ISA performance can be "as good as it gets" on a PCI machine, and most BIOSes will allow you to configure it to a point that it can easily saturate the bus and even break stuff - just like in the good old days. Wait states and bus speed tuning being the most important things.

I also know that Tridents are not all garbage, but it is fair to say that the 9000-series (which is essentially a 8900C with some additional integration) isn't going to win any performance prizes no matter what machine you put it in. The 8900D on the other hand is quite impressive in DOS, keeping up with all but a small handful of much more expensive cards. It is, of course, useless for a GUI system since it has no acceleration functions, but for plain VGA it's pretty good.

The reason is, of course, that the Matrox is made for GUI applications. And in those, compared to its peers, it absolutely shines according to reviews at the time. I'm looking forward to testing it in a GUI environment, and I'll surely post about that somewhere as well. And I'll use more period-correct hardware, I promise! :)

I recently built an original Pentium 60MHz system, built on an ECS motherboard. Around the same time I received a "mystery" VGA card: A Matrox MGA Impression ISA card. And since most of my builds are "open builds" and therefore easily accessible, that machine got the pleasure of becoming the test bench for the Matrox.

As already revealed, the Matrox performs atrociously bad. So bad, in fact, that I had to test a couple other ISA cards to make sure it wasn't a system issue. I used my go-to benchmarking tool #3DBench from Phil's DOS Benchmark Pack. I really don't want to experience Doom with this card..

And without further ado, the contestants and their results in this spur-of-the-moment benchmark run:
- Baseline: A 32-bit PCI S3 Virge/DX based card with 4MB RAM: A perfectly workable 48.2
- The low-end Trident TVGA9000C with 512KB RAM (this is a real garbage card): A pretty shitty 14.2
- The mid-range Cirrus Logic CL-GD-5422 with 1MB RAM (this is a decent card, know for compatibility but not necessarily speed): A barely bearable 24.7
- And finally, the "star" of the show, the Matrox: A whopping 10.9!

I said it was atrocious, didn't I? But hey, I'm gonna use this one with #OS2 anyway, so who cares about DOS performance, right? ;)

#RetroComputing #Benchmarks #VGA #SlowVGA

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Montage: Close-up of the S3 card installed in the system, next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Trident (a small ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Cirrus Logic (small ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Matrox (a very large full-length ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result

I recently built an original Pentium 60MHz system, built on an ECS motherboard. Around the same time I received a "mystery" VGA card: A Matrox MGA Impression ISA card. And since most of my builds are "open builds" and therefore easily accessible, that machine got the pleasure of becoming the test bench for the Matrox.

As already revealed, the Matrox performs atrociously bad. So bad, in fact, that I had to test a couple other ISA cards to make sure it wasn't a system issue. I used my go-to benchmarking tool #3DBench from Phil's DOS Benchmark Pack. I really don't want to experience Doom with this card..

And without further ado, the contestants and their results in this spur-of-the-moment benchmark run:
- Baseline: A 32-bit PCI S3 Virge/DX based card with 4MB RAM: A perfectly workable 48.2
- The low-end Trident TVGA9000C with 512KB RAM (this is a real garbage card): A pretty shitty 14.2
- The mid-range Cirrus Logic CL-GD-5422 with 1MB RAM (this is a decent card, know for compatibility but not necessarily speed): A barely bearable 24.7
- And finally, the "star" of the show, the Matrox: A whopping 10.9!

I said it was atrocious, didn't I? But hey, I'm gonna use this one with #OS2 anyway, so who cares about DOS performance, right? ;)

#RetroComputing #Benchmarks #VGA #SlowVGA

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Montage: Close-up of the S3 card installed in the system, next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Trident (a small ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Cirrus Logic (small ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result

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Montage: Picture of the Matrox (a very large full-length ISA card) next to picture of the 3DBench result

Also, testing hashtags on snac ;)
#OS2 #WarpServer #Memtest

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Memtest86 5.01 reporting loads of memory errors. Yay.

The contenders: QuickView Pro version (dvpro), Digital Sound System 3.1 (dss) and MPXPlay 1.67 (mpx). The file: Astral Projection's "Bizarre Contact" from the album "Ten".

Enjoy these clips :D

#Retrocomputing #VacationInMyHead #Multimedia

I mean yeah, great, I get a proper BSD-4.4, 32-bit TCP/IP stack and tools. But it's taken me half a day. Getting the installation files over involved loading packet drivers and using #mTCP in a DOS session. Which works .. surprisingly well. But still .. FixPak43, reboot. MPTS, reboot. Netscape 2.02, reboot. Java 1.18, reboot. Feature Installer plug-in (no reboot). Then, finally, TCP/IP.

All this to have a machine to play with at #Blackvalley.

#OS2 #Retrocomputing #WhyAreYouReadingThis #GoDoSomethingUseful

Only when a post is boosted or replied to do I run the risk of my hot-babe CPU monitor turning nsfw. So better keep it boring, I guess.

And if it wasn't for crypto being too slow to actually work I'd be doing the same on the 386SX-class machine that I also have running NetBSD. But with a hyper-optimized SSH handshake taking over a minute, I have no hopes for 2k RSA signatures or any kind of TLS handshakes with remote instances happening in anywhere near the timeframe they would need to..

CC: @linuxenjoyer@blahaj.zone

I don't know what your native language is, but imagine how this exact same thing feels for someone whose first language is not English .. All the same scariness plus we may not even know what the words mean! And looking them up in a dictionary leads to a whole other kind of rabbit hole, and even if you understand the definitions and use in normal human language, it does very nearly jack shit to help understand wtf it means in the programming context.

I know this, I've tried to learn programming since I was, what, 8? In a vacuum too, since I lived in the middle of fucking nowhere in Norway for the first 17 years of my life. Imagine only having the MS-DOS or PC-DOS handbooks and some GWBASIC code written by Bill Gates to start out with. And the vocabulary of a 8 year old kid whose grasp of the English language is limited to what he learned during 6 months of school in Australia when he was 5...

I'm almost creeping up on 48 now and still can't code for shit.

Another issue is that the only way to stop dtrace is to kill -9 it, which takes the watched process with it in the fall..

Halp? :)

#Babylon5

I'll take Wayland when it comes my way without me having to lift a finger, but until then I'm glad the X Window System is still around. Keeps this old hardware useful.

Turns out Netscape 2.02 is too easy, so in this picture is IBM WebExplorer v1.1h running on OS/2 Warp Connect. Using the magic "work area" feature of folders (mark a folder as a work area to have the OS manage objects within it as a kind of unit), I can open several windows at once. True multi-process browsing 😉

#retrocomputing #browsers #floppy #museum #html #BrowserWars

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OS/2 Warp Connect with four browser windows, a text mode editor editing config.sys, the parent "work area" folder and the launch pad.

Anyway, I've reduced my ambitions ever so slightly, and am now in the process of installing NetBSD (-CURRENT) on what is essentially a 386SX-class machine: 16-bit bus, 24-bit addressing, 16MB RAM, and nearly as unpleasantly slow as the 286 I had planned to use. It is however equipped with an IBM-branded 486SLC, which is from the Blue Lightning series. This one definitely has a full 486 instruction set. More hardware details will follow when I've completed the build (and installation).

Meanwhile, the obligatory screenshot from the installer. Note the ETA for simply unpacking base.tgz ..
#RunBSD #Retrocomputing #Slowcomputing

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Screenshot from installer. Shows base.txz being extracted, at a speed of 110 KB/s. ETA given is about 30 minutes, which turned out to be relatively accurate.

#sfw #hardware

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Dark-ish picture showing motherboard mounted horizontally on a transparent acrylic surface. Underneath a combined 5.25 inch and 90mm floppy drive. The installed RAM lights up in different colours, four sticks with blue, purpole organge and yellow LEDs, respectively. VGA, network and sound cards are also visible.

All of those things are absolutely wonderful and make many of todays software developers look ... spoiled? What I want, however - and what I love doing - is making this old hardware do stuff its makers never dreamt of, things that are as far removed from their time as possible. That's why I will, if #NetBSD permits, run bleeding edge BSD on a 286-on-486steroids, and why I run web+ftp+irc servers (yes, multitaskign) on one 286 and multiple BBS nodes on a 386 - like one used to do, of course.

I cannot state often enough how amazing it is that there's still software developed today that will work under such constraints.

#RunBSD #EndOfRant

(In other news, the #snac instance on this poor Pentium Pro server is sweating hard whenever I post something. So let me know at @ltning@anduin.net if you have problems receiving/reading my posts. I've made some tweaks but it will be unavoidably detained for a while following each post, my apologies for that..)

#BIOS #POST #Retrocomputing

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Picture of BIOS during boot. It's a 1990 American Megatrends BIOS, for the TD60C board, BIOS version 2.42B. It shows a 20MHz CPU clock and 15872 KB RAM tested OK.

I said I was baking - It was not a randomly chosen term.

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The mainboard is literally in the oven! 60 degrees Celcius in hot air-mode for, say, an hour or so should do, I guess.