Built a S3 Trio/Virge driver from ground up. Need help testing

Built a S3 Trio/Virge driver from ground up. Need help testing

Hi Guys,

I've been building a VGA driver from the ground up. The long term goal is to add support for more VGA chipsets and maybe VLB support or even OpenGL. If I can add some features that didn't exist in the native drivers that would be cool.

I'm a long way off that, but have some basic DirectDraw and Direct3D support.

I'm really keen to get some help to test. I've primarily only tested in 86box in Windows 98se but plan to test on my real hardware soon.

https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x Here is current release version: https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x/releases/tag/v0.3

Requirements:

  • Windows 98se
  • S3 ViRGE/DX 86C375 or S3 Trio32/64 86C764 PCI video card

If you don't have a supported video card I've love if you can run this tool to collect info about your card, for now I will focus on S3 cards. This tool also runs under DOS.

https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x/releases/tag/survey-v1 / https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x/releases/download/survey-v1/V9XSURV.EXE

This has been written with Claude & ChatGPT.

Here is a screenshot of the settings page.

https://preview.redd.it/29tlmtxnphjh1.png?width=405&format=png&auto=webp&s=50ca6b63b697addcdab03fe8632ba58e26cec84e

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u/mwdmeyer — 5 days ago

90s style RTS

Hey All,

I've been wanting to build an old school RTS game for 486/pentium machines. It is written in C++ and using DirectDraw so that it will work on Windows 95 machines.

There is still a lot to go but I've got it working in a web browser and would love some feedback. The interface and design needs a lot more work but the basic game play and path finding should work well now.

Let me know what you think, it is called IronField https://starrts.vogonswiki.com/ironfield/

I will be posting exe/win9x versions once I have tested on my Pentium 233MMX machine.

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u/mwdmeyer — 29 days ago

90s style RTS

Hey All,

I've been wanting to build an old school RTS game for 486/pentium machines. It is written in C++ and using DirectDraw so that it will work on Windows 95 machines.

There is still a lot to go but I've got it working in a web browser and would love some feedback. The interface and design needs a lot more work but the basic game play and path finding should work well now.

Let me know what you think, it is called IronField https://starrts.vogonswiki.com/ironfield/

I will be posting exe/win9x versions once I have tested on my Pentium 233MMX machine.

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u/mwdmeyer — 29 days ago
▲ 5 r/ClaudeAI+1 crossposts

Retro RTS with Codex

Hey Guys,

I've had codex build me a retro RTS style game, it is written in C++ and is designed to compile on Windows 95 and work on 486/Pentium machines using DirectDraw. It has been really good at working out path finding and various tweaks to make it run faster on older machines.

I've setup a version that should work in your web browser and would love some feedback.

It is called IronField https://starrts.vogonswiki.com/ironfield/

u/mwdmeyer — 28 days ago
▲ 3 r/Vllm+1 crossposts

Help with vLLM and Dual R9700 ROCM Qwen3.6 27B

Hi Guys,

I've just got my Dual R9700 system up and running. I was able to get a simple Qwen3 8B model running over both GPUs but I am struggling to get 27B running.

vLLM is stuck with 100% GPU on both cards and reporting:

[shm_broadcast.py:705] No available shared memory broadcast block found in 60 seconds. This typically happens when some processes are hanging or doing some time-consuming work (e.g. compilation, weight/kv cache quantization).

This is after: [monitor.py:81] Initial profiling/warmup run took 761.13 s

So, it does seem to be starting. I left overnight and still it had not booted.

I'm using:

  • Debian 13
  • Qwen3.6-27B-FP8
  • vLLM 0.24.0

My startup script is:

User=xxx
Group=xxx
WorkingDirectory=/home/xxx

Environment=PATH=/home/xxx/.venv/bin:/opt/openmpi-4.1.8/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

Environment=NCCL_P2P_DISABLE=1
Environment=RCCL_P2P_DISABLE=1
Environment=VLLM_CACHE_ROOT=/home/xxx/.cache/vllm
Environment=TRITON_CACHE_DIR=/home/xxx/.triton/cache
Environment=LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/openmpi-4.1.8/lib
Environment=HIP_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1
Environment=OMP_NUM_THREADS=1
Environment=NCCL_DEBUG=WARN
Environment=VLLM_LOGGING_LEVEL=INFO
Environment=VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1
Environment=VLLM_ROCM_USE_AITER_UNIFIED_ATTENTION=1
Environment=VLLM_ROCM_USE_AITER=1
ExecStart=/home/xxx/.venv/bin/vllm serve /models/Qwen3.6-27B-FP8 \     --host 0.0.0.0 \     --port 8000 \     --gpu-memory-utilization 0.90 \     --max-model-len 65536 \     --enable-auto-tool-choice \     --tool-call-parser hermes \     --trust-remote-code \     --tensor-parallel-size 2

Any suggestions would be amazing.

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u/mwdmeyer — 2 months ago

Recommend me a board with Dual PCIE off CPU

Hi Guys,

I'm planning to run Dual Radeon R9700 GPUs and need a motherboard that has 2x PCIE slots (16x size, 8x speed is ok) running off the CPU for LLMs.

I have found a few X870 boards but I'm not sure which is best. I'm also okay with Intel if that makes sense.

My other LLM machine is running a ASRock X870E Taichi Lite but these have a bad rep for killing CPUs (mine is okay currently); I've always had good luck with Gigabyte motherboards.

If there is a board that can do 3x PCIe 8x then even better.

I was reading Intel CPU/mobo might be better. I just need PCIE lanes and don't want to go all the way to epyc/xeon.

CPU would be something like a 9700x or 265k

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u/mwdmeyer — 2 months ago
▲ 2 r/gigabyte+1 crossposts

Recommend me a board with Dual PCIE (running in 8x mode)

Hi Guys,

I'm planning to run Dual Radeon R9700 GPUs and need a motherboard that has 2x PCIE slots (16x size, 8x speed) running off the CPU for LLMs.

I have found a few X870 boards but I'm not sure which is best. I'm also okay with Intel if that makes sense as well.

My other LLM machine is running a ASRock X870E Taichi Lite but these have a bad rep for killing CPUs (mine is okay currently) and I've always had good luck with Gigabyte.

It needs to be avaiable in Australia. If there is a board that can do 3x PCIe 8x then even better.

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u/mwdmeyer — 2 months ago

Hey guys, I've always liked to benchmark Socket 7 machines and wanted to find a benchmark tool to replicate 2D RTS style games. I've written a little command line benchmark tool I'd love you guys to test (if possible on real hardware!).

[https://starrts.vogonswiki.com/downloads/stwin091.exe\](https://starrts.vogonswiki.com/downloads/stwin091.exe)

I've also created a website where people can submit their score, if your 98 machine has network access then you can submit directly.

[https://starrts.vogonswiki.com/\](https://starrts.vogonswiki.com/)

Would love some feedback.

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u/mwdmeyer — 4 months ago
▲ 22 r/macintosh+1 crossposts

I've been working on some retro benchmark software recently for DOS/Win9x machines and decided to port it to MacOS classic/68k and would love you guys to test it!

I've tested on my LC 475 with full 68040/FPU and MacOS 7.5.5 and also on Mac 9.2.1 in a VM.

Download: https://starrts.vogonswiki.com/downloads/StarRTSBench100.bin

It can be a bit slow to run but it would be great if some people to test it and give me any feedback.

https://preview.redd.it/2dvp79uvr3zg1.png?width=1578&format=png&auto=webp&s=f09ce32ab0abe6a81deb703d4e793541f9286597

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u/mwdmeyer — 4 months ago

Hey Guys,

I've written a little benchmark program for Win9x and would love some people to try it on real hardware. It is designed to replicate 2D RTS style performance profile of the late 90s games (e.g Starcraft).

https://starrts.vogonswiki.com/downloads/stwin07.exe

If your Win98 machine is connected to the internet it can also (optionally) submit to a small online database: https://starrts.vogonswiki.com/

If anyone has a Cyrix machine to test that would be cool!

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u/mwdmeyer — 4 months ago