Update 26/06/2009

[Mortagen]

Hey all,

Things are quiet and development is slow as i only have my netbook at the moment. I'm currently rebuilding my old computer for testing of Neptune in a real machine environment rather than a virtual environment. System specs when finished will be as follows.

AMD K6-3 550mhz processor
768mb PC100 memory
Geforce 4 ti4600 graphics & Some sort of ATI Radeon card for different driver testing.

Hard drives will be two or three 20-30gb drives. Yes it's a low spec machine... It's just a rebuild of my first computer I'll be dual booting with 98SE on that machine.

Question.. Do the following apps work on 98SE:

Nlite
CabPack
7zip
eXPander

What is some free virtual PC software that is compatible with 98se? I'll need something for small scale testing.

Thanks.

Regards, Mortagen

[Mortagen]

I'll be testing with a radeon 9550 for ati driver compatibility. 30gb drives will be used. I'll also have a gogabit ethernet and a usb 2.0 card in the machine. Oh and a dvd burner

Just thought i'd throw that update out there.

At first though i'll only have a K6-2 500mhz instead of a K6-3 550mhz. I'll also be getting a new motherboard soon so instead of having a 128mb ram restriction i'll have 768mb max. And that board comes with 2mb of L2 cache to compliment the K6-3 550mhz chip. It's not until i get that board that i'll be able to test the video cards because my current board has no agp slot.

Regards, Mortagen

[dans34]

yay updates

i have no idea about those apps working on win98 ..

if you need any help with the neptune project (and if i know how to do it) just give me a shout

[elf]

Hi Mortagen.

Your K6-III was a pretty damn fast machine for the time, but it has a big disadvantage nowadays: it's only Pentium compatible, not 686 (Pentium Pro, Pentum II and upwards), so you can't run most recent software even if you max memory to 768 MB. Get a 3dfx Voodoo 3 PCI card and turn it into a powerful retrogaming box

Answers:
According to its site, CabPack runs on 98 and I personally tried 7-Zip; MSFN's eXPander (now unavailable) and nLite require .Net framework 2.0 which require MS Installer 3.0 and both can officially be installed only on Windows 2000 upwards. Maybe KernelEx can help you in installing the framework, nLite and eXPander and run the latter, but I highly doubt it implements all system calls and tools needed by nLite.

Virtualization software for 98? Very few if any since 98 wasn't a good host os under most aspects and virtualization was a businnes oriented task at the time, not a consumer one: maybe an old version of Connectix Virtual PC (search for 4.x ones), but I wouldn't stake my life on it. Anyway your K6 machine lacks enough cpu power to virtualize Win 2K or Neptune.

elf

[Mortagen]

Hey all,

I've been sitting here at work (i hate mondays ) and i've decided i'm not going to sell my laptop... I'm going to keep it for my Neptune development platform!

It's a lot more powerful than the crap box i was going to mess around with haha. I'll use Vista Ultimate SP2 32-bit or XP Pro SP3.

CPU: Core 2 Duo 2ghz
GPU: ATI Radeon x1700
RAM: 2GB
HDD: 120GB

I'm going to perform a fresh install on this and only install applications i need for Neptune development. That way i have less distractions when I'm working on Neptune.

Some of the tools i use include:

VPC 2007
CabPack
7zip
Nlite
eXPander

Just to name the main ones anyway

Hey does anyone know of any programs i can use to test USB port speed? I want to test if i've got USB 2.0 support working on Neptune.

I'm retiring that old box i was talking about as my fun old Win98SE box for games like Unreal Tournament and Quake 2/3. Unreal tournament won't work for me though..


Thanks.

Regards, Mortagen

[dans34]

see this

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/71240/

for usb speed testing

[elf]

@ Mortagen:

Mondays are always blue, not only once a year

Your notebook is more powerful than the K6, it's a good choice: if you want to carry it around and run other apps, try installing two copies of Windows, one for Neptune and the other for anything else, and dual booting them.

USB speed tester? I use HD Tach with an external hdd: transfert rates above 2 MB/s are surely USB 2.0 High Speed (Full Speed stops at 12 Mb/s or 1.5 MB/s), common peak values for early USB 2.0 controllers (Intel ICH4 and 5, Via VT1602, Nec u720100a and 101) are around 20 MB/s while good ones are 30 MB/s and above. Actually no controller can get 40+ MB/s due to intrinsec hardware limits (extremely low timings, echo signals, etc.), so 34-36 MB/s are pretty good speeds.

Unreal should run without troubles on your K6-III: check drivers, update the bios (most AGP cards had trouble running because early bios didn't enable MTRR on Socket 7 motherboards) and get a decent videocard.
Look for a 3dfx or a nVidia card of the era because both UT and Quake are OpenGL games and both brands had better drivers for OGL than Ati Rages and early Radeons (who remembers the "Quack optimizations"?), S3s and Matroxes (obviously I'm excluding professional OGL accelerators like 3DLabs ones ): good cards are all Voodoo 3s, 4 4500 and even 5 5500 if you can find one [the Voodoo 5 5500 was a dual GPU version of the Voodoo 4 4500: the second chip helps in raising frame rates at low resolutions through 3dfx' SLI, unfortunately the low ram bandwith impacted fps above 1024x768. Antialiasing was one of the strong points since it had negligible to low impact.], GeForce 2 (all but the MX ones), all 3, 4 Ti ones [beware of the 4 mX series which was based on a stripped down GeForce 2 MX core: the MX460 wasn't completely disappointing due to high bandwith and core clock but never sold in volumes, while the cheaper and more diffuse 420 and 440 performed like the GF 2 MX sisters!]. Look for AGP 2x-4x cards since 8x ones are incompatible with 2x slots.

elf

[Mortagen]

Hey guys,

Ok i'll checkout some of those tools and report back when i get a chance to do all of this. The video card is PCI because the board doesn't have any PCI.

I'm looking at selling my laptop again in replacement for a smaller but still just as capable laptop. I've got a 17" widescreen laptop so it's annoying to lug it around. And my netbook doesn't get much use and it's not very powerful. I think i'll sell these for a 12 - 15 inch laptop and develop neptune on that.

I'll have a look around for laptops containing nvidia geforce video cards... ATI seems fine on Neptune in my experience, so having a nvidia based card will be good for testing

Regards, Mortagen

[elf]

I suppose the card is PCI because the mobo lacks the AGP slot, not PCI ones
PCI are slower than AGP ones because they share the bandwith with other PCI devices (which, on socket 7 boards, means all onboard devices, ide controllers included) and there aren't many worth buying: look for 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000/3000 PCI, 4 4500 PCI (the 5 5500 PCI is too rare to be considered), GeForce 2 MX 400 and the 4 MX440 (avoid the 420 and the 440SE, a crippled 440). Avoid the GeForce FX5200 too becuse it's slower and hotter than the 4 MX 440!

Good luck for your notebook.

elf

[Mortagen]

Just a note. Soon i'll be paying some professional computer artists to do some work on Neptune for me

[Mortagen]

I just thought i'd let you all know that i've posted @ WPC just now, regarding the project

http://www.winprj.net/board/viewtopic.php?...27&p=5169#p5169

Regards, Me

[elf]

Thanks Mortagen: Neptune Is Not Dead (but never has been one of the Beatles ).

elf

[elf]

Any news?

elf

[Mortagen]

I'm working on it here and there =)



Regards, Ben

[Mortagen]

Regards, Ben