Nice stuff!

System 1:
Nice. It's loaded out a lot better than the AMD 486DX4-120 I had back in the day. You might try looking for a Roland SCC-1 (ISA Sound Canvas synth) or an external Roland Sound Canvas (SC-55, SC-55MkII, SC-88 or SC-88Pro) for DOS MIDI. Another alternative would be an SB AWE32 fully-loaded with RAM, which would allow the use of Soundfont MIDI in hardware for DOS games.

MT-32's are also cheap and easy to find for really old DOS games.

I think I have (or had) that exact D-Link card. A decent card, albeit 10mbit half-duplex 😉

System 2:
Oh god, the K6-3. Looks like you avoided the horrible VIA Apollo series of chipsets that almost gave me nightmares with their problems when everyone but me had one (I had an Intel PII-450).
HDD is good for the age of the system, but I can see how it would be a limiting factor if you have it on a LAN and want to dump files onto it.
Main video card seems a little weak for what it can handle (I'm assuming AGP is available), but as long as it's good for 2D... I've heard the Voodoo5 is a monster and I have no doubt that they're unreliable considering how desperate 3dfx was when they made them (they were making some really poor decisions at that point in the game). Maybe a Geforce 2 or Voodoo 3 would work better? (could keep the Voodoo2's around for DOS Glide games)
Also, if you primarily run Windows on System 2 I would recommend putting the AWE64 Gold in the 486 and getting a PCI sound card for it. I'm guessing you're more interested in DOS Glide games though.

System 3:
More RAM would help with less recent games, but I think the video card and especially the CPU would be more of limiting factors for the latest games. My Athlon XP 3200+ with 1GB RAM and Radeon 9800Pro 256MB is starting to struggle with the latest games (have to run medium-high settings instead of higest settings in new first-person shooters like F.E.A.R. and Doom 3). I'm sure my computer would do better with a Radeon X800 or similar, but I only have AGP so I'm going to wait and build a new computer next year with AMD64 and PCI Express.

What OSes do you have installed on each box?

Thanks for the feedback! 😀

System 1:
I've already tried to use the 8MB SoundFont MIDI emulation with an AWE32, but there was trouble with DOS extender games (the GUS MIDI emulation has similar problems). A real MT32 or LAPC1 would be my dream, unfortunately they are hard to get and VERY expensive in Europe. I want to keep the SB16 ASP, because it is one of the rare cards that correctly emulates SB Pro in stereo (didn't believe it first, but it works 😎)

Edit: I was wrong about the stereo emulation. No SB16 can emulate the SBPro stereo DAC correctly. Some games (like Wolf3D) generate "stereo" digital effects by panning mono samples through the mixer. I got fooled by this method. Sorry!

System 2:
The ALI chipset also has a few quirks (poor PCI performance, weak AGP voltage issues). In the old days I had an Intel TX, but that one comes without AGP and maxes out at 83 MHz FSB.
The size of the harddisk would be OK if it wasn't a DTLA model. These are the ones that eventually will crash with the "click of death".
The Voodoo2 SLI project was fun, but now I've decided to get another Voodoo5 as long as they're available for reasonable prices. It would simplify driver maintenance and offer far better image quality (I love 3dfx FSAA 😉).

Operating systems I use on my machines:
System 1: Windows 95 OSR2 + customized MS-DOS 7
System 2: Windows 98 SE + customized MS-DOS 7
System 3: Windows XP SP2 + Gentoo Linux

The Windows systems have only games installed. Any real work is done with Linux. The MS-DOS on the old systems is basically the one that comes with Win9x, but enhanced with 3rd party components (FreeDOS, 4DOS, etc...).

How are you able to get AWE cards to work on a DOS machine with Win9x installed on it? I seem to remember Creative's drivers refusing to operate in DOS when they detect a present Windows installation.

For a while I wondered what you meant with "Creative's drivers" until I found the DOS driver package on their website and tried to install it for fun.
You're right. It doesn't work 😵

Solution: I have never used the official drivers package. Creative has everything you need for download in separate files, without a buggy installation program. Originally, these files were meant to be used as updates for an existing DOS drivers installation, but they also can be used standalone:

For ISA PnP cards (SB32, AWE32 PnP, AWE64 (Gold)) you'll need the initialisation program CTCM.EXE. This one sets the hardware resources and the BLASTER environment.

For the advanced AWE functions like the MIDI emulation and chorus/reverb settings there is the AWEUTIL tool.

There is no mixer for download, but that's not that bad since Creative has never managed to release a decent one. Just use a 3rd party mixer program like "Mr. Guns Master Mixer". That one really rocks, especially for AWE cards.

Some very old games may need drivers like CT-VOICE.SYS or other relics from days of yore. In most cases they can safely be ignored.

Installation is quite straightforward for people with DOS experience.
If anyone is interested I could write a more detailed HOWTO for the Deep Thought section.

Just out of curiosity, can you config a PC to use a Voodoo 3/5/AGP for newer games, whilst using a different PCI card for better 2D image quality and older dos gaming?

Just out of curiosity, can you config a PC to use a Voodoo 3/5/AGP for newer games, whilst using a different PCI card for better 2D image quality and older dos gaming?

Yes that's quite easy, especially if you have two monitors or one that has two VGA inputs.
My girlfriend has a 600MHz Pentium3 with a Voodoo3 3000 AGP and a GeForce2 MX PCI. The GeForce is set up as primary VGA in the BIOS. The Voodoo3 extends her desktop (works well with Win98 and X.org) and provides Glide acceleration for Diablo2 😁

Thanks. I have now tried this for myself. I just set up my P3 system with a matrox G450 and a pair of Righteous Orchids (righteous BABY!) 12mb Voodoo 2's sli'd. My new Viewsonic VP191b has dual vga and one dvi input. I switch between DVI input and vga input for the Matrox (desktop) and the Voodoo's (glide) respectively. I have the matrox vga output passing through the Voodoo's, since I noticed on G-police, some scenes are in Glide, while the intro cut scenes are not, hence the need to run the pass through so that the screen is not blank during cut scenes. I take it most glide games DO NOT do this? I would rather send the VGA out from the matrox to a smallish CRT for older DOS games, and use the DVI output to my 19" LCD for newer direct X games, and the voodoo vga ouput to the secondary input on the LCD for glide games (phew!).

Nice to see that your setup works 😎
Most games use the voodoo cards for all the output (3D and video playback), but some older ones don't because their video playback code doesn't support Glide, or they simply forgot switching the cards (for most users it doesn't matter anyways). If I remember right, G-Police was the first game to use AGP features and textures bigger than 256x256, both things a Voodoo card can't provide 😵. Maybe the Glide support in this game is not up to par.

My pair of Diamond Voodoo2 cards does not behave well, when I use resolutions above 640x480, they crash. I've not found out yet if this is a heat or power issue, or if my DIY SLI cable is faulty.

The LAPC-I card from ebay is fantastic. Unfortunately I've run out of ISA slots on my 486 board. As a consequence, the D-Link NIC has been thrown out and replaced by a Realtek PCI card.

Finally I've collected all my dream hardware for my 486 😀
The Waveblaster has been thrown out, the new wavetable daughterboard is a Roland SCD-15 😎. The difference in General MIDI games is amazing!
A friend gave me another gem today: A printer port DAC (a.k.a. Covox Speech Thing or Disney Sound Source), he made it himself in the year 1995 😁.
It's built around a ZN426B IC and sounds much clearer than the simple resistor-based one I made back in the days before I could afford a SoundBlaster.

Nice! I tried building one of those IC-based parallel port DACs back then but couldn't get it to work because I didn't know what I was doing. I wish I'd known about the resistor-based designs because they'd have been easier to do even though they don't sound as good from what you're describing. I guess it doesn't really matter since I got a SoundBlaster soon after 😀

Yep, I have a Covox. Not many games actually use them. 688 Attack Sub, off the top of my head, does.

My wife thinks I'm utterly retarded. I have a collection of old hardware: working systems, sound cards, cpu's, video cards, modems, NIC's, etc. etc.

I just like having the hardware around to customize a box for an old game like it was meant to be played. Don't get me wrong... I like DOSbox, but it's not quite as satisfying as slappin' together some real hardware and tweaking everything just right.

Anybody up for some Falcon 3.0 over 14.4 modem? 😏

Here's a couple of the Speech Thing pics that I've posted in the past.

Updated system specs again (see first post).
The hardware for the K6 system is now complete, since I've swapped the Voodoo2 SLI setup for a Voodoo5. Voodoo2 SLI would be more "oldschool", but a Voodoo5 is far more reliable and has the benefit of the famous and unique 3dfx antialiasing 😜

ah, this is good! wich version do you use? AGP or PCI?
i'm waiting for my never V5 55k PCI MAC edition to come from ebay! 😀

c.imp wrote:

ah, this is good! wich version do you use? AGP or PCI?

AGP, for two reasons:
1) My P5A board has an AGP slot that would otherwise be left unused.
2) V5 AGP is much cheaper than the PCI version, because fewer PCI models were produced, and they're much sought after by people who have either a very old mainboard without AGP or a modern mainboard that only supplies 1.5V at the AGP socket (the V5 needs 3V).
Performance-wise it wouldn't matter much, since the Voodoo cards don't use any AGP functionality.

Made some changes with my 486 rig:

1) New mainboard: It's still the same model, but a newer revision, which removes a nasty bug in the IDE controller and is generally more stable at 40 MHz bus speed.
2) Exchanged the ET6000 VGA for a S3 Trio64+ because the ET6000 had too many problems with VGA register programming. I will miss the raw speed of this card, but swapping in an ISA ET4000 every time the ET6000 acted up got on my nerves. The S3 is a bit slower, but not much, and I don't have to keep a free ISA slot anymore 🙄
3) The free ISA slot allowed me to throw out the problematic SB16+SCB-55 combo and install a plain SB32 and a SCC1. Now I can enjoy improved AdLib music (with chorus&reverb) and have the advantage of a real MPU-401 for General MIDI.

The leftover SCB-55 module was installed onto my new AWE32 card and replaced the dead AWE64 Gold in my K6 rig.

P.S: Having all those soundcards and MIDI interfaces in a 486 with a buggy PnP BIOS generates funny problems in Win98. Anyone knows how to make IRQ6 available for ISA cards? My FDD controller is already disabled in the BIOS, but Win98 doesn't want to release the IRQ 😒

The ISA cards probably don't have wiring for IRQ6.

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

The ISA cards probably don't have wiring for IRQ6.

The SCC-1 has the wiring for IRQ6 and it works under plain DOS.

It's all because of the BIOS and the Win98 chipset drivers. There are different options to select how Win98 should get the IRQ table from the BIOS, but the BIOS only produces incorrect IRQ tables either way, and there seems no way to override this. 😵

I've also got an asus pvi-486sp3. What revision do you have and what revision are you upgrading from? I was under the impression that 1.8 the last (and best) revision - is this so?

Also, why did you use a trio over a matrox card?

For that 486 system, can you get the full range of speeds from a single 486? After all, for 486s from 25-50MHz, they only have a 1x multiplier. The board and processor would have to be completely adjustable in terms of multipliers and FSBs. But if you could, you could run a very wide range of games indeed. Disable the cache and set the speed to 25MHz or boost the cache and set the CPU speed to 100MHz.