Weren't most VLB systems based on a 486, which topped out at a 50 MHz bus speed? All of the DX2 and DX4 chips have 25 MHz and 33 MHz system buses, which most VLB cards are perfectly happy with from my memory.

Which OS and driver version are you using? You may need to choose an older driver than the newest one that supported your GPU in question, since Homeworld 2 came out in 2003 if I remember correctly. Drivers from circa 2004 may have the best chance of working? For a 9700 Pro, I'd recommend the …

I found that for the Z77-based MSI motherboard I bought in 2013, I was still getting slightly better (to my ears on my speaker setup) sound out of my Xonar DSX than I did from the on-board audio. My now 5-year old Gigabyte X470 board has on-board audio that is at least as good (again, in my …

If you don't mind waiting for one to pop up, an Orpheus II LT would be the ideal ISA card to pair with the Dreamblaster, since it seems to have excellent compatibility and audio quality along with a real OPL3. I pair my X2GS with a Sound Blaster 16 that I purchased in 2020 and it works fairly well …

I grabbed a Leadtek GeForce 2 GTS for about $30 two years ago, and it's been rock solid stable for me aside from a dead fan. I've made sure that there's enough air movement across the heatsink and I'm not overclocking it, and so far it's behaved well in my Windows 98 PC.

If you plan on only doing 3D gaming on the Voodoo 2, then an ATI Rage Pro Turbo would be a good 2D card to pair it with. I've done it myself, and it works pretty well! The 2D image quality is exceptional, the cards can be had inexpensively in AGP or PCI versions, and the performance in 2D games is …

That's very likely a typo and they meant to put Pentium III there. Quality control for motherboard manuals was pretty relaxed at that time, and there were more than a few times that I found outright errors. Never mind the fact that translations were often... less than perfect in that period.

Someone local was giving away a massive stash of old computer parts, and I mentioned that if he had any AGP cards like a TNT2 Ultra I'd take them off his hands. He replied with "I have a Viper V550 and a Rage Fury MAXX." I immediately grabbed them and offered $20 (he was going to give them to me for …

Overall, "period correct" machines are not enough to play id games comfortably. I was about to write "that's true up until about Rage came out," then I thought a bit more and realized that id's game engines and performance went something like this: Commander Keen (1990-1991): 286 or 386 were …

I just had the strangest thing happen to my Rage Pro Turbo in the past couple of weeks. I'd installed the 2002 drivers under DirectX 8 like I always have, but when I tried to launch DOS games under Windows that used VESA SVGA moves I'd get a blank screen while the game continued to play in the …

This may seem like an obvious question, but is the CD-audio muted in the mixer? I know that on a SB Live if you have "What U Hear" selected as a recording source, sometimes the analog CD audio can get muted if you have your Line-In un-muted. I also ran into a similar problem thinking that my Vortex …

The AWE64 is about as good as it gets for an ISA sound card for me. It has excellent 16-bit audio quality, great compatibility since it runs pretty much as a Sound Blaster 16, and decent enough wavetable support. It also works extraordinarily well under Windows 9X. If it had actual OPL3 and a …

I am not sure if someone has tried it, but someone asked the same thing at Anandtech back in 2001 . It looks like the extra pads were for variants of the card that used less dense SDRAM instead of SGRAM, rather than trying to double the memory to 32 MB. Even if somehow the graphics hardware could …

I had an ATI Rage Pro Turbo as my first 3D accelerator. It was on a PII-300 with 64 MB of RAM in 1998, and it was simultaneously a revelation and a source of pain. The 2D quality was spectacular, and a lot of 3D games looked... well, good enough. But it never could do alpha blending properly, no …