Hi!
>> I´ve seen video and I did play a fair number of DOS compatible >> games in my earlier years especially on Windows 95 and 98. I´m >> casually looking for an old 486 to tinker with too... ... > The Vortex86DX hardware natively still has IDE, not SATA. Actually you can even find relatively modern quad core computers with IDE :-) The problem is that when you want DOS compatible sound hardware, you want something with ISA slots and those went out of fashion 20 years ago. Also, while it is easy to use DOS on computers with SATA (the BIOS will take care of disk I/O and there are drivers for high-speed SATA I/O for DOS as well) it is very hard to get non-ISA sound with games on DOS, unless PC Speaker sound is okay for you and available on your hardware. There are a few PCI soundcards with limited DOS support: Some come with drivers which simulate a SoundBlaster, but those do not work with protected mode games, while others use hardware tricks which only work on mainboard chipsets which still have a bit of ISA style even while the boards have no have actual ISA slots. I expect you to be not interested in solutions where all sound hardware is virtual (dosemu2, dosbox, DOS friendly virtual PC variants with ISA soundblaster simulations). Regarding graphics, you can expect decent VGA compatibility and even nice VESA BIOS until not so many years ago, but there will often be mostly 4:3 resolutions, not 16:9 ones. But at least no worries about PCIe, AGP or PCI etc. bus :-) I think RayeR put some tools online to speed up graphics RAM access settings on PCI and PCIe in DOS. Try to avoid ISA VGA cards, those are just too slow even for DOS gaming. Cheers, Eric PS: Since I no longer use a mainboard which remembers ISA, maybe *somebody else* would like to play with my collection of special PCI soundcards which claim to support DOS games? _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
