At least on all 3 of my 486 boards a Voodoo3 won't even post anyway.

Voodoo3 works on my MSI-4144 486 PCI mobo with SiS 496/497. I even got it running 3D games once I got some old drivers that didn't require Pentium instructions.

But it is ridiculous overkill and puts off too much heat. S3 Virge or some such all the way.

Oh and I definitely recommend Windows 95 on 486s. It is so much faster than 98 due to its lighter shell, installs faster because it's smaller, etc.

True, but I was wondering wether Windows 98SE would possibly be more stable. And it should be possible to tweak 98 into running much lighter. Also iirc 98 is a lil more efficient with memory leakage

Lol, I never tried a Voodoo 3 on a 486 mainboard. And it's indeed serious overkill!

Tetrium wrote:

I think I'll build 3 systems, with one each
Yes I'm nuts 😜

You remind me of me. 😉

Tetrium wrote:

True, but I was wondering wether Windows 98SE would possibly be more stable. And it should be possible to tweak 98 into running much lighter. Also iirc 98 is a lil more efficient with memory leakage

One of 98lite's options turns 98 into 95 essentially by using 95's shell. Arguing about their relative stability isn't worth the effort 🤣. I just stick with the MS releases because I don't want to deal with problems that arise from mod jobs.

Tetrium wrote:

True, but I was wondering wether Windows 98SE would possibly be more stable.

It will.

Despite the hype hell on how crap Windows 98 is in its heyday for being a bsody hog, Win98SE isn't even torture on a 486. Works best with 98lite w/ w95 shell, though.

98SE is definitely considerably slower on a 486 than 95C. There's nothing to argue there. Unless you want to blow time modding 98SE into using 95's shell.

And yes all 9x OSs are fundamentally unstable. But considering all we do here is game on these systems it doesn't really matter. It tends to get nastier the newer the hardware too, once you have stuff like ACPI and lots of IRQ sharing going on.

There are some community mods for Win95 OSR2 that make it, in my experience, just as stable as 98SE on pre-'98 machines, but without the speed disadvantage. Might just wanna go that route rather than screwing around trying to hack 98SE.

Thats a good idea actually. Another idea is to install both 95 and 98se on 1 system (using 2 seperate harddrives so they don't mess with each other).

I'm also still undecided which CPU to use on which motherboard.
I'd like to pick the best motherboard for the POD83 first, then 'go down the line' for the 2 5x86's
I'm considering the pvi-486sp3 and the Abit PV4T (both have PS/2 mouse ports and are PCI, so they should be relatively simple to set up)

I also want to build one VLB system, even though I have no good graphics adapters for VLB.
My sole VLB board doesn't support 3.3V chips though, so there the choice is either the POD83, Kingston Turbochip or the Evergreen 5x86

There's also the fun of reliving the excitement that was around when 95 first came out. That OS was such a huge jump up from Windows 3.1 on every level.

swaaye wrote:

There's also the fun of reliving the excitement that was around when 95 first came out. That OS was such a huge jump up from Windows 3.1 on every level.

Definately.

I didn't own a computer back then but my friends did. They went straight from DOS to Windows 95 with a whopping 8 megs of ram! ;D
Later they upgraded their Pentium 90 to a 166MMX and a Rendition 2100 + Voodoo 1 and went to 24MB ram!

My first computer was a P2 350 so I never owned anything older when it was new. I did make up for that later though