vetz wrote:

You don't need the MPU401 with the MQX-32M or Midiman-401. With those cards, just connect the MT-32 directly. […]
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You don't need the MPU401 with the MQX-32M or Midiman-401. With those cards, just connect the MT-32 directly.

I'm sorry, but I made an error earlier with the MPU-401.

MPU-401 is the breakout box for ISA card MIF-IPC
MPU-IPC and MPU-IPC-T are newer versions with more of the hardware in the breakout box included on the card itself (breakout box has the same model name).
MPU-401AT is an ISA card without the need for a breakout box and thus works like the Musicquest and Midiman cards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPU-401

Thank you very much, now I understood it.

Some good and bad news. First the bad news: I fired up an old Pentium III computer to test the RIVA TNT2 card in. After installing both Creative's drivers and the generic drivers from nVidia, I sadly have to discard this card. The card can run high resolution with true color and all that, but when I start a Direct3D or a benchmark program, the screen goes blank. The Direct3D part doesn't seem to work anymore.

And for the good news: I have a backup, probably not as good, but very close! I dug some more and found a Matrox Millennium G400 MAX card. Comparing the specs, I find this card to be almost identical. Should be a good replacement for the time being.

Some of the point behind this build is to try to keep things within the 1990s. I could use a much never AGP card probably, but some of the fun for my part is to keep things "original". My goal is an overkill computer with what was available up to 1999.

Here is a picture of both cards. The fan on the TNT2 card had a broken bearing, so the noise was quite bad. Replaced the fan with what I found right away lying in a drawer. The card had some minor corrosion from lying in the attic for probably 10 years. Cleaned off everything and looked for broken traces. Gave it some electronics cleaner as well to prevent more corrosion. Sadly it wasn't to be saved. The Matrox card is clean, almost look brand new!

Both super socket 7 chipsets the via mvp3 and the ali alladin 5,had sometimes problems when running videocards with the nvidia tnt and tnt 2 chips,u could try upgrading the bios of the mb and using latest via 4 in 1 drivers,also if possible test the videocard on another mb,i doubt it's broken.
What DirectX version u using?

The TNT2 was tested on a computer with an abit BX133-RAID motherboard, 256mb RAM, Intel Pentium III 733MHz CPU, Windows 98SE and DirectX 7.0. The BIOS is from late 2000 on that motherboard.

The video card have some corrosion on it. Cleaned off what I could, but it might still be some that messes it up a bit.

Isn't the Matrox G400 card a good replacement? I don't know the minor details, but they look almost identical when comparing the specifications.

Another question as well: How is the backwards compatibility with DOS when using AGP video cards? Will programs that have VESA 2.0 and uncommon screen resolutions still run? Have some old demoscene stuff I want to still be able to run. 😉

samaron wrote:

How is the backwards compatibility with DOS when using AGP video cards? Will programs that have VESA 2.0 and uncommon screen resolutions still run? Have some old demoscene stuff I want to still be able to run. 😉

Demoscene stuff can be a lot more picky about VESA and VGA compatibility than games. Most common problems are unsupported video modes, for example all the 15-bit modes, which seem to have been dropped in VBE 3. Some demos insist on using exotic video modes, often they expect UniVBE to be loaded and rely on the way UniVBE organizes the mode numbers. So your best bet is a card that is still old enough to be supported by UniVBE.

Matrox cards are best avoided for DOS scene demos, but if you have to use the G400, be sure to load the Gx00VBE TSR.

Ah, that was what I thought. Any suggested AGP cards that support "everything"?

EDIT: Found a list which show compatbility here: http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/ The Matrox card sticks out as a bad sore. Looks like the best bet is the early nVidia cards.

Yep, that's a good table to start off. In my experience the most compatible demoscene cards are S3 Virge/Trio, Nvidia is OKish, 3dfx is annoying, but Matrox are clearly the worst for this job.

samaron wrote:

Ah, that was what I thought. Any suggested AGP cards that support "everything"?

EDIT: Found a list which show compatbility here: http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/ The Matrox card sticks out as a bad sore. Looks like the best bet is the early nVidia cards.

Gona's a member of this forum actually! We attract the best of the best. 😉

I have a MQX-32M and have noticed that it's not 100% compatible, wing commander for example does not work with it. Just throwing that in the mix!

bjt wrote:

Wow. Is the K6 200 really 20% faster than a P233MMX?

Depends on the benchmark or application. Generally the MMX 233 will be faster.

There is so much about benchmarking... From those days to today, everything will be optimized for primarily Intel CPU's. You can design an amazing x86 micro architecture CPU, and no matter how brilliantly it runs internally, it will suck if software is not properly optimized, or even worse... If you are relying on your competitor's compiler which is majorly adopted by the software industry, don't even dream in performance crowns.

Found a couple of nice things today! I were visiting my old grandmother and had a look through her basement. Found a lot of nice stuff I could use. Only brought back a couple of things, but there's a lot more to haul back later.

I came across another TNT2 Ultra AGP card in one of the drawers there! This one is nice and free of corrosion, and the fan don't have broken bearings. Sweet! The other card I came across was an old PCI Hercules S3 ViRGE DX with 4 megabytes of memory. Thought this card would be a nice upgrade to the 3D Rage II+DVD card I'm using now, considering it only have 2 megabytes of memory and supposedly have lesser support for old games. The weird thing is that the S3 card works well, can display higher color resolution in Windows etc, but don't have VESA 2.0? According to the list above it should have support for it, but one of the demos I try to run gives an error stating no VESA 2.0 found. How come that happens?

Heres a picture of the two PCI cards I swapped:

samaron wrote:

The other card I came across was an old PCI Hercules S3 ViRGE DX with 4 megabytes of memory. Thought this card would be a nice upgrade to the 3D Rage II+DVD card I'm using now, considering it only have 2 megabytes of memory and supposedly have lesser support for old games. The weird thing is that the S3 card works well, can display higher color resolution in Windows etc, but don't have VESA 2.0? According to the list above it should have support for it, but one of the demos I try to run gives an error stating no VESA 2.0 found. How come that happens?

S3 ViRGE cards usually didn't include VESA 2.0 support in BIOS. You'll need the s3vbe20 TSR for this (univbe will probably work, too).
Usually I wouldn't consider the card an upgrade to your Rage card, but if you want to use higher resolutions it probably is. For Windows 9x there are certainly better cards, though.
I agree with better compatibility for older DOS games.

Ah, thank you! Downloaded S3VBE20 from the compatibility link above. Works just fine now. 😀

In Windows I usually only run 3Dfx Glide or OpenGL games with my voodoo2 cards. So it isn't that much of a big deal in Windows I think to use the S3 ViRGE. Any noticable upgrades probably would be to use AGP cards, which this motherboard does not support.

The only disadvantage using videocards with the S3 chipset,it's a decrease in output image quality.That's not the chip's fault,it's the videocard manufacturer,not sure how the Hercules card is,but usually the cheap chinese or taiwanese made videocards with S3 chips,had a worse image quality compared with videocards from ATI or Matrox.
I personally have seen the difference between a taiwanese S3 trio 64v+ card a Ati Mach 64 and a Matrox Mystique,the ATI has a sharper imagen compared with the S3 but the Matrox has a more brighter image and more vivid colours,then both ATI and S3.

I see... I'll try it out some more. Not hard to change it again if I change my mind. 😀 The S3 card is something my uncle bought in the 90s, and he usually didn't cheap out on hardware. I'd imagine it was the top of the line that was available at the time.

Got a package today! Now I'm owner of a Diamond Viper V770 TNT2 card. As far as I understand from reading on the Internet, it is probably the best TNT2 card available. Got it for 10 euro on eBay from Germany, and the thing is clean! Almost looks brand new. Exited to test it out!

The plan is to upgrade this computer with Super Socket 7 and AMD K6-2. The motherboard I bought have AGP, so I'll test that out as well. If I'm not happy with the setup, I'll change it back to how it is now. As mentioned, I want to have a versatile system, but I suspect AGP cards will cause some issues in DOS. The CPU probably might be "too fast" as well. The K6 I'm using now doesn't appear to have the pascal bug, which is good when it comes to demoscene stuff. The K6-2 is probably guaranteed to have the bug. It exists a fix, but then the software must be compiled with the fix applied.

My Time-Machine uses AGP video cards. It's a Super Socket 7 machine, Pentium CPU, Cache disabled for all the 386 games.

I have a S3 AGP video card in that machine. VGA output is very good! Also have Nvidia cards and they also have great VGA output. Newer cards even have DVI, which can cause other issues, but worth knowing. For capturing Nvidia cards also often come with S-Video out directly on the card, though I use an external VGA to S-Video converter.

Certainly with all the AAA titles from Sierra, Legend and Origin you shouldn't have any issues with AGP video cards. So it really depends what you're planning on doing with your system.

The only real bug I came across myself is with the CD version of Alone in the Dark. The install menu has messed up text symbols but there is a software TSR that fixes this issue. Not a single card I have can display this correctly until you try really old ISA cards like the ET4000.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

My Time-Machine uses AGP video cards. It's a Super Socket 7 machine, Pentium CPU, Cache disabled for all the 386 games.

Gave up on the K6-III?

Yea missed not having an Intel CPU. No other reason apart from that 😀

I tried out the new motherboard with Super Socket 7 and a TNT2 AGP card. There wasn't really any issues using AGP with DOS, but I encountered issues with the 500 MHz K6-2 CPU. Some old pascal programs of course isn't compatible because of the bug on higher speed CPUs. So I changed everything back the way it was with the good old faithful K6 CPU instead. Another annoying issue was that the new motherboard had the CPU located with the PCI slots, which resulted in the Voodoo2 cards not being able to fit...

The computer have had a fair bit of experimenting now to get the "perfect" setup. A lot of software, drivers and hardware changes have taken its toll on the system. The next project will be to backup some things and reinstall the whole system.

I also did a sweep in my grandmothers basement and found a lot of things I can use for other projects.

This is one nice monitor. Quite large and heavy. There is also a computer with intel BX chipset and Celeron 300A under the desk which I'm considering to try out for watercooled overclocking.

Several different cards. Mostly network cards.

Also found this really old CD-ROM burner with the necessary SCSI controller card. Probably one of the earliest. Haven't tested it yet, but hope the laser isn't dead.

Also found this CPU lying around. Any ideas which it might be? Couldn't remove the heatsink (probably glued). Might it be an Intel 486 with fan cooling?

Lastly is this old watercooling block which my father made around 1998. Not perfect, slightly uneven surface. Require more than a usual amount of thermal paste to get good contact. This was first used in a computer with AMD K6-2. The water was pumped using a windshield wiper fluid motor and had a home made water reservoir tank of steel. Quite heavy.

Today I reinstalled the system. Everything works a lot better now. Probably was a lot of junk in the system files from all the experimenting with different hardware and drivers. I also replaced the network card with one that is more correct for the age.

I had one small issue when loading the CD-ROM drivers when booting from the startup disk. The system would hang. I disconnected the slave CD-ROM and everything worked. When booting the computer I could see that the drive I disconnected would identify it self as "CD-RJ $OPEN" instead of "CD-RW AOPEN", as an example. Is the drive faulty, causing the DOS CD-ROM drivers to crash?

I'm thinking of buying a 5 1/4" floppy drive and an internal zip drive. I want to use this computer to backup and copy to and from other old computers. Have a lot of old DOS software on old 5 1/4" floppy disks and the old copy devices for the different game consoles I have usually require DOS software.