VOGONS


First post, by daniil1909

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i have am386 dx 40 with 2mb of ram and vga rtg3105. Wolfenstein is playable, but a bit laggy (cpu is warn not hot about 40 degrees). What should i upgrade?

Reply 1 of 19, by daniil1909

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daniil1909 wrote on 2024-09-21, 01:17:

i have am386 dx 40 with 2mb of ram and vga rtg3105. Wolfenstein is playable, but a bit laggy (cpu is warn not hot about 40 degrees). What should i upgrade?

P.S. Fps is about 20-30

Reply 2 of 19, by Anonymous Coward

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Do you have another vga card to try? I seem to recall Realtek vga not supporting 16 bit operation.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 3 of 19, by daniil1909

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Anonymous Coward wrote on 2024-09-21, 01:30:

Do you have another vga card to try? I seem to recall Realtek vga not supporting 16 bit operation.

Nope. I have only this vga isa card. Planning to buy an trident tvga

Reply 4 of 19, by Grzyb

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First, make sure the CPU/board is properly configured - run benchmarks, and compare the results:
AMD 386DX-40 with Cyrix Fasmath 83D87-40-GP Benchmarks

Next, try some other graphics - Realtek is one of the slowest.
You can find which chips hit the ISA speed limit here - http://vgamuseum.info/images/vlask/bench/quake320.png

Zaglądali do kufrów, zaglądali do waliz, nie zajrzeli do dupy - tam miałem klimatyzm.

Reply 5 of 19, by daniil1909

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Grzyb wrote on 2024-09-21, 01:36:
First, make sure the CPU/board is properly configured - run benchmarks, and compare the results: AMD 386DX-40 with Cyrix Fasmath […]
Show full quote

First, make sure the CPU/board is properly configured - run benchmarks, and compare the results:
AMD 386DX-40 with Cyrix Fasmath 83D87-40-GP Benchmarks

Next, try some other graphics - Realtek is one of the slowest.
You can find which chips hit the ISA speed limit here - http://vgamuseum.info/images/vlask/bench/quake320.png

About cpu, everything configured and speed is fine in tests, everything goes well. If i use graphics (wolf3d and etc) its lagging.

Reply 6 of 19, by Anonymous Coward

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daniil1909 wrote on 2024-09-21, 01:32:
Anonymous Coward wrote on 2024-09-21, 01:30:

Do you have another vga card to try? I seem to recall Realtek vga not supporting 16 bit operation.

Nope. I have only this vga isa card. Planning to buy an trident tvga

Maybe planning to buy cirrus logic is a better idea. It seems some tridents are much better than others and some come poorly configured.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium

Reply 7 of 19, by daniil1909

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Anonymous Coward wrote on 2024-09-21, 01:42:
daniil1909 wrote on 2024-09-21, 01:32:
Anonymous Coward wrote on 2024-09-21, 01:30:

Do you have another vga card to try? I seem to recall Realtek vga not supporting 16 bit operation.

Nope. I have only this vga isa card. Planning to buy an trident tvga

Maybe planning to buy cirrus logic is a better idea. It seems some tridents are much better than others and some come poorly configured.

What about ram? Should i buy 4mb instead of 2mb?

Reply 8 of 19, by leileilol

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daniil1909 wrote on 2024-09-21, 01:17:

vga rtg3105

This is definitely sticking out to me. This particular card is among the slowest of the 1994 SVGA ones. Any Tseng ET3000/4000 card would be better than this

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 10 of 19, by keenmaster486

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Certain WD VGA cards saturate the ISA bus and are very compatible.

Others are the slowest of them all though so watch out, look for benchmarks

World's foremost 486 enjoyer.

Reply 11 of 19, by Grzyb

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daniil1909 wrote on 2024-09-21, 01:47:

What about ram? Should i buy 4mb instead of 2mb?

Well, 2 MB is very poor for a 386DX.
If you have 8 sockets for 30-pin SIMMs, you can easily have 8 MB, as 1 MB modules are very common and cost pennies.
Windows would definitely work much better.

But no difference for Wolfenstein - 1 MB is totally enough here.

Zaglądali do kufrów, zaglądali do waliz, nie zajrzeli do dupy - tam miałem klimatyzm.

Reply 12 of 19, by Grzyb

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leileilol wrote on 2024-09-21, 02:15:

Any Tseng ET3000/4000 card would be better than this

ET4000 - yes.
But not ET3000 - it's a very early SVGA, may be even slower than RTG3105.

Zaglądali do kufrów, zaglądali do waliz, nie zajrzeli do dupy - tam miałem klimatyzm.

Reply 13 of 19, by PD2JK

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Can your mainboard take cache memory? That would increase performance quite a bit.

Last edited by PD2JK on 2024-09-21, 07:59. Edited 1 time in total.

i386 16 ⇒ i486 DX4 100 ⇒ Pentium MMX 200 ⇒ Athlon Orion 700 | TB 1000 ⇒ AthlonXP 1700+ ⇒ Opteron 165 ⇒ Dual Opteron 856

Reply 14 of 19, by BinaryDemon

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Do you have any options to increase your isa bus speed in the bios? Might help.

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!

Reply 15 of 19, by Babasha

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daniil1909 wrote on 2024-09-21, 01:27:
daniil1909 wrote on 2024-09-21, 01:17:

i have am386 dx 40 with 2mb of ram and vga rtg3105. Wolfenstein is playable, but a bit laggy (cpu is warn not hot about 40 degrees). What should i upgrade?

P.S. Fps is about 20-30

320х200=64 kb per frame
64 x 25 = 1,6 mb for 25 fps
Not so bad value for one of the simpliest vga card.

Need help? Begin with photo and model of your hardware 😉

Reply 16 of 19, by MikeSG

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Trident 8900D's are as fast as 1995+ ISA cards in DOS but visual quality is bad on LCDs.

Replacing caps improves it by 50%.
Soldering a wire over the two green coils (shorting the connection) improves brightness and quality by another 50%.

Reply 17 of 19, by daniil1909

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PD2JK wrote on 2024-09-21, 05:42:

Can your mainboard take cache memory? That would increase performance quite a bit.

Yes, it have 128kb of cache installed with 15 ns latency

Reply 19 of 19, by daniil1909

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MikeSG wrote on 2024-09-21, 08:38:

Trident 8900D's are as fast as 1995+ ISA cards in DOS but visual quality is bad on LCDs.

Replacing caps improves it by 50%.
Soldering a wire over the two green coils (shorting the connection) improves brightness and quality by another 50%.

I have an crt monitor, so i dont think i would care about quality of pixels.