On 13 Sep 2020 at 16:26, Dan Scott wrote: > > I´ve seen video and I did play a fair number of DOS compatible > games in my earlier years especially on Windows 95 and 98. I´m > casually looking for an old 486 to tinker with too, so hopefully > I´ll stumble upon something someone is looking to get rid of or a > cheap one at Goodwill. >
Back in the day, cheap 486 clone machines had weird quirks in silicon and in the BIOS, and were rather starved of RAM. Any hardware that old has to be suspected of having age-related glitches. Cold joints, dusty and oxidated contacts etc. You'll have a problem finding floppy drives and IDE HDDs. If you want 486-class hardware with enough RAM, un-486ish CPU horsepower and pretty good legacy compatibility, try looking for something with a Vortex86DX. Mind the DX, it's a particular Vortex SoC model. Anything from ICOP will do (with XGI graphics, 32MB of dedicated VRAM). Only there's no legacy audio (selected models have USB audio = no use in DOS on bare metal). If you manage to get your hands on a soundblaster card (some ISA model strongly preferred), if could work with the VDX-6324 from ICOP - but you will need a minimal PICMG 1.0 ISA backplane. The Vortex has about 800 MHz native clock rate, but can be underclocked down to 100 MHz. And, the "TurboPascal crt bug" (division by 0 exception, or error 200) doesn't occur until about 400 MHz. The Vortex86DX hardware natively still has IDE, not SATA. It is possible to buy a stand-alone IDE/SATA bridge board, allowing you to attach a SATA disk drive to an IDE HBA. And, some of the Vortex boards have a CompatFlash slot, or you can buy a CF/IDE converter board stand-alone. CF cards can still be purchased, and they have a native IDE mode, making them behave like an IDE HDD. Or you can just run your legacy DOS software in a DosBox - including VGA screen scaling and SoundBlaster emulation. Or in some hypervisor of your choice. Your only problem in that case is too much CPU horsepower, resulting in the "error 200" in some software (not necessarily Borland-based). Frank _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
