I recognize that case's power button. I think I have a similar and related case from 1999 from the same manufacturer.

This is my original first-built gaming PC from 1999 when I was in college. Other than how you have to open the case by pulling off the U-shaped shroud (you get finger cuts fairly easily if you're not careful), it's a pretty solid ATX case of the period.

If you're interested in the specs, I have my original build from 1999 and I have the way it currently stands.

1999
ASUS P2B Revision 1.02 i440BX
Intel Pentium II "Deschutes" 350 MHz (100MHz FSB)
128MB PC-100 SDRAM
Diamond Stealth II G460 8MB AGP (i740 chip)
SMC 10/100 Ethernet PCI
56Kbps Modem PCI
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold ISA
10GB Maxtor PATA IDE (shit drive that failed in less than 2 years and I lost all my data)
32x CD-ROM
HP CD-Writer Plus 4/4/24x CD-ROM
Iomega ZIP 100 PATA IDE
Windows 98 FE (Yes, I said First Edition)

Current
ASUS P2B Revision 1.02 i440BX (same motherboard)
Intel Pentium III "Katmai" 600 MHz (100MHz FSB) (fastest CPU available that MB supports)
256MB PC-100 SDRAM (added a 2nd stick)
Diamond Viper V770 32MB AGP (nVidia RIVA TNT2 Standard)
STB V2-1000 Voodoo2 12MB PCI
STB V2-1000 Voodoo2 12MB PCI
SMC 10/100 Ethernet PCI
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE64 Standard ISA
40GB Western Digital 5,400 RPM PATA IDE
42x CD-RW
Iomega ZIP 100 PATA IDE
Windows 98 SE

I've thorougly enjoyed revisiting MS-DOS memory configuration, sound card resource allocation, and just plain old getting DOS games to work properly. Windows is easy by comparison.

Don't get me wrong, this system has a BUNCH of Windows games on it: Turok 1 & 2, Quake 1 & 2, Unreal, Tomb Raider 1 & 2, Rainbow Six, Final Fantasy 7 & 8, Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3D, Star Wars: X-Wing, Return to Castle Wolfenstein (runs slow, but playable), and a few others.

But for DOS, what I've been working lately was Master of Magic - oh yes. Requires 560KB of Conventional Memory and then requires Expanded memory, not Extended. Gotta love getting familiar with EMM386.exe from scratch.

Perfect Dos/Win9x crossover PC.
As FFXIhealer said, add an isa sound card and you can set it up to boot into pure dos and play even the later SVGA dos games maxed out.
Although even the currant CPU will has plenty enough power to play dos games from within windows.

It's also got enough power to play majority of Win9x games that don't like XP

That case does look rather familiar! Possibly an Enlight one like mine but I don’t know much about them TBH. Sounds like a very nice system, definitely highlights the deficiencies in mine. Perhaps a better AGP card should be on the list for it although the Rage Pro isn’t too bad.

Thanks for the comment chinny22, glad to hear it seems well balanced! I do actually have an ESS Audiodrive ISA card that’ll be perfect, then I can ditch the cheap crap one in there!

If you have 2 Voodoo2 cards in SLI, you don't need to bother with a better AGP card. The reason I did mine was because I didn't have a lot of the original components. Like, I had the original motherboard, the original Pentium II, and the original RAM stick. I also had the original case. But that's about it. The original sound card, graphics card, network cards...they're all long gone, and I'm not even sure how I lost them. The AWE64 GOLD card was worth some serious money now, so I'm kind of blah about it. I'd also have used a perfectly working i740 AGP graphics chip just fine with an SLI Voodoo2 setup, as all the heavy-lifting 3D-wise would have been done by the SLI, not the i740.

So, without a decent 2D card for Windows to use and an open AGP slot, I figured what the hell and got the TNT2 on the cheap. It's on-par with the SLI Voodoo2 cards in just about every respect and a little bit faster in some others, especially with 32MB of on-board memory, so it can handle much larger textures. So...when I have a game optimized for GLIDE, I use the Voodoo2s @1024x768 (my default Windows resolution for this system). When DirectX is the only option, I just use the TNT2 card.

In YOUR case, though, I'd just stick with the ATI Rage card you already have and use the Voodoo2 cards full-bore for everything 3D. The ATI's 2D chip should be fantastic in terms of speed and compatibility with old DOS games and Windows's 2D environments. There's not much better except the Matrox Millennium series. Phil probably has better recommendations, but why spend money at this point? You have decent 2D and excellent 3D.

I can't tell what sound card you have, but you have a whole lot of options. If you want DOS compatibility...or to be able to run pure DOS on the system like I do on mine (via exiting Windows 98SE into DOS mode), then an ISA sound card is pretty much a must. There are a FEW PCI sound cards that have a 3-pin connector to the motherboard for ISA-resource assignments to make DOS mode work properly, but the motherboard has to support that, and not very many did. So it's really about the ISA cards.

And, of course, if it were MY retro system, I'd get a ZIP drive for right underneath your floppy drive, because nothing screams out late-'90s like a Zip drive. I was so hype in 1999 to have a built-in ZIP drive instead of that bulky blue Parallel-port Zip drive we had on our older Packard Bell Windows 95 computer, and it really did increase the file transfer rate over the external drive. I used to save everything to those ZIP drives. Now... all of my disks are full with other people's crap. I'm about to dump everything to a CD-R and wipe the drives so I can use them once again.

Also, one suggestion... if you have a home network, get yourself a decent 10/100 PCI Ethernet card that has Windows 98 drivers available. The reason: It's not hard to get Windows 98 talking on your home network. You can then set up Windows File Sharing to have a share folder available. Then, any modern Windows 7+ computer can access that folder and dump files to it. That makes downloading crap off of the internet stupid-simple, as you can download it using a modern browser at speed, then dump the file to your share drive at network-speed (usually around ~12MB/min @100Mbps speeds). If you need help with that kind of configuration in Windows 98, I did mine and got it working properly and I can always be messaged here and I'll usually respond in a day or two to help walk you through it. There's also a lot of other knowledgeable guys on this forum - it's why I come here. They've helped me out a bunch with my DOS configuration, because I refuse to use Phil's "boot prompt" multi-setup DOS thing. I want my system to just boot to Windows or directly to the DOS prompt. I don't want it to sit there waiting on me to choose an option. I want it to just turn on, walk away, make myself a cup of coffee, and come back and it's ready to use.

Not sure how I managed to miss that post, sorry! I was just going to do a little update on the thread as I’ve had to chop and change some things in my machines. This board is now in my Voodoo1 build running a PII 233 until I can fix my socket 7 board and this SLI build now has an S370 board which perfectly matches all the other green components in the system 😁 it also now has a 733mhz Coppermine Celeron which I think will certainly be slower than the P3-600 but I’m on the lookout for something faster.

Unfortunately I can’t upload any pics due to Imgur playing games but it does look very nice 😁

I just missed out on an AWE64 Gold on eBay that went for £31... forgot to bid on it, grrr. I do have a range of more powerful cards available to pair with the SLI setup (along with things like a RIVA128 I could try) but I’m pretty happy with the graphics setup as is for now 😀 maybe I will swap to the aforementioned Riva but only if the colour matches! Good to hear it’s a decent setup anyway.

I’ve two ISA sound cards to pick from, a Yamaha OPL3 one and an ESS Audiodrive one. It currently contains the ESS card as I thought it looked best 😁 I never intended to be picky about component colours in this build but now everything has turned out green I’d like to keep it that way!

Excellent call on the Zip drive, I think I might have a black one somewhere, I’m keeping an eye out for a beige one now 😁

I’m in two minds about the file transfer thing, on the one hand it would save messing around with USB drives but on the other hand it’s much slower and would require more cables... which I don’t have available where my desk is at the moment, I have to use WiFi 🙁 I could get it on WiFi I suppose. I’ve been sticking with 98lite for all my retro systems, it works fantastic, boots as quickly as my modern computer with an SSD and is generally very very fast with the 95 version of Explorer and all the crap taken out 😀

Ha that green things sounds familiar, I almost did the same thing for awhile as well.

I'd actually say your currant setup is pretty good, depending where you want the bottleneck to be and maxing out the Voodoo's is a pretty good option

A PII 233 is an uncommon choice and will have plenty of power to run any Voodoo game.
V2 SLI only really comes into play for Windows games so the lack of ISA on the S370 system doesn't really matter. Me being me would want a faster CPU as well although really I'm sure neither the C733 or P3600 are really slowing things down much.

Sound comes down to personal choice in the end. if you like the ESS then keep it. If not plenty of other green sound cards you can pick up later on 😉

I'd also go with networking though, it really does make life so much easier. I prefer wired do have a Netgear PCI Wifi card I've used on a few Win98 PC's when I've needed and it works fine. Its not fast but its still better then the alternatives.

chinny22 wrote:

Ha that green things sounds familiar, I almost did the same thing for awhile as well. […]
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Ha that green things sounds familiar, I almost did the same thing for awhile as well.

I'd actually say your currant setup is pretty good, depending where you want the bottleneck to be and maxing out the Voodoo's is a pretty good option

A PII 233 is an uncommon choice and will have plenty of power to run any Voodoo game.
V2 SLI only really comes into play for Windows games so the lack of ISA on the S370 system doesn't really matter. Me being me would want a faster CPU as well although really I'm sure neither the C733 or P3600 are really slowing things down much.

Sound comes down to personal choice in the end. if you like the ESS then keep it. If not plenty of other green sound cards you can pick up later on 😉

I'd also go with networking though, it really does make life so much easier. I prefer wired do have a Netgear PCI Wifi card I've used on a few Win98 PC's when I've needed and it works fine. Its not fast but its still better then the alternatives.

It was totally unintentional but now everything does match I don’t want to spoil it 😁

I’m glad you think it seems like a well-balanced system. Really I’d like to swap to maybe a PIII-800 or in that region with a 100mhz FSB but that’d be the icing on the cake really 😀 , I have a 1.4ghz Tualatin system already so don’t need another fast PIII, I do have a spare 1.4ghz T-bird kicking around though...

The S370 board I’m using does have ISA though so happy days 😀 they all do apart from the Tualatin. I’m happy with the ESS in the V2 SLI machine for now. Thinking about picking up a wavetable for my V1 system and the Yamaha sound card in there.

I’ll definitely have a think about the networking thing, it does sound less hassle than mucking about with USB drives!

So this build is 100% finished now 😀

I decided to come change the focus of it as originally it was a brand new old stock PC I found in a house clearance in the box - it had a Celeron 500, el cheapo sound card, Rage Pro Turbo and 64mb RAM.

The first configuration I decided on was to replace the board with a slot 1 board and a PIII 600, the cheapo sound card for a Yamaha OPL3 ISA one and the rest of the specs you see in the original post.

I decided it would be a shame to do that though and so I’ve refitted the original NOS QDI motherboard and upgraded to a Celeron 733 to be more in keeping with the original system. So now it’s all original apart from a faster Celeron, addition of 2x Voodoo2 cards, better sound card and a RAM upgrade to 256mb 😀

Celeron 500 upgraded to CuMine Celeron 733
Original QDI BrillianX9 motherboard
Original Rage Pro Turbo + Voodoo2 SLI
Original 10gb hard drive with Me installed (which is what it came with)
64mb RAM upgraded to 256mb
El cheapo no-name card replaced with Yamaha YMF718-S based sound card
Original Enlight case + PSU
LG 54x CD drive

The only things i might still add are a network card and a wavetable.

Nice build, you got the little brother of the case I used in my early '98 PC. 😀

Kamerat wrote:

Nice build, you got the little brother of the case I used in my early '98 PC. 😀

So it is! 😀 cool to see the larger version in action. Not a bad case really, although being the smaller size the PSU gets in the way of almost everything.