Something Random

[sedrosken]

I found what Cathode Ray Dude on YouTube terms a 'beige whale' a week or so ago. That is to say, something I've been on the lookout for, wanted, but wasn't willing to expend actual time/effort/money into tracking down.

I've wanted something based around a Cyrix MediaGX for almost ten years now. If that name is unfamiliar to you, you may know it better by what it eventually became under National Semiconductor and AMD: the Geode. This particular example is a Neoware Capio 620 thin client, based around a NatSemi GX1 clocked at 300MHz. It's close enough to the speed of the last MediaGXm's that ran at 266, and the support hardware is still similar enough that the same drivers work under 98.

I am aware this performs poorly. The integrated video is mediocre, with 4 megs of system RAM stolen to run it, and no 3D capabilities of any kind, which I really can't fault it for. Think of how maligned the S3 ViRGE is today despite it having a quite good 2D core in the form of the old Trio64. The kinds of machines this video was intended to be used in simply weren't gaming machines. It does supposedly have MPEG playback acceleration, but I wasn't impressed by it honestly. The performance is strangely bad enough in 320x200x256 (I think that's mode Y?) that it skews Doom's performance numbers to something high-end-486-class. Which is, uh, funny you mention, because...

The MediaGX platform is built around a Cyrix Cx5x86 CPU core. As in, the one they released as an upgrade to 486 owners that was only most of a 6x86. The FSB is 33MHz. You'd think that'd mean poor memory performance, but in this case, that's a no -- it has an integrated memory controller capable of talking to SDRAM, and it runs the stick in it at 100MHz. It does not, however, have any L2 cache.

The sound is also surprising in some ways and a major letdown in others. It's fully capable under Windows, doing 44.1KHz at 16-bit in full-duplex. It does the job. In DOS it shows up as a SBPro or SB16 with no drivers or TSRs needed. You can usually set the resources for this SB emulation in the BIOS. The digital sound is whatever, that was never good under DOS on anything, really, but the FM emulation is... interesting. It's surprisingly accurate relative to how badly competitors like Crystal could get it so disastrously wrong, but... it's clearly emulation, and... it's in 11KHz, for some reason. So it sounds... weird. High accuracy, low fidelity. But it does work and from what I can tell nothing can really trip it up. I'll put it this way -- it's good enough that Creative wanted to sue because of it back in the day, but it's not good enough that anyone goes out of their way to get it for the sound today.

My particular example lacks the joystick port which I didn't USE to care about but now with my messing around with General MIDI and joysticks and gamepads it kinda stinks. But I have USB examples of the latter and a USB MIDI adapter from Yamaha with 98 drivers, so... I just miss out on it under DOS, it looks like. Not the end of the world. What use would a thin client have for a joystick port in its intended use case, anyway? ... Well, it has mic and line inputs too, so you'd think they'd just spend the extra 50 cents on a joystick connector and be done with it too, but... alas. This particular example also has a Realtek 8139 10/100 NIC onboard... with no boot ROM. No IPL for Netware, no PXE... what kind of thin client is this that it just... got away without being able to netboot? Anyway, I'm not usually a fan of Realtek, but in 9x, where networking is a CPU-intensive and slow process anyway, regardless of NIC, I don't care so much.

In benchmarks it can perform anywhere from roundabout P166 numbers or maybe a bit worse in floating-point heavy stuff, to P200-233 numbers in integer. So there is a range of Windows games it can play, even if it runs into a brick wall in about 1999. Half Life and C&C Tiberian Sun are probably about the most strenuous games I want to try on here. Stuff like Worms Armageddon, Age of Empires II, and Starcraft should be fine.

 

[sedrosken]

The integrated video is surprisingly competent in some areas and the whiplash between the highs and lows is kind of insane: using FastDoom to run in mode 13h like Heretic or Hexen does instead of mode Y as DOS Doom does by default has the high-detail sound-on results of benchmarking demo1 going from 22fps to 80.

Its Windows 9x driver is also apparently only built against DirectX5, so later stuff that tries to do DirectDraw shenanigans may or may not work depending on how gracefully they feel like falling back to older ddraw functions. Shockingly, the latest unofficial patch for Worms Armageddon does work without issue, after shunting the mode to 8-bit DirectDraw with the hardware cursor off and forcing it to 640x480 (it loves to run in 1024x768 instead despite what I tell it). But this old DirectDraw puzzle game, Flux, doesn't want to run, and neither does Snood 3.52 of all games. I'm going to have to track down an older version that isn't quite the DOS original, I guess.

Half-Life was a travesty. About 10fps in 320x240. UT99 was surprisingly similar despite how I considered it a more intensive game than Half Life was... Either Unreal's software renderer is actually pretty good, or GoldSrc's is just bad.

Tried a few different Quake variants, and the DOS port of Quake II, all of which do surprisingly okay, though of course engoo runs significantly worse than the original or the 486/586 optimized source ports, simply because it does so much more. Colored lighting, shadows, that kind of thing.

I was pleasantly surprised at how decently Tiberian Sun runs. I guess I'd never realized that it was closer to the old Red Alert engine than the vastly more intensive Red Alert 2 engine from a year later, which runs awfully on much more powerful rigs than this -- my old K6-III+ build couldn't handle it, even.

 

[sedrosken]

Some stuff I was surprised ran at all, albeit quite slowly:
Zuma Deluxe, Feeding Frenzy... in general I did not expect these mid-2000s shovelware (affectionate) titles to even launch, I just copied them over because... why not.

Some stuff I was surprised didn't:
Age of Empires 2. It just freezes after the intro cinematic. I almost wonder if it's some obscure problem with running on 98lite, I seem to recall it behaved similarly on my Pentium Pro build back when it ran 98lite. AoE1 runs fine. It makes me want to poke at it some more, especially on another SD card with regular Windows 98SE for testing. I'm not generally a fan of running the enhanced shell on stuff that's much slower than a Pentium II 450 or so.