Recent content by Gustavo

If you like soldering, take a look at this simple circuit I've made to connect a CGA card to a VGA monitor. It's very simple, but you'll need a 15kHz capable monitor or TV. It changes the CGA palette to something I find more pleasing. https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=98454&p=1228519

Hi Boggit, Just go for a VGA card. Most ISA Trident cards work fine on an XT. The have jumpers to force 8 bit mode; or autodetect mode. Many games do run 'faster' in VGA mode than CGA mode. Incredible, but it is true. Probably because EGA/VGA mode doesn't need any graphic conversion to be...

Have you tried the UNIVBE driver/utility for DOS?

Old games like this are called abandonware.

Maybe this utility will help you. It´s designed for composite output, but I think that part of it will also work on RGB monitors. https://int10h.org/blog/2018/08/tvcgafix-utilities-adjust-cga-output-for-tv/

Didn´t know that. Very interesting!

That might be just as fast as RAM for an original XT!

I had an ST-238R 5 1/4" RLL Seagate hard drive. It served me well up to the 386/486 era. I remember it always being noisy, even when new. But it was a pleasant, even amusing, sound. As for the sounds that it made, well, it hard to describe: something like [power on] uuoooooOOOOOOOOHHHHH cling...

please, share the results with us

With the GOTEK drive emulator the LCD displays the current track the drive is reading. With a low BUFFERS value, the head seeks back and forth, maybe reading the FAT or the directory, then the file contents.

Now, a small trial with STUNTS. I´ve got different results. I think Timo was correct. BUFFERS=99,8 51 seconds BUFFERS=40,8 50 seconds BUFFERS=32,8 50 seconds BUFFERS=30,8 76 seconds BUFFERS=20,8 118 seconds BUFFERS=10,8 135 seconds The golden number was 32, this time, maybe because...

Will check other situations. Stunts is particularly slow to load on an XT machine. Smartdrv is great, but breaks some software. Would you test smartdrv with BUFFERS=10,8 againt smartdrv without BUFFERS line?

I´ve been benchmarking various values for BUFFERS=x,y in CONFIG.SYS, and found very surprising results. The test consists of starting Indiana Jones 3, the adventure game, from floppy (GOTEK emulator) until the title music plays. Using DOS 6.22 with 10 MHZ NEC V20. Check out the times...

Great news! The V20 CPU has arrived and is working perfectly. So far it has been a HUGE improvement. The tests so far: - Pinball Fantasies runs great, very fluid (without sound). It hangs, as expected, with PC speaker MOD music; - Flashback runs great with PC speaker digital audio effects; -...

Games that I´ll try to run: - Pinball Fantasies - MS Flight Simulator 4 in 286 mode - Magicland Dizzy (won´t detect VGA with any 8088 XT) - Charlie the Duck - Alone in the Dark (very slowly) - Tubular World (don´t know if it requires 286 or 386) - Alpha Waves (won´t run in my XT clone) - Flashback