ncmark wrote:

Interesting - are ISA sound cards really going to slow you down that much?

I once used a SB 64 ISA in a K6-2/333-sih rig of mine with 98SE and the system was definitely slow. Though I can't be sure the problem was at the hands of the ISA card though.

k6-2/333? That sounds like it used a 66 MHz bus. I have used them and in my opinion the K6-2's were pretty underpowered.

The SB16 PCI is a rebranded Ensoniq AudioPCI and those are very basic sound chips. But they still have the advantage of lower CPU use on bus transfers than an ISA card.

You can absolutely run an ISA and a PCI sound card at the same time. Run that AWE64 alongside a Live or Vortex 2 and you have a very flexible setup. If you don't care about soundfonts (Windows MIDI), I'd go Vortex 2 because A3D does an impressive 2 speaker 3D audio spatialization.

Most PCI sound cards install a Sound Blaster Legacy Device in Windows. This isn't actually a hardware device. It's almost entirely a software emulator of an ISA sound card. You can disable it in device manager and this will usually disable the DOS driver as well. You definitely want to do this if you are using an ISA sound card because the two will not get along.

ncmark wrote:

k6-2/333? That sounds like it used a 66 MHz bus. I have used them and in my opinion the K6-2's were pretty underpowered.

Yeah the K6 is not well designed for 3D games. You really want a Pentium 2/3 for your Half Life / Unreal box. I've seen a P3-450 outperform a K6-III+ 600 in Unreal Tournament. A little experiment I did years ago with a Voodoo5.

K6's fail mostly has to do with its MMX implementation - it's REALLY bad. I know Serious Sam on a P2 400 vs. a K6-2 500 is quite polarizing (you can't play the final level on a K6). Battlezone II makes the same kind of results, even with the K6-2 boasting 100mhz fsb, it even somewhat falls behind the P2 Klamaths.

Also, if you want a perfect Unreal box, it absolutely MUST be single core. Even for UE2 games, a single core is ideal.

Making a "half-life box" translates to "opengl box" but remember some commercial games crash when your video card reports too many supported GL extensions due to a string buffer limit in the engine to read the extensions string. So, something not a Geforce2 or better would be ideal there for that situation. (Voodoo5 perhaps?)

How about a TNT2 Ultra? That would be roughly period correct and was quite happy with Q3, HL and UT.

TNT2 Ultra is not great for Unreal. You really must choose a Voodoo 2/3/4/5 because the Unreal engine's D3D & OpenGL support is far inferior to its Glide option.

If you run a GeForce3+ you could use UTGLR / OldUnreal on XP though. But that's getting a bit outside of the period.

ncmark wrote:

k6-2/333? That sounds like it used a 66 MHz bus. I have used them and in my opinion the K6-2's were pretty underpowered.

The chip I used was a 333 part because I simply didn't have a faster part at the time. Also as the board was a SiS 5598, it had no 100Mhz FSB in the first place. Iirc I had it slightly underclocked @ 4 x 75Mhz.

Btw, I think the AMD chip was supposed to run @ 3.5 x 95Mhz instead of 5 x 66Mhz (one of those oddball FSB's Super 7 had).

Why do even monkey with Unreal 1/Gold and HL 1 it one thing if it wasn't working on the latest great hardware but they run on later hardware today and if look around you can even patch Unreal to a High Resolution Textures and as for HL there is High Resolution Textures Mods being work on coming soon someday we see know as Black Mesa.
Don't waste you time with old AMD CPU and VIA, SiS chipset and etc it best to stick to Intel.
For Pare Dos Game/Dos Windows it best stick with Intel Pentium 3 with Socket 1/370 and ISA Sound card and you want it base on BX becuases for PC133 there always the LX but it only dose PC100 and I don't think you find any i810/i815 or even i820 that need Rambus memory unless it i820E there hard to find any that had ISA and I don't recall who made them other then going with VIA and SiS motherboard and Socket 370 just beware the of VIA 686B southbridge it will cuases you problem.

Now if need more Power for Windows9x Games and your not worry about few Dos Game then your best beat is Pentium 4 with Intel 8xx chipsets and Sound Blasted Live, Audigy 1/2 I think there maybe have been drivers for the X-Fi but I don't know for on that or some things else that you like.
For Video card the last AGP made are nVidia GeForce 7800 or ATI HD4670 as Win9x dosen't support PCIe.

shspvr wrote:

Why do even monkey with Unreal 1/Gold and HL 1 it one thing if it wasn't working on the latest great hardware but they run on later hardware today and if look around you can even patch Unreal to a High Resolution Textures and as for HL there is High Resolution Textures Mods being work on coming soon someday we see know as Black Mesa.
Don't waste you time with old AMD CPU and VIA, SiS chipset and etc it best to stick to Intel.

Why waste time with the non-Intels?
Well, for one, one reason for us to mess with AMD/VIA/Cyrix is that the rigs we build around these chips are the reason for us to build those AMD/VIA/Cyrix rigs in the first place!

We all know that 98SE will run perfectly fine on Athlon XP/Netburst, but for us the fun is in making the hardware run, not the software per se 😜

shspvr wrote:

Why do even monkey with Unreal 1/Gold and HL 1 it one thing if it wasn't working on the latest great hardware but they run on later hardware today and if look around you can even patch Unreal to a High Resolution Textures and as for HL there is High Resolution Textures Mods being work on coming soon someday we see know as Black Mesa.

Maybe some of us don't like those "fan patches" as it might have too much creative liberty to bastardize or so (like applying excessive dumb community in-jokes and Ted Turner to everything in Duke3D HRP). I play only Unreal 200 without any hi-res crap or official patches (the later U patches change the sounds and remove some effects with some overproduced ones)

plus Unreal looks pretty sweet on PowerVR 😜

If i'm going to use a media patch, it'd be higher quality versions of the same assets. If it looks/sounds substantially different, then it's a no-go. One of the only wads I load for Doom is Per's 32khz's sounds wad for example since it's recreated sounds from using the original Sound Ideas cd Bobby Prince used to produce Doom sounds

I think some of the upgrades, fixes, user made levels etc. for Unreal are pretty impressive and quite faithful to the original game concept. I almost always run Unreal on the UT engine (launching from Unreal Tournament) and apply hundreds of fixes and mods, high res compressed textures / voice packs etc... The settings (and the maps themselves) I use in the game would send any Pentium 3 on its knees. My Opteron 170 (somewhere between a strong P4 and C2D) is the minimum for this job... And needless to say, one can forget about updated graphics with Glide, metal, even with D3D. OpenGL is the way to go.

It is indeed very subjective what one regards as the perfect metal (pun intended) for Unreal, not to mention Half-Life...

I have tried Unreal in many forms. 😀 it's a great game no matter what.

Of course it had the most impact on me back in 98 with my P2 and Voodoo1 so nostalgia kicks in for that setup.

shspvr wrote:

Don't waste you time with old AMD CPU and VIA, SiS chipset and etc it best to stick to Intel.........Socket 370 just beware the of VIA 686B southbridge it will cuases you problem......For Video card the last AGP made are nVidia GeForce 7800 or ATI HD4670 as Win9x dosen't support PCIe.

Why are AMD cpus a waste of time compared with Intel? The hardware tinkerers here are not seeking to always build the best config but rather to test out stuff and/ or relive some bygone era. Strictly speaking, if this weren't a hobby0 we're all guilty of wastin time with the old stuff.

VIA686B soutbridge or VIA s370/ Slot 1 boards are fine- I'm tired of hearing that they're problematic- most likely this myth is caused by some off- brands just like selling overclocked ss7 AMDs in the old days gave them a bad rep.

Nvidia 7xxx series and ATi 4xxx series cards might be available in AGP but they don't support Win9x.

Nvidia 7xxx series you just used the Nvidia 6xxx series but you had mod the INF to see 7xxx AGP as for ATI it can be done with ATi but need mod ATi 9xxx Catalyst 6.2 drivers INF I recall doing it on may old HD 3850 AGP.
I try both my SBLive and even the Audigy with this VIA686B even with official patch for VIA686B it still had problem after finely solving data corruption issues where I still see still experience some sound clicks and distortion while copying files, burning CDs, transferring data "network" or just capturing video and with hardware mpeg2 encoder like Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 250.

VIA's southbridges get a lot better starting with VT8233 but I've found AGP issues with the northbridges all the way up to K8T800 so I still don't think much of VIA myself.

I wonder if we have any fans of that SiS 735 chipset here. ECS K7S5A in particular. That had a little cult following. One of my friends adored it, and then he sat down at a nForce2 and couldn't get over how much snappier it felt 🤣

swaaye wrote:

VIA's southbridges get a lot better starting with VT8233 but I've found AGP issues with the northbridges all the way up to K8T800 so I still don't think much of VIA myself.

I wonder if we have any fans of that SiS 735 chipset here. ECS K7S5A in particular. That had a little cult following. One of my friends adored it, and then he sat down at a nForce2 and couldn't get over how much snappier it felt 🤣

I personally favor VIA actually (in part because NF runs much hotter...I checked on the net 😁 ), despite it's problems. Not every mix of hardware will work and as I have plenty parts anyway, it doesn't bother me all that much.

I'd like to get my hands on the K7S5A actually, despite it being an ECS 😜

I admit. I'm an Intel / Creative fanboy through and through 🤣

Oh I like Intel...as long as it's product doesn't have anything to do with netburst 😜

I admit I uesd be an Intel fanboy my self but that only in early model, But now I'm AMD fanboy of K8/K10 core architecture only reason why becuases Intel i7 are just dran high cost when they frist come out and the way over prices motherboard.
My SageTV Server has Athlon 64 X2 6000+
Main Gaming system Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition
Working on build up my old Socket 1 BX board I most like stick in P3 850Mhz
Quantum3D Obsidian X-24
ATI Rage Pro 8mb 2x AGP
384mb
Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold
I have few old game I love re-play POD, MotoRacer and few old Dos one

AMD made northbridge and southbridge chipset work really well now day
I can't wait for Bulldozer to come alone with Radeon HD 7xxx Series that my next upgrade ever few years

I have a suggestion : try installing these games in the latest pc you have. Most probably that latest pc of yours will be your "perfect" box for Unreal/Half-Life. 😁

Unless :

1. If a game runs too fast, or

2.If running a game requires lots of tweaking to make it run on the current NT based platforms (Win2k/XP and Vista/7), or

3. Able to run on newer systems but has glitches, or has sound problems like stuttering, etc.,

it's better to run these games in new machines.