personally I use a K6-II + voodoo3 because it has enough power to run svga modes in games like Blood, you can play win98/d3d games of the era fine , and it behaves better than pII/400 and above in older DOS games. Another reason for me is that ss7 mobos have ps2 ports, usb and pci slots that work fine... not of gaming interest but makes life easier on the machine... I never had a Kx AMD cpu btw 😀

One of my ideas is to take a classic Pentium MMX and run it at 200 and 300 mhz. I want it to be more of a dedicated dos and Windows 98 platform, and hopefully something of a permanent home for my Voodoo 2 SLI setup, at least until I decide to get original Voodoo Graphics. Otherwise I'll get a K6 and virtually rebuild what was my first PC that I had all to myself.

yeah but, the compaq i had wouldn't come close to fitting a p3 board and iahd already doesn a nicie case theme besides a hopped up socket 7 would be great ro 95 or 98se and games like comand and conqure series and mybe gta 3 with really good pci gfx card 😀

prophase_j wrote:

....hopefully something of a permanent home for my Voodoo 2 SLI setup, at least until I decide to get original Voodoo Graphics.

Voodoo2 SLI will be CPU limited with anything under like a P3 700 or so. Just thinking of how say Quake 3 and UT99 will run. A 300 MHz Pentium MMX would probably not max out a single Voodoo2 because a Pentium II 300 can't and a PII 300 is definitely faster.

You should try out a Voodoo3 IMO instead of the V2SLI. You get a better image because of the removal of all the passthrus and you get really great 2D to boot. And I think even a V3-2000 is a bit faster. I actually discovered that a Voodoo 5 5500 works with some Voodoo2 DOS games! Now that clears up any GPU limits u once had!

cdoublejj wrote:

socket 7 ... and mybe gta 3 with really good pci gfx card 😀

That would be horribly slow. Completely unusable. You don't even want to have to play Quake 3 or UT99 on a K6-III+ IMO. GTA3 is Athlon XP / P4 territory, with at least like a Radeon 9700 or so. That game is a hog.

rumor is a blakcjack 1 or 2 with a tweak version of playstation emulator pushed 10 fps on gta 3 keep in mind this is smart phone good for laughs. so even with a 512 9xxx nividia pci card it would lag because of the bus speed and the gfx would still limited to cpu correct?

I ran GTA3 on a PIII-550 with a Geforce2 MX (I think?) and it was playable but had some minor slowdowns in a few places. My memory may be faulty because it wasn't long before I upgraded to an Athlon XP.

swaaye wrote:

Voodoo2 SLI will be CPU limited with anything under like a P3 700 or so.

Defiantly aware of that. It's just that I plan on doing some restructuring as I build up a new retro computer, and I don't want to leave them "homeless".

swaaye wrote:

You should try out a Voodoo3 IMO instead of the V2SLI. You get a better image because of the removal of all the passthrus and you get really great 2D to boot. And I think even a V3-2000 is a bit faster. I actually discovered that a Voodoo 5 5500 works with some Voodoo2 DOS games! Now that clears up any GPU limits u once had!

When I first started out in retro-land I had a V3-2000, but I gave it to a friend who was a Diablo II die hard when I got my Voodoo 5. My understanding is that anything that won't work on the V5 won't work on the V3 either, so not seeing too much reason to go back. Once I get my C2D back up and running, I'm going to stick my V5 back in my Athlon system and leave it as a dedicated late 90's Shooters/Adventure box.

yes you probably did run it on a p3 the minimum requirments are 400 or 500 mhz cpu when i was younger are pc was an under clocked p2 and i had gta 3 on it even c&c renegade and it ran xp!!! man did that computer really suck sometimes, are pc guy had upgraded the ram and gfx card on it. i always crt atl del it and shut down extra crap to play games but it ran them.

That machine was the first computer I bought with my own money and the second that I built. It started as a PII-450 with Win98 and a 16MB AGP nVidia Riva TNT1 when Unreal was new and a bit before Half-Life 1 was released. Later it got a GeForce2MX so that it could run Black & White. Later it ran Win2K, and then it eventually got a PIII-550 CPU and (I thnk) WinXP. I ran games as new as Morrowind on it once or twice but it was almost unplayable.

Eventually it got re-purposed as parts for a desktop for my mom who now uses a laptop instead, so now it lives in a closet gathering dust :p I ought to do something with it, but it's too fast for older DOS games and too slow for newer Windows games.

some times i paint the case and cd drive bezels up real nice and make a nice xp machine out of them. i have a nice purple 98se machine i need to document and post up sometime. gonna buy some pII systems from a local shop tomorrow for like 10 bucks each, thinking of making one a dual p2 machine and sell the rest for internet machines after i fix 'em with some spit shine and maybe some paint.

Just for a bit of fun, I tested a socket 7 mobo with a P166MMX CPU + 64mb RAM, with a couple of Creative Voodoo2 12mb accelerators in SLI mode. glQuake gives me 60.4 fps @ 1024x768 resolution, which I thought was quite respectable! (Quake 2 provided far less impressive fps stats.)

A P166MMX can pull probably just shy of 40 fps in pure software mode 320x200 in Quake 1. So with a 3D card offloading a lot of the work, 60fps isn't surprising really. If you could run with a single V2 @ 1024, I wouldn't be surprised if the results were the same.

i did that big test with all those CPUs recently. 😀

I disabled SLI mode inside the Voodoo2 display control panel, and reran glQuake, but it failed to run - maybe because a single Voodoo2 cannot run at 1024x768 resolution? So, I reran the following tests, all in 800x600 resolution -

Test #1 (SLI, 800x600, 3dfx) = 70.5 fps (is this a "capped" result, I wonder?)
Test #2 (SLI disabled, 800x600, 3dfx) = 54.0 fps
Test #3 (winquake.exe, "software mode", 320x200) = 38.4 fps

(All tests run using the "timedemo demo2" console command.)

This archived webpage is interesting - it's full of Quake benchmark results:

http://web.archive.org/web/19961223112037/htt … gena/quake.html

Yup the Voodoo2 can only do 800x600 unless you pair them up and then you get 1024x768.

Oh my. You've unearthed one of the ancient Quake Timedemo sites! I remember going to that site way back when. That one is so crusty that it only has VQuake results for hardware accelerated Quake, no GLQuake stuff at all. Fun stuff.

Unearthed? sounds like a fossil!

swaaye wrote:

Yup the Voodoo2 can only do 800x600 unless you pair them up and then you get 1024x768

Yet another good point for going with the V2 SLI instead of V1. The latter models sacrifice compatibility, are even more under-utilized due to the CPU, and keep you from using some other interesting card like S3 or Rendition. As for as the pass through; I have always used it on my retro since I had the cards, even now it goes through a KVM switch, running at a desktop resolution of 1280x1024 and it's a non-issue.