revelator

probably need a 7800xt to match a 9060xt speedwise. the 7900xtx is still amds fastest card though it does not support FSR4 (marginally faster and a lot more expensive) so the only real benefit it has is its huge ammount a vram compared to the 9070xt. speedwise the 9070xt is a bit more than double as fast as my 2080 ti in raytracing but lacks behind a bit in pathtracing which imo sucks on my card to . still in alan wake 2 it is one of the fastests cards out there even beating a rtx 5080 by about 3 fps in all resolutions except 4k where the 5080 beats it by 0.1 fps . with raytracing on it starts to look a bit more dire and the 5080 beats its by about 35% in 4k. still neither card can manage 60 fps with all the bells and whistles on in 4k and the 5080 is only about 6 fps faster. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/sapphire-radeon-rx-9070-xt-nitro/7.html amd is getting there slowly but surely. atm im out of options in saving up for one because food prices have exploded in denmark, but if they normalize at some point ill definatly will start saving for one.

still remember the win 95 presentation with bill gates where he lauded the stability of the OS and then it bluescreened while booting up bill stood there like a stump and just said well that wasnt supposed to happen lulz. i think after the debacle with ME he finally realized that the old platform was newer going to become stable and since NT could run DOS games and DOS software without to much trouble via the DOS VDM it no longer made sense. so they moved things to NT and newer looked back. today DOS compatibility is all but abolished in the NT kernel, last version who could run it was win 10 32 bit and it did not run all that well anymore. some work was done by independent hackers to bring it into the 64 bit NT platform with some success (ntvdmx64) and for 16 bit software (otvdm) both are compatible with eachother so you can have support for both. there are a few pitfalls though. ntvdmx64 is based on the leaked NT5 sources so its somewhat questionable and using it might bring you in trouble with the feds. otvdm was built upon the linux vine emulator so its safe to use but on its own it does not support DOS though it does allow use of say dosbox or msdos player (msdos player is kinda odd though as it is more like a patch that allows some dos software to be run under a windows environment and is not really an emulator).

heh yeah there were some real oopsies back then like the pentium ring 0 bug . yeah balmer may not have seemed like it but he had some good ideas with vista.

Aye there was quite a lot of competing tech at the time. Novel held on for quite some years feks. One fun thing with win 2000 was that the server version could cluster several computers and share the cpu power from each giving a massive boost in performance. I played around with it quite a bit and it was like windows on steroids . Hmm yeah i know the one you think of and it was scrapped due to security problems. Cant remember the name either though . Yeah i got the same sales pitch on win98se which i allready had so i took win 2000 and boy was he wrong . I newer had one crash with it and it ran for 7 years. I actually prefered it over xp but in the end i was forced to move on due to compatibility problems. Vista was actually not that bad after the last service pack. Main problem was that the computers at the time simply lacked the power to run it properly. My first try ran like ass, but as i got better hardware it started to fly. I actually kinda liked the cinematic desktop feature much more than i like windows 11's attempt at copying macos with its centered start menu. I also hated that they started hiding context menues and other stuff so what once took one click now takes atleast two wtf is that about ???.

another thing many may not know is that NT is actually as old as win 3.11 the first version NT 3.51 used the win 3.11 gui and the upcomming NT 4.0 used the windows 95 one though with certain differences. the reason many did not know about NT back then was that the first two versions were intended for bussiness and were pretty expensive. and you could also not really use them for gaming because they only supported directx 3 which was severely hampered. later an update upped this to directx 5 but it was still not a good gaming box. the differences from windows 95 was mostly the device manager plus additions of some admin tools to setup servers etc. both ran pretty well and were stable though as said not intended for gaming at all. with the fiasco of Windows ME microsoft decided to scrap the old dos platform and instead merged the ME gui and directx compatibility with windows NT 5.0 or Win 2000 as it was named. this turned out to be a huge success as windows 2000 was massively more stable than the win9x platform (id even go so far as to argue that win 2000 was microsofts most stable release ever).

yeah you can actually still get browsers that work online on win9x though i would discourage using online to much because of the risk of malware etc. though in retrospect i bet all the malware makers have long since moved away from targetting old systems as there is really no point. unless ofc. you keep sensitive data on the retro box . so why are there still people who use these you may ask. well older games especially dos based and some of the first opengl or directx based ones actually run better on said hardware. also it gives you an insight into the inner workings of later versions of windows (you used the commandline way more back then especially with the first windows models to setup hardware and other tasks). these commands still exist in todays computers but people rarely if ever use them cause they have no idea they are there. the syntax for one is allmost the same as used in CP/M . and back then the first windows boxes barely had the nessesary memory to even run windows so we used memory compressors to optimize it. my first windows 9x box had 4mb and it ran quite ok. this was the first version of windows 95 and came on floppies (about 24 if i remember correctly). it was a pain in the a.. to setup and needed a lot of handholding but it worked.

for those still dabling in retro hardware heres some interresting sites https://windowsupdaterestored.com/ windows updates for win 9x to xp https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/tpus-nostalgic-hardware-club.108251/ links to various sites with old software and information on setting up older systems hardware.

hmm another small problem creept up from behind when doing SDL3 builds. SDL3 removed the old hardware gamma ramps from the library so dhewm uses a shader based version. unfortunatly for my hybrid GLSL/ARB interaction renderer it only works in ARB mode because it is hacked into the interaction shader stage instead of the material shader stage and sadly i do not have an implementation of this hack in GLSL . I have a rough idea how to do it but i lack some skills in regards to working with hardware shader code. i do however have an old codepiece which i used in quake as a replacement for the old gamma ramp code but it needs a little work. what it does is actually really simple, it uses the same code as overbrights but scales the output with the gamma value. also overbrights tended to use a texture this code foregoes that completely as it is unneeded and instead outputs to a fullscreen quad. it works somewhat good in quake but there are two values in dhewm brightness+gamma so i might have to get creative.

refurbed LTO drives are about 1000 euros here in denmark so not exactly cheap in these parts, may be cheaper elsewhere i cannot say . hmm good question about the viability of older flash drives? tbh flash drives where sortof the forerunners of SSD though had none of the error correction and neither trim so the data may actually be bust, should work if the drive is otherwise fault free for storing data short term though. last flash drive i have is mounted in my phone "64gb" and still works but it had power. before that the last one i had was used for a micro PC with windows XP mounted behind my old TV which i used for streaming back in 2015. still got a flash drive mount in my old lian li cabby but it hasnt been used in years i only use it for the usb3 outlet it has nowadays. got my old floppies and dvd/cds backed up to harddrive about a decade ago (about 8 tb's worth).

well of i go to visit my mom. ill be back in a day or two . slowly started porting the old daikatana source code to more modern compilers (msvc for now but i do plan on doing a cmake based build system sometime in the future). probably gonna use some of the fixes we made over the years to idtech 2, kmquake2 horde mode anyone (though i guess getting overwhelmed by 100000000 monsters while fighting the stupid sidekick AI will make people want to murder me so...). lets see what i can dig up that makes sense for it.

heh i think i saw a movie about just that... cant remember the title but it was recent. yeah putting your dead relatives in AI is just bad taste IMHO, but as we seen countless times the people behind such crap will do it anyway out of greed.

Easier if familiar with unix commands also a lot cheaper (as in free). LTO is quite old ya, but its proven and still used even today.

allthough we mostly used windows based systems in public, our backup systems used bsd (unix clone). because it was easier (and cheaper) than doing it on windows which for the most part does not have software capable of handling tape drives. the old one in my heap of hardware is not even recognised by windows 11 (unknown device) but works without a hitch in wsl ubuntu. for windows use something like uranium backup (costs 290 euro for a lifetime license).

P.s tar actually stands for tape archiver

Aye they are mostly used with tar and other unix software . The head on later models have changed to the same mechanism used in vhs recorders, so a spinning head. And yes excessive cleaning is discouraged mostly because with digital it does not matter so much and there is allways a risk of damaging components when cleaning

a good DDS or LTO tape drive is actually a pretty inexpensive way to do massive backups. granted the drives themself cost a pretty penny but the tapes are cheap as dirt and some types can hold upto 45 petabytes of data yikes . the downside is depending on what kind of data you are storing they can be rather slow. for streaming file types like movies or music they are pretty snappy but if you try to backup the software from a server with everything it can take a whole day to get it written back to a harddrive. and as said they are pretty sturdy. we had backups going back to the dos 3.0 days which were still in working order. though as a precaution we checked them every year (better safe than sorry) . only had one tape go bad and that was because the drive needed new rubbers for the feeding mechanism (tape got eaten...).

got one of the old digital tape backup drives for pc laying around somewhere in my heap of old hardware . they are pretty sturdy and the tapes last forever if properly archived (we had a dust free room for our backups when i worked in the communal IT department). can be used for music as well if you can get your hands on the right software (which can be pretty damn hard as they dont like those drives being used that way lol). works just as well as a dat recorder but as said the software for using them that way can be a pain in the b... to get. still got my old sandy bridge packed down somewhere (asus x79 deluxe with a 3900k and 64 gb ddr3 ram) in case someone is missing a rock solid platform. runs pretty ok even today and is one of the boards i had that can be massively overclocked. the 3900k in it does 5.4 ghz but you need a pretty brutal cooler at that speed.

hmm its actually rather advanced and unfortunatly a bit of a pain to setup. one example is hrtf (headphone surround) which requires mapping sound locations with a tool they provide. https://deepwiki.com/kcat/openal-soft/5.3-gui-configuration-tool lists a good deal of which steps needed. for all other cases it is probably better to ask on the github forums for it. attached my own config for dhewm3 which sounds somewhat ok. drop it next to the dhewm3 executable. if you feel up to experimenting you can add your own settings to it alsoft.zip

seems the ryzen 3700x was an excellent partner for my rtx 2080 ti (no bottlenecks encountered yet). windows 11 is starting to piss me off though (plastering a new ui and more data mining on top of win 10 has made it an unstable mess).

damn i was 7 when the 8080 intel chip came out im starting to fell like an old geezer. the intel 386 scheme actually survived well into 2010 and you could actually buy a 486 processor brand spanking new up untill 2007 . so it seems to have had excellent longevity. the 386 could actually run NT4 and that was a 16 mhz processor lol. i know that for a fact because some kid dragged off with our old server at my workplace at the time, and that one was a 386 with a seperate floating point processor. it also weighed a ton... poor kid

hmm i think linux builds of rbdoom3bfg still use the openal-soft backend due to not having access to xaudio (besides running it in wine). i just experimented a bit with alsoft-config.exe which is a qt6 gui for openal-soft. sadly while it does work on windows it is clearly geared towards linux as the only backend with any semblance of control over the runtime is pulseaudio. it does have a plug for wasapi but the only setting it can control is the resampler and it only allows on or off lol. so for more fine grained control on windows one would have to read up on openal-softs config files and what settings can be used in them and then write those by hand ugh... jack is also supported but thats another backend not native to windows so . could ask if daniel would support xaudio as an alternative on windows but i wouldnt hold my breath on that one.

Could be ?. What many dont know is that openalsoft can be configured with a simple config file in the same directory as the dll "alsoft.cfg". There are some hints on the net on how to finetune openalsoft if it acts up. There was also some bug with the emu10k driver atleast on linux at some point which caused a lot of problems, but chances are high that this has been fixed in the latest version. Openal was sadly not the easiest sound engine to work with, mostly due to it being a low lvl driver like opengl32 / vulkan etc.

oki so no openal at all then. guess the xaudio implementation is really good . openal seems to be a bit over the top on some effects like 3d audio where it sounds like your standing in a concrete tube with echoes to max. could probably be toned down if someone with a good ear took the time to adjust levels.

probably needs some fine tuning , not sure if the BFG versions uses the old openal SDK or was updated to the openalsoft version also ? might explain some of it i reckon. i do have a version of dhewm with atleast some of the mentioned GLSL functionality (interaction shaders for now). It uses a hybrid GLSL/ARB renderer and works quite ok on my own port but ran into a few snags with dhewm3 cause it uses a hack for enabling hardware gamma with SDL3 which bypasses the code used for splitting up the hybrid renderer between ARB and GLSL parts. So gamma is broken in SDL3 builds until i can get a GLSL version of the shader used. sadly thats a bit beyond me as i come from the C world and only started to learn some basic C++ due to the release of the idtech 4 source code. And i newer really got my feet wet with hardware shaders.

damn i wish i was still able to have a payed job im still on the AM4 but recently upgraded it with an 5800x3d so besides the gfx card being some generations old im pretty happy with it. performance isnt to bad the crysis remaster runs at the highest setting on my 2080 ti with granted a not so stellar 35 fps in 4K but it is rock stable and newer drops below 32 fps no matter what action is on the screen (plays pretty fluid to). it also handles alan wake 2 with high in gfx and medium in raytracing without any hiccups. only oddity i have had with the ryzen was occasional stuttering which turned out to be a bug in microsofts thread handler which they recently patched. it has been running great since