Hi! > It`s a P3 motherboard. My system is not the most hottest (4 GHZ, quad > core, 64 bit...) but still relatively new and incompatible.
Quad core is pretty new I would say. > This Fortemedia FM801 chipset is only good if > BIOS offers sb16 emulation? No. It has hardware SB16 emulation and several ways to do the DMA for that (it comes with a DOS driver to configure them) but new mainboards are "so ISA free" that none of the SB16 ISA DMA simulations work any more. For example it worked on my K6-2 (socket 7, ISA, PCI and AGP) when plugged into PCI, but no longer works on AMD Athlon64 nForce for me... > > So a SB16 simulating card such as > > the SBLive or SBPCI is the next choice. The hardware is actually AC97ish, so the SB16 driver for SBLive is exactly what we are looking for now, only that the SBLive driver is "locked" to work only with SBLive brand AC97 cards. New operating systems just use the real hardware which is AC97. Problem with SBLive is that ancient games which need the full protected mode for themselves cannot work with the driver, only EMM386 compatible games work. The driver co-exists with EMM386 in memory and traps all attempts to access the SB16 card. This allows it to simulate the card. VSB works very similar but it only works with either QEMM (afair) or with no-EMM386. In the second case, VSB is a protected mode host itself. There is a limited "trap hardware access" interface in MS EMM386 and yet another interface might exist in JEMM386... > solution could work until I get my next motherboard - with pci > express only? That`s what I did mean with in the long run. That is possible, but at least here in Europe PCIe is only popular for really fast and modern cards. People know that PCI works as well as PCIe for low bandwidth cards such as soundcards. However, PCIe costs less to build, fewer pins, so mainboards typically have more PCIe slots and fewer PCI slots than I would like today. And more types of card are becoming available in PCIe versions today. > > virtual PC just for the sake of virtual SB16 usually is a > > waste of CPU speed / CPU time, but DOSEMU is just right. > > Sounds interesting. Note that DOSEMU is only fast if you have a 32bit Linux, and that there is no DOSEMU for Windows at all. On 64bit Linux, DOSEMU might become faster again when it can use new virtualization interfaces, but in the meantime, it has to do full CPU emulation on 64bit afair because you cannot easily have 64bit kernel and vm86() in parallel. Running a 32bit kernel on 64bit hardware only has little performance impact in my experience as long as at most 4 GB RAM are used :-). > > But you are right - if your hardware has > > PS/2 sockets, better connect keyboard/mouse there in the > > first place... Almost all modern keyboard/mouse models > > still seem to support those USB PS/2 adapter plugs. > Hopefully. The manufactors doesn`t seam to care a lot about dos. True, but most mainboards do have CMOS configuration tools which need no help from the OS, so if those want to be able to use your keyboard then the BIOS has to support USB PS/2 emulation anyway ;-). Plus OS installers and boot menus do not typically support USB themselves, so they do need BIOS help as well - including OS installers and boot menus for OS for which BIOS makers do care? ;-). > test fails with an error message and then only cold start works. Which error message? > Seems nvida`s vga/vesa support is only to install the OS Partially true - textmode hardware can be slower in new cards than in old PCI VGA today, I believe to have heard... But it still does work, at least. Windows needs it for bluescreens ;-). Seems in your case even the framebuffer is slow, sounds bad. > http://img362.imageshack.us/img362/5659/20080517133621tq0.jpg > http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/170/20080517133646cl3.jpg Looks like a weird text mode while it probably should be graphics? Which graphics mode is it supposed to be? > >> But if I look on google I find that most people recommend > >> dosbox or dosemu for legacy applications. Very much don't > > Who are "most people"? > Well, just when I search on google that`s what I find. Still I would like to know who you find and with what search terms. As said, Dosbox is very popular for old games on too fast PC w/o SB16. > VMware is bad choice for classic dos games, it`s and virtualizer, not > an emulator. Rarely any games work inside... I think VMware does emulate lots of hardware. Yes, newer versions let you share the CPU between host and virtual computer, but I do not think that VMware would let you share typical "game use" things with the host. So I would assume that VMware for example has some emulated network, graphics, keyboard, mouse and (non-DOS) sound hardware instead of letting you share your real hardware for those. > On my comp I also don`t feel that games in dosbox run to fast/slow. > You can adjust this with settings. The unrealistic part is to find > out what setting to set. What I mean is that it takes more CPU time than you would think and that simulations are typically limited to what you need to run games... > > the other hand, ancient games sometimes crash on new hardware > > just because it is too fast! > > Normaly only because of to fast and slowdown is fine enough? Well plus you have the well known problem of having no sound :-p. For slowdown, you can use the www.oldskool.org/pc/throttle/ tool, fdapm, tools which disable cache or singlestep everything, etc. Could you contact the MPXPLAY author and ask for comments about why your AC97 does not work there and whether you can help by running test tools on your PC? Most AC97 are pretty similar to each other so maybe he already has yours on some wishlist... > > I think some nVidia boards had a tiny Linux in the BIOS for that. > What do you mean? Linux on graphic card? No, nVidia also produces nForce mainboard chipsets ;-). > This virtual soundblaster brings for me in VMware and on bare metal > "incompatible memory manager - QEMM 7.0+ req". No matter if himem + > emm386 or jemmex. Yes - VSB either needs QEMM or no EMM386 at all at the moment. > without emm386 I guess I couldn`t even play duke. I doubt that... Most of my old games work without EMM386... 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