[Hardware] Dual-core and/or SMP + Win9x/ME

[Elektron]

On 1 Nov, 2005, at 04:06, Vadim Tukaev wrote:

>>> Scenario:
>>> 1.I want separate computer for gaming ONLY. AFAIK, best OS for this 
>>> purpose is Win98 (all my friends, who have skills in Windows, say 
>>> thus).
>> Many new games require NT-based systems.
>
> You enlighten me! Please, give me names of few games of that kind.

I can't name any off hand, since I don't play games much. You'd have to 
ask my brother.

>> Win98 may also have more DirectX bugs
>
> What sort of bugs?

The one where an app crashes DirectX, and nothing that uses DX will run 
until you reboot.

>> No, it certainly is possible. All you need to do is write an OS that 
>> runs Windows 'under' it, on one of the CPUs. I'm not sure how it'll 
>> handle all the hardware stuff (or whether it's even possible to make 
>> a small amount of memory invisible from one of the CPUs) - that might 
>> have a performance penalty.
>
> Are you talking about Virtual Machines, such as Virtual PC or SViSta.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'virtual machine' (which isn't 
particularly well-defined), but no, I'm talking about something more 
like VMware (or there's some free thing that lets you run linux inside 
linux).

>> And games do not 'require' any amount of CPU time. They generally use 
>> as much as they can (I suppose they might sleep if the framerate is 
>> capped).
>
> I mean: this game work fine on 2.7GHz and higher. So, using processor 
> higher than 2.7GHz is pointless. I get nothing upgrading it to 3.0GHz.

It depends on what you mean by 'working fine'. Almost all games will 
run marginally better at higher clock speeds. And then, there's no easy 
way to tell a game to only use such-and-such an amount of CPU time.


It should be possible to make a cheap hack that will start dnetc 
running on any 'extra' processors (using what memory I have no clue), 
and then boot to Win 98, which should happily ignore the extra 
processors.

How to get it to return results is another exercise entirely.

You may also be able to write a dll that will let things run on extra 
CPUs.

- Purr