ODwilly wrote:I would also like to add that if you buy an Abit board from that era even if the caps look good, the chances are that they will go bad soon or are already bad and you just can not tell.
+1; good call.
God Of Gaming wrote:Now that I look at it the Voodoo3 really is AGP, I didn't pay attention and thought it was PCI... There's 2 of these for sale nearby, that's why I thought I could pick this, maybe I should wait for a Voodoo2 which I see is PCI? Is a Voodoo2 strong enough for all Glide games?
Voodoo2 is slower than Voodoo3 (which may be a problem for later Glide games), nor is it a complete graphics card as you might expect. It's a 3D accelerator. It requires a separate 2D card (can be 2D/3D) to provide an image when it isn't running in 3D. It will also likely run fairly hot with an AthlonXP at the helm, which would be something to keep in mind. On the upside, you could add one (or two; in SLI) alongside whatever AGP card you like (like a GeForce 4) for Glide support. Assuming of course that the games you want to run in Glide are compatible and that you're okay with the performance limitations of the Voodoo2.
There actually are PCI-based Voodoo3 cards, but the prices have gotten silly recently. The same goes for Voodoo 4/5. 😊
And yes, I do want it for Glide, and I might look for another graphics card for games that don't support Glide. That's why I looked for a motherboard like this, with an AGP slot and as many PCI slots as I could find, so that I could just stick many expansion cards for different games and just unplug the cables behind the case when I'm done.
Stacking up a whole bunch of GPUs is not usually a great idea - it can create conflicts, be a general pain to deal with, and make a lot of waste heat. Much better to figure out exactly what you need to support, and target that. Unless you go with some obscure workstation card that nothing supports, you probably won't have too many support issues sticking with an nVidia, 3dfx, or ATi card. With 3dfx you can also consider SLI for the Voodoo2 if you're so inclined.
As for which games, well, let's just say ALL DOS/Win95/Win98 era games
That's far too broad.
For example, I see Half-Life supports A3D and EAX, and A3D is the superior sound api, but the only way to experience is with an aureal3d sound card, no way to emulate it under win7 like alchemy does for EAX. Or, for example, there's Colin McRae Rally 1 and win95 version of The Need For Speed SE, which were a pain in the ass to get to work under Windows XP and even then they were crashing all the time, but under Win7 I just gave up. I could play the need for speed se with dosbox, but it was not a satisfying experience either, with broken car videos and slowdowns in some areas of the track, also the CD stops spinning sometimes and the game laggs until it spins up again... Then there's the Glide games, I could get some to run with nGlide wrapper, but it didn't work for all that I tried.
I wouldn't get too hung up on "best" or "superior" - target "works" or "doesn't crash" first, and worry about the little details later. 😊
I think your original instincts towards the MX300 (since you want A3d) and Voodoo3 were pretty bang-on though; I'd just move away from the NF7-based platform for such a machine (for one thing, it isn't compatible with the Voodoo3).
What motheboard would you recommend? Some particular models to look for? In one other forum they recommended me to look for a ABIT KT7A or KT7A-RAID because it has ISA slot, and also add a Rendition v2200 graphics card to the build.
Why all the Abit boards and K7? I'd stay away unless you have the inclination (and time) to futz about with repairs. There was an ebay seller with Intel 440BX and 440BX2s in-box for reasonable prices not long ago - I'd look into one of those. Throw a decent P3 in there, grab your Voodoo3 and MX300, and you should be fine. If you find in the future that you need an ISA sound card, it'll support that too.
On newer boards with ISA you also have to be somewhat careful - they may not be fully compatible with soundcards, and the ISA slots largely exist for legacy support of industrial/scientific hardware that is cost prohibitive to replace. Give this a read: http://www.flaterco.com/kb/ISA_chipsets.html
A quick look and the Intel boards still appear to be available:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/390966414407
Of course you could go after any of the popular makes (e.g. Asus, Gigabyte, Tyan, etc) if you're so inclined. And don't write OEM machines like Dell and HP off entirely either - they're usually decently put together, aren't usually hard to find as complete systems (and for cheap, because nobody usually wants them), and can be an easy path to what you're looking for with a few add-on parts. Once they got into the P3 era they tended to stick to ATX or mATX (I've seen Slot 1 LPX systems with Pentium IIs, but never AGP-based Pentium 3 variants), so you could re-case into whatever you like as well. I have a Dell i815 board that I've done this with, since the original case fell apart.
Remember that older Dell PSUs may use a non-standard pinout on the ATX 20-pin connector though. Adapters do exist, and aren't terribly expensive. Some of the OEM Dell PSUs are pretty respectable though (assuming they're still in good working order of course).
Gonna add ram sticks with heatshields just for the looks, Im gonna put this build in some sort of case with a side window. They're cheap anyways, that pair of Geils is just 4 euros.
If you want something very flashy, Corsair had some DIMMs with LED lights at one point. I think some of them you could even program to display certain patterns. Try looking for "XMS Pro" or "XMS Extreme" or "TwinX" or something like that. I forget if Crucial BallistiX is available as DDR1, but those light up too.
If you go with the 440-platform though, you'll be using SDRAM. You can still affix heat spreaders if you like, but I'm not aware of any SDRAM with flashy LEDs. 😊
If you want something that requires heat spreaders, you can always go for an i820/i850 build and use RDRAM. 🤣
tayyare wrote:As far as I can see from the posts in the forum, "Windows 95/98 retro PC" is a very popular subject, and there are many topics covering that, so if you do some digging here in this forum, you will find many valuable suggestions.
If you ask me, here are the major components that I would suggest (and happily use in real life). Please note that I'm considering your requirement is playing almost pure 95/98 games (i.e. early/non XP) with occasional late DOS (1995-1996) games
I agree with your overall to your suggestions 😀 , but I had a few comments on graphics and sound:
Graphics: First of all, PCI is for 486/early Pentium machines, for PII and up you should definitely go for an AGP card. My suggestion would be anything Geforce2 (Ultra?)/ Geforce4 (Ti4xxx but even MX would be ok) and in between the two. The PIII boards I use are almost always AGP 4X boards, so I have no problems regarding card/MB compatibility with the cards mentioned above. Most people here does not prefer ATI cards for that era, but I have no experience with them to speak about. NVidia was and is my only choice from the very beginning, I don't know why. 🤣 By the way, you could always add a couple of Voodoo2's in SLI mode if you also want to taste the good old days of Glide. It is definitely a matter of taste, and depends on which games you want to play.
GeForce 2 Ultra is a fine card, but some of them can have VGA output quality issues (it's a per-vendor/per-board issue; some AIBs went cheap on the output filters). I have an eVGA that is generally fine once drivers are loaded in Windows, but can exhibit the "wavy lines" in DOS-mode from time to time. They're also not the most common things on the planet. GeForce 4 MX is essentially the same GPU as the GeForce 2 series (they're all NV1x based; DX7 and h/w TnL support, but no PS), but adds VPE, LMA, and MSAA support. Watch out for boards that went cheap on the RAM though (true of any entry-level/value card).
GeForce 2/3/4 Ti/FX are all universal AGP cards, and will work on 3.3V slots ("AGP 4x" can actually be 1.5V keyed, as on early Pentium 4 systems with 845/850 chipsets; I'm not aware of any 1.5V 4x cards though). The biggest advantages I see for the FX series are dual-link DVI (some of the Quadro variants support this (like FX 3000), but none of the consumer GeForce-branded cards do), and potentially higher performance (especially with the 5700 and above) which would be a benefit if you're targeting higher resolution output. If you're planning to hook up to a modern monitor and want to support high resolutions and DVI, a Quadro FX would be a good candidate. Note that Voodoo2 will not do DVI for pass-through.
From what I understand, ATi never had such dramatic inconsistency with their analog video output quality. However if you're limiting yourself to Windows 9x, you will have broken table fog for all Radeon cards (it was fixed in a driver update that only supports Windows 2000 and above 😵 ). I'm a little leery of R300-based cards (mostly Radeon 9 series) as I've had a few of them cook themselves to death (and have heard of similar stories from others), but wouldn't say that's a guaranteed problem. Some of the older models, like Radeon 8500, support TruForm, which could be a consideration for some games.
Sound: I'm ok with mediocre sound, so my tastes are not so sophisticated when it comes to this subject. People here are sometimes go far when it comes to sound and MIDI, with all the rare and pricey hardware. I'm not one of them, so my suggestion would be a SB Live (too many versions of this card are around, so you need to do some research first) as a pure w9x card, and SB AWE64 for DOS compatibility, if required (providing that you choose a MB with ISA slots). You can even put two of them together.
+1 on SB Live. I've personally got both an "original" variant, and a Dell OEM variant - they seem to work equally well. I've heard that the Dell OEM cards will cry about the Creative driver package, but I've never tested that out myself - I just grab the drivers from the Dell support website and don't worry about it. 😊