 100MHz, 8MB RAM SVGA, SB Pro 2. After that I got my hands on thousands of systems. I even worked for years in a repair shop as a technician. I just love old PCs but I love more the new ones. I like what Phil says his page (Phil's Computer Lab), to quote "I was always into computers, old, new, real and emulated". I love channels like yours. Good luck mate. I will stick around.
It can be headache, but there's also something very satisfying about the way things work in DOS. You plug in an ISA card, manually allocate some resources and tell your software where to find it. For the few things that need drivers, you run them by hand or write a line in autoexec to do it for you with whatever settings you like. You need to know what you're doing, but equally nothing really goes on without you knowing. It's a much more direct relationship with your PC down to the hardware level.
@@ozzyp97 That's why while I hate all those things of the past, I also totally love them. It was, as you pointed out, a much more direct relationship with your system. When things were working fine, it was something to be celebrated and it was consistent. One does not visit those things older than what they first encountered when it comes to technology.
I saw that just recently, but while it contains a 386SX, it does not run DOS, and while I would love to try getting DOS onto that, that graphics chip is likely going to be an issue. Good mention though
FM Towns Marty does run MS DOS but it also runs something called Towns OS on top of it which has some APIs specifically designed for handling graphics ,sound and interrupt requests for accessing the mouse and gamepad and has some sort of custom Fujitsu graphics hardware
Well, I just checked this out more closely.... Damn, it's basically the DOS console I've been looking for, would love to get one, but by the sounds of things, I'd be spending a lot
@@PIPERdotEXE Yeah they aren't cheap by any stretch, but they were very cool. And they included some licensing deal with Pharlap 386 making the dos extender ubiquitous on the platform. So you have that console experience of common hardware, 32bit flat mode programming, MS-DOS API's and better than VGA graphics. Galaxy Force II on the Marty was pretty impressive (when it was new!).
Context is everything. These days it seems whatever words people use to describe something, someone, somewhere finds it objectionable. Granted, sometimes it's warranted, but often things are taken out of context. But some people just like to take offence no matter what, what's worse is that sometimes it's actually done vicariously. I might add that labelling people as "Abelist" is morally no better.
You do realize anti static bags are anti static because they are conductive? Powering anything on them is a really bad idea.
It might not have been obvious, but the board was mounted on 20mm long standoffs when I did that 😉 but was aware of this, don't worry
@@PIPERdotEXE Too bad you had some bad luck with the CPU and RAM then. Might have been a fun little "console".😀
Oh, we will return, and all the problems will have been resolved
Sooo, testbenches with anti-static mats cannot test any powered devices?
"Conductive" is not "shorting".
Anti-static is high resistance to avoid static discharge which is BIG potential difference between PCB and operator. The idea is to SLOWLY discharge large voltages over more points than a fingertip (I think everybody had a discharge in their life). It's effects are negligible for 12V, even 220V applications. For higher voltages you should have proper training and already know this.
@@mateiberatco500 The silver bags are usually coated with aluminum. It's easy to punch a pin through the dielectric coating and hit the metal. If you are fine with running your electronics on aluminum then you could also use an anti static bag. The red/pink ones are dissipative those should not be able to hold a static charge but might still conduct to what they are placed on.
To be safe I wouldn't power devices on either. Use the cardboard box instead. (Also don't wear rubber boots and a wool sweater while rubbing a cat.)
The red line on the cable indicates pin 1 BUT the way these cables are manufactured (in china) makes it difficult to know if the orientation was correct in the process. I have even some cables from the 90s that have the red line on the wrong side. One time i had a 40pin cable (that was most likely not even IDE) where the pin-rows! were switched on just one connector. In the end you have to make sure that pin1 on the device corresponds to pin1 on the mainboard. I tend to make my own cables to be sure.
The onboard ES1938 is a nice PCI sound card with very good SoundBlaster and excellent AdLib emulation (if the lines for proper ISA-'emulation' are connected on the mainboard).
A P166 MMX is a good fit for a 1996 System. The S3 Virge is good for 320x240 DirectX or even 640x480 with S3D enabled games. The Virge is a 2D beast and has very good dos compatibility.
The CHIPS VGA Chipset graphics has good VESA support but is slow and may have problems with scrolling in older games, so maybe using the onboard graphics might be interesting if you want to install a 3DFX-card and have more of a 1996 3D system.
The red line on ribbon cables is supposed to indicate pin 1, not power. It's always been that way as long as I have been working with computers, and we are talking about going back as far as the late 80's, even though ribbon cables have been in use a lot longer than that! It could be that the cable has had the connectors put on backwards.
This is why as much as I'd love to have original hardware I'm good with DosBox
Looking forward part 2, hopefully you'll have better luck
Yeah, I am really riding by the seat of my pants with 90s hardware, but yeah, part 2 will be along
@@PIPERdotEXE lol, can't wait to see it 👍
@@PIPERdotEXE There's a reason why I have no interest in original DOS hardware. I did my time on it back in the day, cracking open the case and rearranging the entire IRQ/DMA map every time I got a new game or piece of technology. While I'll grant that there are fewer components to worry about for "just" a game computer (no need for a modem or a handheld scanner), I still refuse to go back to crawling under the desk on a regular basis. DOS Emulation FTW!
Write your production schedule separately from your release/promo schedule, and keep your products produced ahead of your videos so you have content complete for release. Get ahead of yourself with a vault of more content than you have release dates yet. Like how Prince had like a thousand unreleased songs. That took a lifetime, so you won't hit a 1000 soon, but you got a bright future in this video stuff, just gotta tighten up those behind the scenes skills. Finish the DOS console and release another video. You're doing a lot right, and you got a lot going for you, just keep learning.
I randomly found your channel and Videos thanks to youtube Recomendations. Excellent Production quality. Really enjoying the vids. Keep up the great work!
Huzzah! So the algorithm works? Thanks very much 😁
Just got this vid recommended, great channel!
Hey, thanks so much! Have a little look around, there's some videos that need some love!
Hey this was a good video, i'll be waiting for part 2
I think this a nice project and the journey you are on by learning new things is awesome. So thank you for sharing all your lessons with us.
just came to say thanks. Big fan of DOS gaming as I used DOS in my childhood.Thank you for your video! All this stuff is pretty cool! It made me wonder why there was no MS-DOS based consoles back in the day! That would be super cool!
Rather than the floppy disk smoke and mirrors setup, how about using a compact flash card as a 'cartridge' and have the system boot from it? They existed in the 90s so it isn't too much of a stretch. Could even make a hole in the top of the case and have it top loader style like the SNES / Megadrive!
@James Howard How about something like a miniature hard drive like what was used in the original ipod ? I'm sure that existed in the 90s although not popular I agree with the compact flash card idea that was used in late 90s MP3 players
@@cryptocsguy9282 yep was thinking the same or those compact flash HDD from China that where like 2.2gb
Good and bad ideas mainly down to cost for each cf card and if the bios can autodetect diff cards
The biggest issues I see with this setup is the lack of pci slots and non existing isa slots that really limit what you can add to the system especially in a dos gaming system also a floppy emu would be a good option for having multiple booting devices and cf harddrive adapter for internal storage they are similar enough to hdd interfaces of the Era ide and Pata and a keyboard emulation device for custom controllers.
wow, what an adventure! subscribed and waiting for part 2!
Awesome! Thank you!
algorithm showed me this. It's the greatest video for me that I could watch just on christmas. Thanks!
Well thankyou very much! I thought this video was a little trash, barely anything worked
@@PIPERdotEXE it's still part 1 tho, and it doesn't have to work. It has to be an interesting story :)
You've put so much effort into this, good job! :)
Aww, why thank you ☺️ it has been a challenge and it still didn't end positively, but I will return to it
Frustration is the most common thing in computer build projects before Pentium 2, and retrofit projects. You have to get used to the inevitable failure. I worked as a computer technician back in the day when this type of computer was common. It was hell, the internet was basic, there wasn't that facility that we have today in finding drivers, if you didn't have a cd with drivers, you were fucked. Lots of configuration with jumpers, components could burn just by touching your finger (the ESR protections were weaker) several times I burned the tops of my fingers touching VRM heatsinks when changing jumpers (it's excruciating pain), IRQ, bent ISA pins, dallas clock, cache chips, all this was a nightmare that most people nowadays have forgotten or even gone through. Today it is incredibly simple to assemble hardware, the pieces just fit in the right position, and there are protections that prevent them from being damaged if they fit wrong. The further into the past you go, the harder things get. Has anyone already reversed the P8 and P9 cables from the PSU to an AT? The whole thing explodes, burns out the motherboard, PSU and everything connected to them! Did you reverse the PSU AT switch wires? In addition to exploding, it catches fire, and you'll have your room in the dark.
By that I mean it was really hell, some youtubers want to make it look like it's something simple and nice (like ordering a waveblaster and soldering everything to it) but in reality it's all hell.
This type of project is not a hobby for those who want to relax on a weekend, it is something like "hardcore for Asians who like to be beaten with barbed whips".
Pretty good idea, will be interesting to see how close you get to feeling like a real console such as with the controls if you compare the same games such as mortal kombat.
The RAM module you bought is probably okay, you'll find it's actually incompatible with the board as it's single sided SD-RAM. Most boards of that era will only work with double sided SD-RAM. This is why the double sided 128MB module you installed originally works on that board. Single sided SD-RAM was made toward the end of that RAM type and requires board support to function. Even the i845 chipset P4 boards I have that use SD-RAM won't work with single sided modules.
For gamepad control, you might consider some one of the keyboard emulating ones like the Interact 3d Program Pad (easy to find on US eBay at least), or Act Labs 3D Powerramp Mite (harder to find, but can store button mappings that are selectable via a slider which could be handy). I used these a fair bit to get around the 4 button limitation of gameport pads, at least until USB gamepads finally took over.
I actually have a Rockfire Silver Shuttle that supposedly emulates a keyboard on PS/2, might have gotten it out, had I not run out of time on this, this could have been the alternative
I've had a project that went about as well as this one too. Its still parts sitting behind the island in my kitchen. I'll get back to it sooner or later, but yeah. Its just some tinkering. Don't push yourself too hard. I like the concept you're working with. I hope it pans in another part or two. Just subbed the channel, I enjoyed the video regardless.
Leaving in all the frustration is what makes this a good video at least for me.
I like to see all the trials of a project and the thought process for fixing any problems.
There's a lotta videos like "so I made a program myself and 3D printed this cool shit and everything just works after a few bumps in the road".
And while those are cool, it's still nice to see a video end with a very human moment of just having to step back and strategize.
PCBway sponsor so many videos it was almost a surprise to see someone actually use the service.
Hopefully you can get the board populated and working.
Ahhh yes, the joys of retro projects. They can put up a fight! After a bit more time you will manage to get there!
Ah, hello there :) Yes, they do, at this point we should expect to have a few bits die, I anticipate more before the project is done
Pin 1 is pin 1 is always the stripe. It has nothing to do with power. The SD adapter has correct pin1 marking.
44pin IDE is a shrunk 40-pin+power. Pins 1-40 are IDENTICAL to the big connector (as you should see on the adapter cable you unboxed..see how the molex connector is opposite to the stripe).
Pin 1 is NOT POWER. Pins 41-44 are.
Further confirmation: the missing pin is pin 20, but on the connector, on the side of the notch, you should see an arrow representing pin 1. The notch side has all the ODD pins, so empty pin is AWAY from the notch. You can check that with a newer IDE cable or motherboard that have the pin filled/missing with notch indication (i.e.: what you tried to do with 2.5" HDD...a 3.5" would show this).
The HDD theory did surprise me, but I guess the 2.5" HDD was intended for laptops, where you either put it in a fixed connector on the MB or you have a proprietary cable that will fit in a single position. So a notch is irrelevant.
Anyway, I never had "pin 1=stripe" rule break on me. The only pin 1 rule I found bad was on Serdashops WP32 McCake (2021 MT32 wavebalster card), where the square pin is in the opposite place, with no other markings. I think I got lucky because I used it first with their gameport-waveblaster adapter which went in a single way. Then I noticed the even rows (on adapter and sound cards) are VCC+GND which are easily noticed and confirmed the mistake.
a future famous channel in the making !
Haha, well thanks, don't know about that, but we can dream
Looking forward to part 2. Subscribed. Im doing something similar. Pos ( the till type 😊 ) its not much bigger than what you have. Has isa & pci. I’ve got the pico psu and most of the parts. Awe64 and voodoo banshee pci. Making a dos/win98 setup with either the amd k6/450 or down clock to 233 or even a p133. Its been on my todo for s VERY long time 😊
Ah the joys of old PC motherboards, jumpers, PATA/IDE drives and good old MS DOS configuration. I remember those days, but not especially fondly. 😁 My routine is: check you've got power first (you'd be surprised how many times I found someone forgot to plug it in!) then check the last device you added to the system. Then check all the cables, reseat the RAM, (one stick at a time, preferably a known working SIMM/DIMM), and try it in different sockets. Then look at the jumper settings and lastly the CPU. I would suggest having a keyboard attached when doing any power on testing, as those older BIOSs often required fettling to get hard drives up and running or disabling onboard graphics, setting IRQ's etc. And then you've got the joy of finding all the right drivers! Looking forward to part 2. 🙂
I love this idea! Last year bought a laptop as parts for next to nothing. The monitor was broken off, it lacked a hard-drive and RAM. So I took some RAM, installed them and I formatted a USB-stick to FreeDOS and then filled it up with games demos and/or sharewares. The concept was to create something that is 1. portable 2. completely legal. So now the laptop works as a console (or more like an arcade cabinet, since I had a cheap, simple DIY project out of a wardrobe with a CRT monitr installed in it), but I can take the USB drive and use it as a boot-disk on any PC as well. There is no sound compatibility, but hey, that's not necessarily a problem with office computers :D
Love a good TOP GEAR reference! Well done!
please finish this project. thanks!
Don't worry, I will!
I also had this idea a few months ago, I'm using a dell inspiron 7000 notebook as a base (ref. direct x box prototype), and a satellite receiver case, which is the face of the 90s.
Take a look: th-cam.com/video/T5FWDZ9dQt8/w-d-xo.html
A tip, there were floppy drives that had a sensor to detect if you inserted the disk, but you can manually create this sensor with a simple button and a rod, so that when you put the disk, the rod is pushed activating the button, you takes the wires from the button to the serial or parallel port, and creates a small qbasic application that checks "true or false" on those pins on that port. This will tell the system when the disk was inserted.
You can also create a frontend using colored ANSI characters, (I recommend NANSI.SYS) which allows you to change the date and time, and other things, just like the consoles of that era when they were turned on without a game inside.
Don't feel down. I've got a pile of Pentiums, P2s, and a P4 sitting in the corner of my spare bedroom waiting for my attention. 🙄
Dremel has an attachment called "speedclic". These cutting wheels stand a lot lot longer! And you don't have to fiddle with washers and a tiny screw. More like a real angle grinder in small size.
These sound waay more useful, I must have broken about 5 of these things....
They indeed are. Despite being proprietary dremel stuff, they are on another level, compared to the single screwed discs, which, in my opinion are just child toys.
Just discovered this channel your vids are great
Hey, thanks man :D sub for more, we will return to this project in the new year, hopefully all the issues can be worked out!
I already subscribed and liked
Awesome!
Make a dos menu with each game installed on the hard drive. Look it up and you will find instructions on how to do so.
Today I meet this channel and subscribed! Great!
Just one thing (as a feedback) maybe the music is a bit to loud, - 3dBs for the soundtrack will help hearing your voice 👍
i just remember something, there was no DOS consoles ever made, but there was one Windows 3.11 console with 286 inside - Memorex VIS MD2500, rare thing nowadays
Hmm, interesting, I also saw the FM Towns Marty, I'll look into this other thing
Seems like a good idea, but I do have a thought on how to improve it: go with a case with a 5 1/2" bay, get a bay adaptor for that will hold a 3.25" drive _and a card with PC Jr cartridge ports,_ and an ISA card to connect to that cartridge board.
Then you'll just need games! Which, admittedly, is probably the hard part.
the red wire - pin 1 is not power, it's the reset signal. the ide doesnot carry any power for the device so connecting it the wrong way will not burn anything.
Cool project! That board seems to have ESS Solo-1 based onboard audio which supposedly works well with DOS, so if you don't manage to source the sound chip that could be an alternative. (If this doesn't work, you might be able to salvage the CS4237B from some ISA sound card on eBay. There are also some PC104 to ISA adapter designs around the Internet).
For storage there's a DiskOnChip slot on the board - maybe that would work better? Those SD/CF to IDE adapters can have compatibility problems even with real PC motherboards, much less an SBC.
Also, you can look up what those POST codes on the board mean - saves a bit of troubleshooting. C6 is indeed a storage problem.
I wonder if there's a way to go without "smoke and mirrors" by hooking DOS file access routines to prompt for a floppy when the file the game needs is not on the current one (possibly with a RAM disk/temporary directory to store files from floppies already inserted). Maybe it could even be possible to make a fully diskless console?
I noticed that sound chip too (ESS Solo-1). If the right header can be found/made (I could only find a datasheet not a manual) then that thing should have good sound.
There is also a socket for a GPS module on that thing too!
Now I'm left high and dry.... waiting for the next part!
Don't worry, it's coming! Not sure precisely when, at least when I work out the issues
I feel the struggle... i’ve been working on some laptops (p133) and have had the same issues with cf and sd harddrive replacements. Try an ide hdd first... if that works.. look at raplacement options. For me a cf adaptor didn’t work but a delock 44pin ide to sd card adaptor did... the adaptors can be tested with an ide to usb adaptor on your modern mac or pc.
First try to get it working like you did... with bare minimum cpu, ram and video... then one by one keep adding stuff like hdd, fdd, sound and so on. But it’s a lovely project mate 👍
great video! can you tell me what music did you use around the second part of the video? thanks! :)
Could cheat a little less by using some nebulous rewritable media such as a zip drive or an early DVD RAM drive [I believe I have one circa 1998] and have a small boot drive that basically loads the drivers and starts the program on the disk using some common batch file in the root directory of the media.
FAT16 DVD RAM is limited to 2 GB due to the FAT16 format but that should be plenty of space for even a compilation of DOS games.
I have been intending to build a number of the sound cards you mentioned in this video as I have a fairly large supply of the main chip and probably have most of the components for at least building 5 of them but I have been sidelined by other projects.
Oh yeah, a Zip drive would've been a good solution back during this timeperiod!
Didn't want to use a Zip Drive. I can see why you suggest it, they're bigger, but there's a few issues.
1. The whole concept is that the floppy disks are equivalent to game cartridges
2. The Zip drive would never have been able to fit in that case
I understand the limitations of the storage media, I would only be able to use an 8GB card split into 4, but that's ok, SD cards are cheap, and likely I wouldn't fill even one up with all the DOS games I would have on it
You will see what I'm trying to do when I fully demo this thing when it's finished
I got enough bits for 4 but hit a snag when getting the chips
@@PIPERdotEXE yeah I don't think I know of any slimline zip drives.
It might be possible to get a slimline drive that can read dvdram discs with DOS drivers. The old DVD ram discs would have a little over 2gb so fat16 would limit it to that. It's also an odd format that cannot be read after I think windows 98se.
@@PIPERdotEXE Yeah, I suppose size would kill that idea. SD and CF cards existed in that era, but one big enough to handle the larger 1996 games would've been insanely expensive, but I'd lean towards that way myself building a system nowadays. I will note, I actually find Zip disks far more cartridge like than floppy discs, with their beveled sides and the pull tab part, on top of being on the chunkier side. On top of that, I had a fairly small harddrive in my PC in that era and actually ran some games off a parallel Zip drive, so there's a bit of nostalgia with thinking of that option.
Your vud couldnt be more timely, accidentally discovered my dad has in storage 2 old pc towers, i am talking the stuff of retro wet dreams haha s3 virge, 5-pin din slot for keyboard on the motherboard etc.
Thanks for the great vid
wasn't the s3 virge known as the 3d decelerator card?
I think it was haha
it was because it used OPENGL wrapper, it didnt have built in OpenGL support. It was Direct3d only card.
In Direct3d , it had decent fps for it's price and age. No CPU could count faster, than with Virge under Direct3D. Except, when it was outdated. Some Pentium III could be faster, but in that time, S3 Virge was renamed to S3 Trio3D. So, when we count it's era, 1996-1997, and early 1998, when it was usable, and used, even most powerful PC of that era (Pentium II 300 mhz) could not count faster in software mode, than Virge, and thus, Virge wasn't decelerator... PC was faster with it, as without it.
But who would buy Virge, when he could afford Pentium II 300. Most people with Virge, had usually socket 7 system. Pentium 90 - Pentium 233 MMX. And with that CPU, Virge was ALWAYS faster in 640x480x16 in Direct3d, than CPU alone.
Important on Virge was to disable some features, to make it faster, particulary Z-buffer. It didn't have good Z-buffer, and it had performance hit with it. Important was also to use EDO RAM with Virge, not SDRAM or SGRAM, and overclock it. Some Virge's were terrible underclocked (like to 45/45 mhz). You could usually get to 60/60 or even slightly over.
Virge had also big performance hit with bilinear filtering. Simply, wasn't too good with it. But CPU would be even slower, if it needed to count Bilinear filter. So, the trick was to turn it off... same as Mystique. You've got big performance boost , and could go for 640x480-16bit color mode.
Now try Virge DX in direct 3d, with EDO RAM, overclocked to 65/65, turned off Z-buffer and Bilinear Filter.
And you will see, HOW MUCH faster it is, than Pentium 233 MMX in 640x480, while looking the better (16 bit colors, vs 256 colors in software mode)
"spazzed out" that's worth a sub :)
Really excellent content. It was a fun project to watch! I hope you get it fully operational soon. Your editing was great, but I feel like the music was a little overpowering. Hope you don't mind my saying.
oh seeing Recoil on the first shots of you using W98 instantly hooked me up. I still remember the cheat code for it, hemmit and cavalry. Hey nice video, I just subbed! Btw, is one of the capacitors near the cpu buldged?
You should have used a ZIP drive.
No, I shouldn't
@@PIPERdotEXE Maybe not, but that would have made it more interesting as you should be able to fit bigger games on them, giving you an experience closer to what you were after. Very good video, at any rate. Cheers. :)
@@PIPERdotEXE You're a blast. 🙄
I'm interested in the concept. From the title I imagined a system where the cf card sat in a 3d printed shell and that's where the installed game sat. The autoexec would just attempt to load game.bat on d else echo something like "please insert cartridge". Since we're already getting pcbs fabricated might as well make a card edge connector for the cf card and the cf to ide adaptor.
You could use a zip 100 drive to store up to 100mb on the disk or even 250 with the zip250
See other comments as to why I won't be doing that
wow your so close to when you can get stuff to review keep up the good work man me im still really low on subs
there is supposedly a PCI sound card that has compatibility to SoundBlaster andhas a way of emulating interrupts behavior such that MS-DOS games will see it as a legit ISA-bus SoundBlaster card
the upshot is that it then becomes feasible to build a modern x86 PC that is able to run early 90s MS-DOS and DOS games in native instruction execution mode
would insanely fast given modern CPU clockspeeds
Well, it seems a lot of sound cards, including the Sound Blaster Live in the 98 Machine that I was using to test, does have limited Sound Blaster support, though it's not perfect, for example I couldn't get General MIDI on there for some reason
What did you select for master slave on the IDE? Or were you using a cable select ?
I had a similar issues with compatibility with 486 and Pentium boards.
The early to mid 90’s tech could be complex to get ram and drives compatible with chipsets on the motherboard.
Wow a Pentium without a ZIF socket. That just blew my mind.
Yeah, I was surprised too, getting heatsinks seems to be a challenge
Looking forward to part 2
Awesome 👍
Watching this kinda makes me want to do a smol ITX build of some sort.
Also what music is playing around 17:04?
Do it! And make a video :)
As for the music, it's "Pirate TV" by Rasure, from Epidemic Sound
@@PIPERdotEXE Not sure when or if I'll do it, too much stuffs and too little money.
Also thanks.
🎄Best. Christmas. Sweater. Ever.👏
Hey, you love that you should see my Captain Picard one! lol
@@PIPERdotEXE 😂 Next year I'm gonna have to step my game up lol
Well, be prepared, you'll be up against a Windows/MS-DOS sweater :P
Very nice man, I ran apon your channel today. Good video but the music in the back round. Can you or anyone else tell me where I can get it from? Thanks
If you use ls120s you could have an OS Game and save data on a single diskette or Zip disks. Or some other removable storage
LS120? Well you've certainly upped the exotic storage stakes....
I have an LS120 drive. You can actually get slimline IDE drives and there is an adapter you can order from a guy on vogons to get an adapter to IDE. This would make your games actually store the games content on the disks and allow save data and everything A 20MB Clik drive would also be a great solution! (Being that the are available fairly cheaply and having a nice pcmcia card for polished
Using LS120 you also keep the backwords compatibility with 3.5 inch floppy drives! And with the way things boot. You could insert and boot from a ls120 and have a full DOS environment. Meaning you can actually treat them like cartridges and stick them in basically any comparable computer and boot rom them!
@@PIPERdotEXE or if you want to go slightly less exotic and cheaper. You could use ZIP disks. Those are available cheaply and even the zip 100 will store basically any DOS game.
I wonder if you could get full game loading off a zip disk.
Others have suggested this, but no. No zip disks. One of the specifics of this project is that it uses floppies. This idea will be discarded later for full hard disk loading
waiting for part 2
Awesome, will try and get it out in the new year, not sure when, but it will only be after I have solved all the issues
pc jr was a decent console with that mcga
I used to have bootable floppy's with games on it.
Only very small games will fit on that setup though.
It should work in theory for CD's although a cd can only be written to once so no saving.
Maybe a DVD-RAM would do the trick for DOS.
or a zip disk drive with 250mb in it
He's just using the floppy to contain a batch file to start the game, the game which is on the hard drive
@@SimonQuigley I guess it if it aint broke dont fix it.
@@mOddEdLiKeHeLL Was thinking this aswell, would have chosen that over harddrive and floppy
@@ZakHooiTM I seen they have a 750mb zip drive too.
British LGR!
Haha... British LGR my arse, but thanks lol
What music is playing around 14:22?
Grooves Happen, by Rasure available on Epidemic Sound
Thank You
A couple of suggestions, don't know if you addressed them already or not, but worth mentioning.
Make sure your hard disk jumper is set to master or cable select (since you are using a single connector ide cable, yes this does matter.)
Try going into the BIOS before plugging in the IDE driver/adapter and checking the HD params to see if it set to auto or manual cylinders, heads, etc. This board has some weird quirk regarding HD compatibility regarding Hard disks. Then plug in the drive again.
Try disconnecting the floppy cable/drive and then having the IDE disk only connected to rule out that the floppy is interfering. The floppy drive cable you used, may not be the correct type. There needs to be a crossover of the pins in the middle of the cable, if you don't it can cause all kinds of weird issues in booting (again your cable has a single connector on it, see if you can find a dual connector type with the cross-over) make sure it is pin one (red on both sides). If you have it incorrect the floppy won't do anything at all, or the activity light will stay consistent red.
the other thing I can thing of is IRQ conflict. That board has a ton of embedded IO on it, and it is possible the graphics card is sharing an IRQ with something else (preventing it from booting. If you can get into the BIOS without anything connected except the graphics.
The EDO ram may actually still work, but that board may not be fully compatible.
Wait... You're not LGR?
Sadly not haha
yeah, the lack of mention of wood grain rather gave it away
Wow, twice the subs I saw when I’ve been here last time.
where did you get that motherboard i can't find one.
They were on eBay, not sure if there's any left
Part 2?
Hey, yeah part 2 is coming, just need to get some sound cards built, that's mostly what's holding it back
@@PIPERdotEXE ok 👌 no problem. I hope you get what you need.
It's a really good project.
I don't know if anyone has asked this and if so whether or not you answered, but do you know what the name of that case is? If so, would you please tell me? Thanks!
Well, I didn't remember, but I went back to my emails and this is an ITX case by Morex, it had a number of 3677, maybe model number
@@PIPERdotEXE Thanks for replying!
aahh that motherboard gets a tick down for using a forsaken dallas battery clock those a ticking time bomb
I replaced mine, thought about a coin cell retrofit, but I wonder if this board is even worth it
@@PIPERdotEXE yeah. After seeing the issues you had :/. That setup seams fragile to the slightest change
Seems to be, the seller mentioned flaky power sockets, and I did notice that the caps near the CPU are a tiny bit "bulgy", they will need to be replaced at some point, they could be affecting power delivery
Honestly, I'm relieved when I see those on older boards. They're pretty much always dead, but at least they can hold their liquor. I bought a tube of sockets, and have a batch of home-made PCBs with SMD clock ICs and CR2032 holders on top, that drop right into the socket, and it's job done for another 10-25 years.
Beats scraping rotted copper off a motherboard... :-)
Uh... put an SD card in your IDE to SD Card thingy... that might solve the issue.
Also, start looking for a Voodoo; take into account it needs a display cable between Voodoo and the 2D card; S3 "does 3D", yeah, but only a few games made for it; the truly greats you want to use the GPU for from 1996; Quake / Tomb Raider, don't work with it.
It was tried with and without, you would also see at least some indication of hardware there, also this would not cause the non-POST issues I was having
Would have been cool if it used a ZIP drive. In that case the whole game would fit on a disk. But yeah zip drives where in the windows era
I don't want to use a zip drive. In this project the floppy disks are merely triggers for the games that are stored on an SD card, much bigger even than a zip disk
The best solution is actively supporting a flashfloppy emulator. This means that it can AND WILL support using games from floppy, but also allows you to have multiple disks on a single usb stick. (indeed, since most floppy controllers will allow two drives, you can actually simultaneously support a real floppy AND a drive emulator.
3:46 Quake isn't actually all THAT big. the id1 folder is actually only about 50mb. A lot of floppies to be sure, though.
What might actually work would be support for a CD-ROM/DVD ROM drive for bigger games. Indeed circa 96, many games still used the disk as copy protection and would support being played almost entirely from CD-ROM via a minimal install with only a token amount of save data winding up on the hard drive.
I feel you have missed the point of what this build was.... If I was just building any old DOS PC, I would be using a floppy emulator of some sort, I wouldn't be bothering with a real floppy drive (they suck). I only wanted one real floppy drive, as this is a fictional product from the early to mid 90s, as if there had been a console like computer that ran DOS and the games were on floppy.
My reference to Quake, is pretty much what you mentioned, it's a lot of floppies, so you couldn't put the game on one, but you can put it on an HDD or SD card. There's a lot of artistic license in this project
There is going to be support for a parallel port CD-ROM drive, all this will be in the later parts. Hope this all helps
@@PIPERdotEXE We're all kind of struggling with what the the appropriate balance of vintage hardware in these builds is, to be honest.
Yeah, I mean with all the best will in the world, I can't fully target 1994, the CPU is about there, but the board is from 1996 I believe, with a BIOS from 1999, and the graphics card, is from 1995. Maybe the GUI shell I have planned for it which is from 1991 will balance things out lol
Tandy mvs bro. Only gamestere81 has one.
The S3 Virge is a really good video card, but the 3D acceleration is pretty useless. My experience back in the day is that the Pentium Pro could render Tomb Raider faster and cleaner than S3 Virge 3D acceleration. 3DFX is fairly late stage gaming anyway, so 2D should cover all the _cool_ games. 😉
The joystick emulator looks like an IRQ conflict. Likely the serial port you're using for the mouse is on the same IRQ as the joystick and you're just not aware. You will need to ensure that you set a good dead zone as the old pots on those drift a LOT, which is a huge problem if you're thunking to keyboard inputs.
I'm surprised you used a non-boot disk for game launching. Back in my DOS days, first thing I did when I got a new game was to create a boot disk. That's because the mishmash of EMS/XMS, CD ROM drivers, mouse drivers, sound card drivers, and other hardware meant that nearly every game had to be tweaked to make the right amount low memory available along with the right amount of extended memory with the right drivers. Pretty easy to add the launcher script to the autoexec.bat of your boot disk after configuring the config.sys. Makes the disk more useful than a launch script too.
Someone else mentioned a ZIP disk. That's actually a pretty good idea for a "console" like experience. Only problem is that you can't boot off it, but it's better than using the B: drive like you're currently doing. You could even detect and autorun file on the zip disk and boot normally if there's nothing in the drive.
Overall, very neat project. I hope it works out well!c
i remember how much of a pain in the ass it was to get ultima 7 and 7 part 2 running without a boot disk back in the day, i could do it in my sleep now but back then dealing with the memory managers was so much of a pain in the ass that i always just used a boot disk then ran it off my primary drive.
oh, and luckily these days with dos box all you have to do is type "xms off" and poof, ultima 7 and serpent isle run fine
@@kght222 Oh heck yeah. I mentioned in a comment below that there's no way I'm going back to period hardware. I'm perfectly happy with emulation, thank you very much.
The clincher for me is the fact that there's no such thing as "period correct hardware". Back in the day you had what you had. If you had a 486 in 1990, you were almost certainly running everything too fast. If you had a 486 in 1996, you were almost certainly running everything too slow. I remember Carmen Sandiego running faster on a CGA PCjr than a much prettier EGA XT.
Those experiences are all interesting memories, but they're a consequence of the landscape of computers. Not the way the games were "intended" to be played. (Hell, there probably wasn't a precise "intended" with many of them.) Today I can cycle up and down as needed to find the experience I want, and I'm happy with that. I've got too many other hardware projects to dick around with old PC hardware.
@@thewiirocks To be fair, most early 90s or even late 80s games aren't directly CPU sensitive, you're more likely to encounter physics bugs or sound issues than outright speedup, which can often be alleviated by disabling cache. Ultima 7/UW and XCOM are some big exceptions, both of which happen to be a pretty good fit for a 486DX33. Admittedly the opposite is more true, even Doom doesn't run all that great on a typical 486. If you did want to go hardware, you'd probably want a different PC for late DOS / early Windows, a P2 or even P3 could do.
I'm not saying that it's easier or even better than emulation, but I do think you can get quite "period correct" results either way.
@@ozzyp97 Have to disagree with you, I’m afraid. In my experience it’s not just Ultima. Most Origin titles are CPU sensitive, with the Wing Commander series immediately popping to mind as an example. The original Wing Commander was so bad that there simply isn’t a “correct speed” to run it at. I played it on a 486 DX2/50, but that’s a very different experience to everyone who played it on a 386.
Games of the time didn’t use the RTC for timing. If for no other reason that the use of high resolution clocks (i.e. millisecond or better) weren’t very common yet. Instead, many games attempted to use VSync for time control, using extra frame time for double buffering to smooth out spikes in frame rendering time. This approach makes many games of the time somewhat well-behaved, but it doesn’t mean they weren’t affected by CPU performance.
DOOM for example, has a fairly famous story of how everyone in the ID office was running postage stamp sized viewports to try and keep up with the one guy who had gotten himself a 486. Despite DOOM being VSynced, the player with the higher frame rate had a massive advantage over everyone else.
It was only well into the Pentium era that we started seeing games that would hit the 60FPS limit, leading to consistent experiences. And that was short lived as game designers pushed the hardware. This made the game speeds inconsistent again and by the late 90s games started employing game state update cycles independent of frame rate. This more effectively solved the problem and is a technique still in use today.
Source: I lived through this period and was even responsible for a popular video game timing library known as GAGETimer.
You went the hard way, just use old correct pc cards from 1995/2000, I coud assemble a whole ms-dos console and make it running in less than 20 mintues all together... then running quake/doom/etc....
I did, and good for you. I had specific intents in mind, it should have gone easier, but it didn't
YOU SHOULD REALLY CHECK OUT EXODOS !!!
What I will say sounds heretical even for my own tastes. Although I have collected tons of retro hardware to make DOS PC projects, including some top notch hardware of that era that I purchased for dirt cheap prices the recent years, I ended up realizing that emulation is the way to go for all sorts of old hardware. Yes, I know, it is not original and we all like original, however the overhead of building an original system of the era with original old components could prove a nightmare given the condition of the capacitors and the incompatibility between old devices. Terms like "conflicting IRQs", "incompatibilities", "not enough high memory", "memmaker", "EMS", "XMS", "UMB" , "mouse driver", "inverted ribbon cable", "config.sys", "autoexec.bat" and all those things of the past are both things I totally love and totally hate at the same time. I truly admire the scope of this project and I do stand with you but if I would attempt to do something similar I would either use emulation within a more modern system or I would use a full size retro PC case. ITX wasn't a thing in those days and if ITX is somewhat niche market today, imagine what it was then... S3 Virge and S3 Virge DX did not have any sort of 3D acceleration. The only one that did was S3 Virge GX that was still shamefully slow. What S3 Virge had was great compatibility with DOS titles and it stands as reference point for modern DOS emulators. The most compatible soundcards for old dos games were Sound Blaster Pro 2 and Sound Blaster 16 that have been emulated almost perfectly with time. I subscribed only to see how this project goes. It really feels like something I would try! Good luck with it! I am looking forward to part 2!
Oh sure, normally I would be doing just that, I try and get the most I can out of my one main PC, I run DOSbox, and have a number of other tricks including source-ports, patches, wrappers etc. This is nothing but a headache, usually the hardware I deal in is late 90s to mid to late 2000s, and this avoids a lot of these problems, but on this project I decided to get a little fancy. I realise ITX wasn't, but there's not much outside of 3D printing, that would give me a "console-y" looking box. This S3 card does appear to have it, but it's weak, I've come to realise that there's precious few DOS games that do have 3D, and the ones that do, probably use Voodoo.
Thanks, part 2 will be along when I can get it done, hopefully you will stick around for more than just this in time
@@PIPERdotEXE I will for sure stick around for that. It brings a smile to my face when I find such endeavours. My first PC was a 486 100MHz, 8MB RAM SVGA, SB Pro 2. After that I got my hands on thousands of systems. I even worked for years in a repair shop as a technician. I just love old PCs but I love more the new ones. I like what Phil says his page (Phil's Computer Lab), to quote "I was always into computers, old, new, real and emulated". I love channels like yours. Good luck mate. I will stick around.
Great to hear :)
It can be headache, but there's also something very satisfying about the way things work in DOS. You plug in an ISA card, manually allocate some resources and tell your software where to find it. For the few things that need drivers, you run them by hand or write a line in autoexec to do it for you with whatever settings you like.
You need to know what you're doing, but equally nothing really goes on without you knowing. It's a much more direct relationship with your PC down to the hardware level.
@@ozzyp97 That's why while I hate all those things of the past, I also totally love them. It was, as you pointed out, a much more direct relationship with your system. When things were working fine, it was something to be celebrated and it was consistent. One does not visit those things older than what they first encountered when it comes to technology.
sd ram with a p5 133? 🤔
Indeed
FM Towns Marty says hello
I saw that just recently, but while it contains a 386SX, it does not run DOS, and while I would love to try getting DOS onto that, that graphics chip is likely going to be an issue. Good mention though
FM Towns Marty does run MS DOS but it also runs something called Towns OS on top of it which has some APIs specifically designed for handling graphics ,sound and interrupt requests for accessing the mouse and gamepad and has some sort of custom Fujitsu graphics hardware
Well, I just checked this out more closely.... Damn, it's basically the DOS console I've been looking for, would love to get one, but by the sounds of things, I'd be spending a lot
@@PIPERdotEXE Yeah they aren't cheap by any stretch, but they were very cool. And they included some licensing deal with Pharlap 386 making the dos extender ubiquitous on the platform. So you have that console experience of common hardware, 32bit flat mode programming, MS-DOS API's and better than VGA graphics. Galaxy Force II on the Marty was pretty impressive (when it was new!).
pc-engine?
Awwww, poor putty you... I bought my NES to me as an birthday present.
We had "Pararell Memory cards!" May the devil take you soull (bashing my hands against the soil".
Pentium DID have 2-3 pci slots, but plese go on
This is super inspiring, I love it. But please avoid using the word "spaz", it's an ableist slur 🙏
Context is everything. These days it seems whatever words people use to describe something, someone, somewhere finds it objectionable. Granted, sometimes it's warranted, but often things are taken out of context. But some people just like to take offence no matter what, what's worse is that sometimes it's actually done vicariously. I might add that labelling people as "Abelist" is morally no better.
Uh, no?
Yeah, as I start getting more subscribers/views this was always going to happen, thanks for your context on the matter