MiSTer FPGA Forum

To my surprise, Panzer General 2 works better on NT Workstation 4.0 than on Windows 95/98 :shock: That is incredibly surprising, as NT4 isn't exactly known for its gaming prowess! My first thought is that it could be related to the graphics driver we're using, as it uses a linear frame buffer (as opposed to the paged one in the W95 driver), and al...

Thanks to @NML32: After installing Dial-Up Networking, you will get an Event Error at every boot. It doesn't break PPP (at least from my very few tests), but get rid off it by re-running the Service Pack 6 (mount misternt.iso CD-ROM and run sp6ai386) and restart when asked. *Even later Edit: I compiled all these infos into what I hope is a more co...

This is great, thank you so much for adding this to the guide!

For those interested, the original thread where NT first successfully booted can be found here: viewtopic.php?t=4175

The floppy fix has now been released, so I've written the full installation guide. Now available here: https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=4400 Note for anyone who downloaded a previous version of the setup images: A new version has been released due to required changes to misterfs.exe. The following link can be used to always download the lates...

Windows NT 4 install for ao486 It’s now possible to install and run Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000 on ao486, due to some bugfixes I have provided as well as two amazing drivers which have been provided to the community. This is a guide for installing Windows NT 4, with a guide for Windows 2000 coming soon. Note that this guide may look long, but th...

I may have some of my older builds from NT4 experiments I could try the overclock with. Thanks for the tip.

Thanks for the pointer to the config file which I found here: viewtopic.php?p=37074&sid=bcc3411f92e62 ... 3af#p37074

For me it's pretty much an instant crash in FastDOOM at 100 MHz. Back to 90 MHz I go...

Those are some great numbers, thanks! What is it you’re doing to run at 100 MHz? Is it still a custom build or is there a hidden option available?

Generally speaking I don't think we'll see much speed increase from this. While it is more efficient to be writing to a linear frame buffer rather than having to do banking operations, most games are going to be hitting other performance bottlenecks before this is a big factor. Having VBE 2.0/3.0 support for ao486 is going to be much more useful fo...

notice any speed differences? when in game you can type "dnrate" and it will show the frame rate... It's maybe 2-3 FPS faster than the non-FBE mode. As you say, it's hitting other bottlenecks for performance so the improvement is not very much. I'll work through the list as I can, and update as results come in: Age of Rifles Archimedean ...

Thanks very much. I've also now confirmed that the VESA 2.0 modes of Duke3D work with these settings. If anyone else is aware of other games which may now work with VBE 2.0 support, it would be great to test these too.

I've been looking further, and I've now found a solution which works for all resolutions and has passed every test I've thrown at it.

Use version: SDD653-D
Commands:

I've made some progress on getting VBE 2.0 and 3.0 working, including with linear framebuffer support. These configurations use only 4MB of the available 8MB space, because anything above that boundary fails the "flicker" test with paged graphics. I haven't yet found a combination which works well for all resolutions, so here are two opti...

Great, thanks for confirming!

Awesome!

Yes, this is the same issue as you have more than 1024 cylinders on that disk. Here is an updated version which should fully solve the problem, although I am still completing testing: https://github.com/alexoughton/misternt/archive/refs/tags/1.2.zip This version forces fdisk to keep the partitions within the first 1024 cylinders. A few MB of space ...

OK, so it's not anything in MiSTer or ao486 setting the geometry values we're seeing. It's the way LBA translation is working in the BIOS. The behavior we're seeing is likely matching original hardware and BIOS behavior, so I will work to adjust for it in my boot disk instead.

Thanks. I actually have my testing running in the background right now, and I've just seen something I didn't encounter before. There must have been something wrong with my testing when I last looked at this. Did setup give you the "Setup has determined that one or more of your hard disks has more than 1024 cylinders" screen? I've never s...

That all looks exactly as I'd expect it to. Was this installation starting again with a completely blank disk? Or was this a re-use of the vhd after a previous attempt?

I'll try again to reproduce this error on my end. I'm asking myself the same questions to see if there was something wrong with my testing strategy the other day.

Can you do the following please?

1. Boot from the “Boot first” floppy
2. Press CTRL+C as soon as the first screen appears, and press Y to cancel batch execution.
3. Run 4. Send screenshot of the output there
5. Run 6. Run 7. Send screenshot of the output there

Thanks

Sound doesn't seem to be working under Windows 2000, with an error related to kmixer being unable to start. I did some experimentation with switching to different resource settings for the SB16 and trying older drivers, but nothing worked. Other than this sound issue, Windows 2000 setup is mostly similar to NT4, with the same video driver (and spec...

So far it's very slow. Not as bad as it is during setup though.

It's alive. Disk and video drivers working. Still needs some clean-up as my original registry settings didn't take and actually corrupted the system. Also need to see if it performs best with native disk drivers (which do work) or with uniata.

I've made it all the way through Windows 2000 setup using SP4. The main setup procedure takes 2-3 hours to complete (I didn't time it precisely). After setup completes it will then boot to a blank screen unless Safe Mode is used. My hope is that this is due to Windows trying to use the broken Tseng ET4000 video driver.

Possible progress. Need to call it a night now though. There may be enough fixed in the core and in the IDE/floppy implementation that Windows 2000 SP4 can work. My previous crashes were with SP1.

ToothbrushThreepwood wrote: ↑Sat Mar 05, 2022 6:54 pm Cliffhanger alert!

Ha! Don't get too excited. Ruling-out an FPU issue just means I have even less of an idea of what the problem is.

Thanks for the video! Fun to see it working with the BBS.

Side note... I've since learned that the lack of FPU is not the reason Windows 2000 isn't working. There's a video out there of 2000 booting successfully on a 25 MHz 486SX. Experimentation continues...

OK, I found and fixed the problem. For some reason fdisk was choosing a different partition type with a 1GB disk versus what I see with either 2GB or 400MB. Very strange. The script has been updated to enforce the correct type. Here is the updated version: https://github.com/alexoughton/misternt/archive/refs/tags/1.1.zip Thanks again for testing an...

I created a 1GB file using this process: https://tweaks.com/windows/62755/generate-large-test-files-in-windows/ OK good, that's actually the same way. There must be some bug which comes up specifically with a 1GB image rather than specifically with the method of creating the file. I'll take a look at this when I'm in front of my MiSTer tomorrow. I...