Mail Archives: opendos/2000/10/30/08:43:07
> My brother likes those DOOM/Heretic type games. Some of them work fine and
> some do not. I checked them all out on my computer and they all worked for
> me! I installed and set up DRDOS for him. We even have similar systems! I
> have and AMD 5x86 133 with Award BIOS, he has a Cyrix 5x86-133 VIP with
AMI
> BIOS! Go figure!
How are they at disk I/O throughput? I had a machine a while back that
would run anything based on iD's engine (DooM, Heretic et al), but a couple
of similar games just curled up around the middle of engine initialisation.
When I retired that hard drive (it's now doing a tour of duty as my Netware
5 SYS: volume) and replaced it with something that could transfer a few more
Mb/s, everything ran fine.
> 486's were flaky anyway! When compiling a kernel for Linux, it needs to
know
> if it is a 486 in order to work around 486 bugs. If it is a 386 or
pentium,
> it does not have to change the code for bugs! Go figure!
There are certainly problems with the 486 architecture - there's a TID
somewhere in Novell's KnowledgeBase detailing a problem with lost and
spurious interrupts on the 486 (NetWare, unlike most OSes, reports
lost/spurious interrupts on the System Console). I think the gist of it was
that the internal handling was changed such that if you ignore one when
processing another interrupt, the thing crashes. NetWare's problem was that
if the keyboard handler was active when the OS caught a lost interrupt, the
Console locked solid. *shrug* Also, I had a nasty abend yesterday in
NetWare 5 (I think I've got a faulty DIMM in that machine, which has really
ticked me off), and the internal debugger reported 'Break to debugger
because of break reason not set (80486 bug).' - on a P133, but never mind.
Of course, the Pentia have their own set of bugs - three nasty ones, IIRC.
The classic FDIV, F0 0F (always good for security batch files), and
something else to do with PCI and losing data in some circumstances.
Regards,
Ben A "but at least the 4004 could add up" L Jemmett.
(http://web.ukonline.co.uk/ben.jemmett/, http://www.deltasoft.com/)
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