Glorious Hacks of Yesteryear

re: Glorious Hacks of Yesteryear

Xepol — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 06:07:39 GMT

If you think about this sort of thing in the future, consider instead making it a selectable option that defaults to the best choice by default.

Then we can pick for ourselves.

re: Glorious Hacks of Yesteryear

Norman Diamond — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 04:07:11 GMT

Monday, December 11, 2006 6:41 PM by sj

> Norman, the first version of VPC for Windows

> (4.0 from Connectix) had a maximum RAM limit

> of 512MB.

Then it didn't entirely emulate the TX chipset, as far as I can tell ^_^

> VPC 5.0 upped the limit to 1GB

Hmm. The largest I've seen physically on a BX chipset is 3 x 256MB, but if 4 x 256MB was possible then that could explain it.

re: Glorious Hacks of Yesteryear

sj — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 02:41:41 GMT

Norman, the first version of VPC for Windows (4.0 from Connectix) had a maximum RAM limit of 512MB.

VPC 5.0 upped the limit to 1GB, and replaced the MR BIOS with AMI, as well as the BX chipset (allowing ACPI), and replaced the DEC 10BT NIC with the intel 21140a 100BT and caused a lot of problems when migrating Windows 2000 VMs from VPC4 to VPC5

re: Glorious Hacks of Yesteryear

Norman Diamond — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 06:41:38 GMT

Hmm, I ought to try giving a guest machine more than 768MB of virtual RAM and see if its virtual BIOS accepts it from the virtual BX chipset. Ought to get my hands on an old version of Virtual PC and see if 256MB was a limit.

I wonder if there might be some drivers on the client side that would happily take advantage of optimizations when presented with a virtual BX chipset, but might use slower code when presented with a virtual TX chipset.

re: Glorious Hacks of Yesteryear

Jim — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 06:03:08 GMT

I've always wondered why Processor speed (or time alloc) isn't something that can be adjusted in VPC.

There are many old programs that systems are simply too fast for - as the code wasn't written to run at a particular speed; running as fast as the system could execute it was fine.

Sure, the apps&games im referring to are ancient, but so is the SB16 ;)

Need an example? goto one of the many abandonware sites and grab hi-octane.

Then try playing it on a VPC.

I loved that game back in the day...

re: Glorious Hacks of Yesteryear

Robert — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:11:01 GMT

Yep, that's what VMw*re does. It gives you choice of two different audio cards. There should be no reason why it couldn't be done in VPC, considering that the SB16 is on the ISA bus and not really supported any more. Most Linux distros and Windows 2003 dropped support for it.

re: Glorious Hacks of Yesteryear

Matthew — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 21:39:54 GMT

Adding new hardware is fine, but don't drop old hardware as far as peripherals go. Add a newer audio card emulation, but give a choice to keep the SB16 for all the DOS users running the old games and demos.

re: Glorious Hacks of Yesteryear

Robert — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 15:56:31 GMT

This of course begs the question - why not start emulating something more modern? Maybe the BX chipset is fine, but the S3 video and SB16 could be updated.

re: Glorious Hacks of Yesteryear

Jonathan — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 15:53:07 GMT

Why did you change? I don't recall any new features in the 440BX vs. 430TX that are relevant to VirtualPC - only AGP and Pentium2 support.