Project - using a p133 in 2018

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cryptotooth

Reputable
Jun 3, 2014
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Hi!
I am now in possession of a Pentium 133, 64mb simm ram and 1gb hard drive, currently running Windows 98se. I have a sound card and ethernet adapter all working well, but for the purpose of a YouTube video my question is, doesn't anyone know what software or tweaks I can use to get this pc with kernel ex to run at least some modern day low end purposes eg YouTube or office tasks. Memory seems to be a limiting factor right now as loading a website almost completely freezes the pc. But the CPU wants to handle it. Is there any software to load data like websites into the page file instead of straight to ram? I tried puppy Linux but it was barely any better performance.
 
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BFG-9000

BFG-9000

Splendid
Sep 17, 2016
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No chance because a 486 could barely decode .mp3 music files in real-time. Your P133 can be up to about twice as powerful as a fast 486 depending on what kind of L2 cache it has, and you are trying to play video with it? Even though Youtube won't push VP9 on any browser that runs in Win9x, there is no hardware acceleration for H.264 with any driver + hardware combination in 9x so it will all fall to the poor CPU. There was a reason why 20 years ago MPEG2 hardware decoder PCI cards were all the rage--it was the only way to smoothly play DVD on the PCs of the time. H.264 is several orders of magnitude more CPU intensive than MPEG2.

Keep in mind also the main memory was asynchronous. You may think the RAM should be OK because it's on a 66MHz bus, but you see the 60ns or 70ns printed right on the chips? It means that 70ns runs at an effective speed of 14.3MHz if it were SDRAM, and 60ns is equivalent to 16.7MHz. That's why if you run a memory benchmark you'll only get about 35MB/s for RAM bandwidth--about the same as USB 2.0 today.

To make matters worse, many boards of the time had either a chipset limitation or lack of a TAG ram socket, so exceeding the cacheable limit (often 64MB) would cause a further ~40% severe performance loss.

If you were lucky enough not to have a CMD640 or RZ1000 for i/o (only PIO Mode3 and worse, had a data corruption issue so the driver workaround in every OS further reduced performance), then Intel's PIIX supported PIO Mode4 + Multiword DMA Mode2 (both 16.7MB/s) was better but still not something you'd want to page to.

 
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