I first played it with the creative Soundblaster midi so it sounds very good to me for nostalgic reasons.😂 But that PC speaker version is incredible. IBM PCs were intended for boring office work, back then. Creating music with a lead voice, rhythm track and bass in between on a single channel, sine wave only output was really hard work. It's like comparing a whole Orchestra with a guy playing the sing on just a pot un his kitchen.
When AMD released the 939 Opteron they where lower in cost then there desktop Athlons not quite sure why I bought the Opteron 165 and installed it on an Epox agp motherboard that had an Nvidia Nforce 3 chipset and overclocking was easy and I got the processor from 1.8 to 2.8 . The video Card I got for this system was a HIS 4670 AGP 1 GB. I also used 2gb of Corsair ddr 400 memory and a sound blaster 16. I also installed a Ageia Physx card. The system was awesome and it ran Doom 3 in ultra at 1076x864 with over 100 fps. It also ran crysis II very smooth . You can see my build here - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vRqbG_a-ahE.html
Hey phil and anyone else that happen to read the comments, What cf2ide do you use? I have several star tech ones and used a 512mb card and 2gb transcend cards on a 486 dell pc. I had nothing but issues with both cards. I can partition them correctly but while using either card random junk would generate on the card and corrupt. Is this because I must set the drive parameters? I could have sworn i set them correctly in bios and I have no issues with these cf cards in other old pc's but the 486 simply screws up those cards. I do have master set because its my primary card. While I do have a DOM I can slap in there its a little to small for what I want to do. I'm pretty swift with these things so I have no clue with whats happening.
@@ratix98 Definitely need drive parameters. Start with the 2GB card and use CHS values for 504 MiB. That should work in every situation as a good test.
I was aware of this option in the control panel, and used it before. But never had these perfectly tuned profiles. Low-res games haven't looked this great on my CRT before! Thank you.
My 1999Compaq Presario had an ESS-1 Solo on the motherboard. It ran pretty much every game and web audio effortlessly. Later I was presently surprised that it could run ASIO4All low latency audio driver, so even with a 759 MHz Celeron processor it could run a DAW if you didn’t push it too hard.
My last desktop was a P4 with a Gf4400Ti, IMHO this is the best retro starter config. Cheap as chips, available, perferct before you get into the hardcore stuff, like repairing 386s with Varta damage :).
Hey Phil, I found a strange little hack with windows 98 formatting HDD. I use modern ssd's PCI - SATA. Not sure if that has anything to do with it. What I do is fdisk the drive and delete the partition. Leave it deleted and start Windows 98 setup. It will then create and format the partition at the full size of the HDD. I've successfully done this multiple times with 240gb in single partition
The CRT is awesome! I have one myself. I also have DOSBox, but I must say, comparing the real thing to an emulated session in Windows 10/11... it is not buttery smooth. Check out doslogo's smooth scrolling video, and boot that in DOSBox, it can never run as smoothly like on a real retro PC, even on a CRT. There are more factors like the VGA emulation of the modern graphics card.
If DOSBox runs in XP, then should be good to go. Creating custom resolutions might be tricky, but at least with some drivers I remember that option was available.
hello, when I try method 3 after loading, a blue screen appears with the message check for viruses, remove any newly installed hard drivers! help what can i do?
@@philscomputerlab When creating a custom resolution, if it's possible, to set the color bit rate to 16-bit and not 32-bit as most used to run that back then ;)
@@1300l DOSBox is a windows application though, it uses 32 But but of course will only display the limited colour palette of VGA DOS games afaik. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the question...
A good solution to emulate these 286-486 era games that are a bit of a challenge to build a machine for, you'd go bankrupt with that pretty quickly these days.
Love the video, as always. Gotta say you often trigger my FOMO when you focus on prices and scarcity. I've got plenty of hardware, but it always elevates my blood pressure. 😅
The proper German pronunciation of Wolfenstein, I love it! Nothing beats a CRT for DOS games, but it's getting harder to get them, not to mention people want ridiculous money for them.
The audiodrive and Yamaha OPL cards are hands down 2 of my favorite cards. I own both and the S2 wave table. Such a fantastic combo using any of the 2 cards with the S2 in DOS.
This has been of great help to finding the optimal settings for Retroarch. 16 bit consoles like the Mega Drive/Genesis use resolutions very similar to old DOS games, like 320x224. Until now I was using a good enough compromise of 640x480, but thanks to the Custom Resolution Utility I can make a custom resolution of 640x448 to get an absolutely perfect double scaling on my CRT monitor. Though I'm still trying to find the best fine parameters for 512x448 (which is the double of the SNES and Mega Drive 256x224 low res modes). It is kinda working but the picture isn't covering the full screen so I guess some of the front porch/sync width/polarity values I tried aren't quite right. And I wish that the Custom Resolution Utility allowed you to create more than 4 custom resolutions.
Great video, thanks for sharing knowledge! I personally have tinkered a lot with DOSBox and CRT monitors, and yes, it's a very convenient setup, really close to the experience in native DOS with original hardware. In my case, I use a dedicated secondary gfx card (GTX 750) with VGA output,.no problem under Windows 11. Also, it's perfectly fine, and better for your eyes, to double the original vertical refresh rate (640x400 @140Hz, 640x480 @120Hz) if your CRT supports it (any 1280x1024 SXGA monitor should). I also found out that some scrolling games (Supaplex, Bio Menace...) work better with output=overlay instead of output=surface, at least in my case. Surface output stutters a little and won't show the original smooth scrolling, for me.
0:35 If you install Windows 10 a lot Phil, you might want to check out Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC. It's a very barebones version of Windows 10 (no Microsoft Store or UWP apps), and I find it is a lot easier to customize everything to my liking after a fresh install. It is also supported until 2032.
Thats an idea i was toying around a while. It may be noteworthy, that it is possible emulate Grayscale by using Colorfilters in Windows 10. Its niche, but may be of use in some situations.
I made a 30min video on how to get a CRT to run on a modern PC that doesn't have VGA out. It's amazing how almost identical your methods are to mine, particularly when setting up DOSBox. But like in your video, the video I made tries to simplify the process as much as possible, and keeping the costs as low as possible. So yeah, you could invest in a fancy DP or HDMI to VGA converter but I wanted to see what result one can get with a basic (cheap) HDMI to VGA dongle, and I actually got a lot out of it when you use the right tools, especially CRU. So yeah, it totally is possible. You don't have to pay an arm and a leg to get a good experience. Obviously, if you want to expand beyond basic CRT compatibility, like you said, it can get really expensive.
Nice improvement. My dream back in the 90s, as a previous Atari ST and Amiga user, was to be able to run PC games at 15 kHz without doublescan, so the pixels would look a little more rounded. It always hurt my eyes to look at those ultra-sharp rectangular 320x200 pixels on a 640x400 resolution. Nowadays, I'm more or less able to achieve that 15 kHz scanline feeling with CRT filters, but it would be great to run those games on a real CRT monitor at real 15khz. A few years ago, I managed to run some of them using a CRT TV and a custom VGA-to-SCART cable and a TSR program that modified the output resolution on a real MS-DOS machine. However, since most games were coded for 70 Hz, compatibility wasn't the best.
That Scart RGB look only existed with an EGA monitor, they also have lower KHz. But VGA was double scanned in order to hit the higher KHz. DOSBox Staging lets you have that Amiga Scart RGB look even with VGA, its a nod from one of the developers because if his passion for the Amiga.
I think this has something to do with CRTs doubling up basic VGA signals (such as 320x200) to display correctly on an SVGA monitor that is meant to have double the resolution, to get it to output properly, but I have no idea what the consequence of not running this in DosBox would be.
I hear if you have a modern GPU with a USB-C you can use a VGA to USB adapter. Steam deck is a good candidate for this. Would like to see a video on that from you :)
I found another solution for dos gaming in native resolution with smooth scrolling without changing host resolution and refresh rate. This solution is Dosbox pure from retroarch + crt switchres (31Khz) mode enabled. But for crt switchres you need to have compatible video card. Mine was hd 5450.
I've tried a similar approach in the past with an old EEEPC 901, running XP and Dosbox. I didn't do any low level tweaking, but i found out that if i set Dosbox to full screen when it chenged resolutions it seemed to set the CRT correctly. At least i remember seeing those classic scanlines. Really an old laptop + a CRT + Dosbox has come to satisfy 99% of my retro computing needs (edit: typo)
From what I have seen, the cheapo ones will probably give you VGA and SVGA resolutions at 60hz or 70hz, but if you want to try some modern games on your old CRT, they struggle with accepting a modern HD screen resolution at higher refresh rates. It may not be much of an issue depending on the specs of your monitor and the type of games you are trying to run but from what I've seen will typical hamstring late-model high-end CRTs from running at their optimum display settings. Apparently there are some expensive adapters that may get around the issues found on most of the basic ones.
