Gday everyone, today we're going to revist the microbyte machine I showed late last year.
There have been a few developments and were
a few comments on that video I thought I'd address today.
One of the major drawbacks of the mircobyte machine is not being able to add a sound
card. Fortunately for me there are some nifty parallel port devices available.
The one I bought is the OPL3LPT from serdashop earlier this year. I initially had some challenges
getting it to work, mostly as I was trying to use the TSR rather than patching game executables.
The TSR requires EMM386 in order to run,
I spent some time trying to get it to work. I tried multiple different
settings and configurations trying to get the memory manager to install with no success.
I suspect it could be the version of MS-DOS that's on this machine which is a specially modified 3.3.
At this point I could have tried a boot disk to boot something newer, but I thought I'd try out
the executable patcher that you can download. It doesn't support compressed executables so you'll
also need to download UNP, a program which will decompress them for you. I did this to
four games which turned out quite well. Here's a quick sample of the audio for each one of them.
I hope you'll agree the audio sounds awesome and is quite
a significant improvement for this machine. I recorded the footage using line-in for audio,
so that's why PC speaker sound that goes with these games is absent.
After looking into how to program for it, I decided I'd be able to add support
to my own game. Because there was already adlib support it wasn't too hard to add.
Another issue I've had with this computer is the poor capture quality,
which has been quite mysterious to me as the same setup doesn't have jailbars with other hardware.
One commenter on the previous video suggested I check out the phase setting for my capture
device. I had a go with this and did find I was able to make the text mode look much better,
but the jailbars returned in graphics mode.
Up until this point I've been using OBS to capture footage on the software side,
which fortunately does allow me to tune the capture settings.
The device of course came with it's own capture software which I decided to try out.
Here's some footage from jill of the jungle captured with the default settings for the card.
Using the old software seems to give better results, but the reason for this is the old
encoder essentially dropping the jailbars, which still appear on better codecs. I won't
be using the old software because it has a few distinct disadvantages, one being the massive
file size for short recordings, but also poor compression and not eliminating the jailbars.
So I returned to OBS, I found that I basically need to retune the settings
for each graphic or text mode, with the phase making the largest difference. I've not been
able to completely remove the jail bars, but it's possible to improve the image somewhat.
Something I noticed that may be the reason for poor capture in commander keen
is the screen border. it doesn't show up in the capture, but commander keen has a cyan border
on the CRT screen. I think this probably messes with the capture card and throws off the colour.
A few people had some comments about the possibility of increasing performance.
I gave a few things a try, such as setting address ranges to shadow in the BIOS,
and trying trident driver software, but nothing seemed to make any difference.
I did stumble upon a config.sys setting that allowed this special version of DOS
to use some of the high memory area for the stacks, buffers, and files.
It also seems to load himem there. This saves a bunch of conventional RAM making it a bit
easier to run some software. on the other hand it makes no difference to performance.
I was hoping I could get the trident software to help with the poor display for commander keen,
but there wasn't anything that helped. There is a possibility that the software for adjusting
the trident CRTC may improve the capture quality I'm getting. I need more time to do some trials
and to figure out how this software works.
That just about covers everything that I intended to look at today,
I'd like to thank everyone who commented with suggestions for improvements.
Adjusting the phase on the capture card in particular worked quite well.
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Thanks for watching and I'll catch ya next time