8 Jan
2003
8 Jan
'03
11:02 p.m.
>> In fact, when thinking about building a low
speed Game
>> machine for early 90s games, I would go for a 60-200 MHz
>> Pentium, or at least a PCI bus 486.
>The problem is that these are all too quick to use
with the buggiest
>Sierra game ever: Quest for Glory IV. Which is why I'm going for a slow
>486.
You could always try clocking a faster system to a
lower rate, though - just
wire up something so you can choose the clock speed you want before booting. If
whatever audio setup you have gets its timing from the main system clock then
you're out of luck as all the audio would sound wrong, but I image they all
have their own on-board timing.
I remember booting an old 486 at around 3MHz once,
just to see if it would
work. It did (took about ten minutes to boot!) but the beep on startup lasted
for about a minute :-)
Quite a good idea. I remember that late 486 boards offered settings
of at least 25,30 and 33 MHz, often 40 MHz, while a 50 MHz was rather
rare, although available on Intel boards (For the DX50). For early
Pentium they offered usualy 25,30,33 and 50 MHz.
If you use a AMD 5x86, these boards had often selectable multiplyers,
so you may set them to anything from 25 MHz x1 to 40 MHz x4. In my
opinion the best way to go. When a 25 MHz 486 is already to fast,
you'll need a 8088 anyway.
Another nice way is using a Pentium board with a K6 or K6-II, alas
the lowest speed on such systems is usualy 25MHz x2.5 or 62MHz internal
speed.
As for myself, I have 2 systems with ad on AMD 5x86 on adaptor boards.
One is used as a router, while the other is used to runn old software
with low speed.
Gruss
H.
--
VCF Europa 4.0 am 03./04. Mai 2003 in Muenchen
http://www.vcfe.org/