After [Andy]’s discovery of an old ISA soundcard at his parents’ place that once was inside the family PC, the onset of a wave of nostalgia for those old-school sounds drove him off the deep end. This is how we get [Andy] building the fastest MS-DOS gaming system ever, with ISA slot and full hardware compatibility. After some digging around, the fastest CPU for an Intel platform that still retained ISA compatibility turned out to be Intel’s 4th generation Core series i7-4790K CPU, along with an H81 chipset-based MiniITX mainboard.
Of note is that ISA slots on these newer boards are basically unheard of outside of niche industrial applications, ergo [Andy] had to tap into the LPC (low pin count) debug port & hunt down the LDRQ signal on the mainboard. LPC is a very compact version of the ISA bus that works great with ISA adapter boards, specially an LPC to ISA adapter like [Andy]’s dISAppointment board as used here.
A PCIe graphics card (NVidia 7600 GT, 256 MB VRAM), ISA soundcard, dodgy PSU and a SATA SSD were added into a period-correct case. After this Windows 98 was installed from a USB stick within a minute using [Eric Voirin]’s Windows 98 Quick Install. This gave access to MS-DOS and enabled the first tests, followed by benchmarking.
Benchmarking MS-DOS on a system this fast turned out to be somewhat messy with puzzling results. The reason for this was that the BIOS default settings under MS-DOS limited the CPU to non-turbo speeds. After this the system turned out to be actually really quite fast at MS-DOS (and Windows 98) games, to nobody’s surprise.
If you’d like to run MS-DOS on relatively modern hardware with a little less effort, you could always pick up a second-hand ThinkPad and rip through some Descent.
Euhm, LPC is pretty much a serialized version of the ISA bus, not of the PCI bus as mentioned above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Pin_Count
You’re right, I mixed that up somehow.
2Ghz, 64MB RAM, 2GB partition limits; unless you use hacks..
Period correct you’re going to be limited to 100Mhz Pentium and ATA for 6.22
Correct, but they obviously use hacks. which is not that difficult.
I prefer to call them patches. But I guess hacks is also appropriate.
I don’t know. A Pentium 133 or Pentium MMX 166 was’n being unheard of in the DOS days, either. I was there.
Astronomy fans, hams, Amiga tracker musicians and emulator fans had used MS-DOS on quite fast PCs (up to Pentium III, I think).
Impulse Tracker supports MMX, for example. Some DOS games do, too.
For gaming, MS-DOS was relevant until 1997. After that, its use declined.
A Pentium 90 PC or Pentium 100 PC as upper limit.. Okay.., if we consider Windows 95 release time as the end of DOS era sorta.
Though a 486DX2-66 might could have been considered to be the “pinnacle” of DOS era, just as well.
That used to be stereotypical DOS PC of the 90s, I believe.
It was being very common, at very least.
Many 486 motherboards supported it, it was 5v compatible, ran stable and needed no BIOS upgrade.
Many games, new and old, ran “okay” on that PC processor.
Then there’s Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which ran on top of DOS 6.22.
It had been used by demanding multimedia applications, too.
Xing MPEG Player, Hauppauge WinTV MPEG boards, professional audio recording, MovieCD format (Windows 3.1 based software).
Some of these applications didn’t run correctly on Windows 95 and needed a flavor of Windows 3.1x (and MS-DOS 6.22 as its basis).
So I’m not sure if the statement is correct all the time.
A Pentium 100 is reasonable, but there might be exceptions.
Emulator writers supported DOS until 2005 or so.
Arcade cabs used to be running DOS ports of Mame/Mess, too.
Late FMV DOS games such as ToonStruck or A Final Unity did quite stress the CPU, too.
Depending on resolution and image settings and the graphics card (VBE 2 or not, LFB or not) a Pentium 100 wasn’t quite enough for smooth gameplay, maybe.
Mobygames.com might be a good indication to check.
It has minimum requirements listed, which aren’t optimal requirements of course.
“A Pentium 133 or Pentium MMX 166 was’n being unheard of in the DOS days”
Pentium MMXs (P55C) were introduced in ’96, so that’s a stretch to call it “DOS days.” The first Pentiums to pass 100M were all ’95+.
Good point. On other hand, not all PC users were happily moving on to Windows.
Some had a disgust against Windows 95 in particular or dual-booted with real DOS, at least.
There were users who held out on OS/2 or DOS until year 2000.
Or installed some Linux out of dispair, which wasn’t exactly a nice experience in the 90s.
I assume that especially DOS users didn’t like the uglyness of Linux architecture, all the confusing aspects of it.
Personally, I would draw the line at 2000.:
It marks the end of the 90s, the late 20th century.
Makes for a nice ending, on paper.
By using graphical shells, such as DESQView/X, DOS was still usable until that point.
The final “end” would have been at 2006, though, when DOS-based Windows 9x went EOL.
Professional users might have still doing their drawing on DOS using AutoCAD r13 (DOS ver) or their rendering using Autodesk 3D Studio 4.
With a good processor, unaccelerated SVGA on DOS was no problem.
AutoCAD’s SVADI driver could do at least 1280×1024, I think.
So even DOS software from, say, 1989 could use higer resolutions and “enjoy” a fast PC.
Something like AutoSketch 2 or 3 on DOS.
Ok, this may seem archaic, but good DOS software didn’t age as much as someone may think.
There had been software products that were written very well and were made using a very sophisticated and efficient programming.
That was necessary for software written in the days of 286 and 386 PCs, also.
And last but not least, there had been emulators such as ZSNES or SNES9x that originated on DOS platform in mid-late 90s.
A Pentium MMX was rather on the slow side here, with a a Pentium II or III being more practical.
Also, POV-Ray v3.1g for DOS was released in 1999, too.
Raytracing and fractal generators could make good use of powerful PCs.
Same goes for making MOD music using high-end samples and many instruments and channels.
That’s why I’ve mentioned Impulse Tracker.
There are certain MOD files that take up several megabytes of those 32MB of total EMS memory cery quickly.
Or take up the on-board memory of the AWE32/AWE64 wavetable RAM quite fast (AWE could have 32MB of SIMM memory).
Of course, neither of these was mainstream.
I’m just trying to demonstrate that people with fast DOS PCs aren’t necessarily silly or uneducated.
They might just have interests that are not that common.
Like running D-Paint (Deluxe Paint) or StarDivision StarBase 2 (DBase database) on DOS in late 90s.
Users of flight simulators sometimes have extreme PCs,
despite the simulator software being years behind in some cases.
MS Flight Simulator 5.x (DOS) can bring a Pentium down to its knees if the resolution and detail level is just set high enough.
So it makes sense that a MS Flight Sim fan had gotten hold of a Pentium MMX 233 PC just to enjoy his classic simulator in full glory.
Amateur radio is same, maybe.
Many hams were fond of their DOS software, refused to go Windows.
Their DOS applications could do up to 1600×1200, maybe, via VBE or Super VGA.
JV-Fax 7 and SSTV software in general comes to mind.
Or DSP-based RTTY/CW software using sound card.
Filtering and decoding was done entirely in software (CPU heavy).
Or printed circuit board software (PCB software), also with SVGA/VBE support..
Others stuck to Windows 98SE, by comparison, refused to move to Windows NT line.
Either because they loved Windows 98SE or because direct-hardware access was needed by all their homebrew ham gadgets.
Again, it’s just me trying to provide another point of view.
It’s always hard to mention a deadline of something, because the process is transitional, something isn’t abruptly ending.
Just like the 1980s didn’t end by 01.01.1990, but continued to be around for a few more years.
The transition between the decades was smooth, rather.
The 80s were fading out, like the DOS days did by late 90s.
You have to remember that in it’s original release state W95 was garbage. It needed several fixes and QoL patches to gain traction.
I forgot to mention, DOS-based software projects such as LCARS24 or DeskWork had just started by late 90s/early 2000s.
Likewise, programming in QBasic (QB45) was very beloved in early 2000s still!
Websites with QBasic code were very popular, with lots of people contributing code snippets.
My favorite Packet-Radio software, XPacket, had been updated until late 2003 or so. It ran on DOS, too.
It was beloved among CB radio users for many more years, even,
because it supported CB style call signs when others software on DOS/Windows did merely support ham style call signs.
And it was beloved simply because it was very good, of course!
ZSNES v1.51 for DOS was updated in 2007, still.
The professional grade satellite tracker “Predict” supports DOS to this day.
PREDICT Version 2.3.1 for DOS was released on August 5, 2023.
Anyway, these are just some examples.
I forgot to mention Allegro library.
Allegro 4.2.2 was released in 2007 and supported DOS, among other platforms.
To this very day, Allegro applications can still be ported back to DOS.
Also, there’s HX DOS Extender, which allows Win32 command line programs to be run from MS-DOS.
And simple GDI/DDraw applications, too. Such as DOSBox (Win32 build), for example.
Or early versions of Neko Project II.
I mean, sure, this sounds like grasping at straws. Maybe it is.
But it’s still interesting to see how much DOS can still do.
There’s Arachne web browser or the new MicroWeb 2 browser.
There’s a graphical DOS port of Dillo web browser..
The source code and SDK for PC GEOS had been released just recently, too.:
GeoWorks Ensemble, Breadboard Ensemble etc still has an active community.
This graphical environment supports high resolutions via VBE, has 8-Bit Sound Blaster support etc.
There’s even a planetarium software being written for it.
Using DOS is still possible to this day.
And in the year 2000, to some people, it was still usable as a daily driver.
Even if it was just in use on a dedicated PC for a special purpose.
GeoWorks Ensemble and its successors contained a whole office suite similar to MS Works or MS Office, for example.
We used both.
What’s most important to DOS gaming, though, is a CRT screen.
With a big dot pitch of 0,3mm or more.
Otherwise, those 320×200 256c graphics look just bad.
Watching raw, pixelated graphics aren’t a period-correct experience.
If you can’t afford a VGA monitor from early 90s, watch out for 14″ CRT TVs on the roadside or a the recycling center.
I’ve got a Wells-Gardner D9400 27″ CRT VGA monitor, with a dot trio spacing of ~0.83 mm, so, yeah, it’s a HUGE difference for both DOS or PS2/PS3 arcade games.
This is my problem with claiming “the fastest” whatever. One minute of Googling found an MSI Skylake motherboard (6th gen) with ISA slot: MS-98L9 V2.0
I am fairly sure you can get newer boards too. Even a 12th Gen Pentium like G7400 is likely faster, especially single threaded, which is what DOS is going to want.
The principles from the video are good, just found click bait title unnecessary. I get it on YouTube, but would have preferred a tongue-in-cheek headline on HaD, where we do science and accuracy.
Also ironically it seems that with the depreciation of LPC bus in the chipset the possibility of “add-in-board” ISA adapters may be possible as the address space is now free:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1230228
Not to mention with CoffeeTime utility it is possible to add BIOS support for mobile 10th gen BGA1440 processors to the 1151 slot. I have some 10980HK mutant CPUs from China that work pretty well, almost an i9 9900.
A salient point seems to have been missing. DMA support. Looks like DFI has an H310 motherboard with custom QEMU, but no word on DMA support.
What a rabbit hole, I have yet to try the software soundcard SBEMU on my Vortex86 systems, but back in the day I usually played without sound.
If only you could travel in time this machine in 80s would been top secret project 👍😄
DOS didn’t actually ‘die’ until Windows 2000 came out.
Win95, 98(SE) and ME all still ran on top of DOS, and you could still skip loading Windows if you wanted to run your old-er DOS games.
So yes, there were DOS PCs still going with Pentium IIs and K6s….
ISA hardware died first.
Even then a massive miner of people continued to use DOS.
RadioShack’s POS and inventory system never moved off of it until they were out of business.
Farm processing equipment still runs it unless it’s been replaced, which doesn’t happen often.
HP diagnostic equipment into the early 2000’s.
Canon used DOS on most of their digital camera like until around 2010, and some much later. Industrial control software often has it’s own console, Liebert HVAC and environmental monitoring equipment often ran DOS and Siemens continued existing long term support contracts so some might still be running it.
And of course you can buy a brand new business laptop from Dell with DrDOS pre installed as the default OS.