On Tue, Sep 15, 2020 at 12:45:46PM +0200, Eric Auer wrote: > 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.
I tested during last few days a few motherboards I had access to - and there's another possible issue: - the newer the mobo, the more likely it can use some part of "conventional memory" (first 640 KB) for its own purposes, like my ASRock mentioned in that other thread - the newer the motherboard, the more likely it'll offer less and less UMB, and I mean _really less_; my old VLB Soyo (SiS) mobo reports over 138 KB of UMB, while motherboard featuring Athlon64 offers only about 30 KB UMB So the best choice is old motherboard that still has at least one ISA slot present. > [..] > 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. If one uses 16-bit accelerated ISA cards (like TSENG ET4000) it doesn't have to be that bad. But they are difficult to find nowadays. > [..] > 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? Have a look at the thread "Using Yamaha the YMF744 under DOS without legacy/ISA addressing": https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=61256 The thing looks cumbersome and somewhat complicated, but still (in many cases, even if not always) feasible -- regards, Zbigniew _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
