NovaCoder wrote on 2023-07-31, 02:51:

I've brought an Asus K8V-MX Socket 754 Motherboard with an AMD Athlon64 3200+ CPU.

Hey there, I use the same motherboard in one of my retro rigs. It's pretty nice for building a fast Win9x machine. One thing to note is that you may want to downgrade your BIOS to the oldest version available on the Asus website (v0112) in order to avoid the VIA microcode bug which cripples AGP performance. See this thread for more details. That said, I'm not sure if the oldest BIOS version supports Venice core CPUs, so you might want to check which one you have before doing that.

After some advice about what graphics and sound card to get for retro gaming DOS SVGA and also some Win98 games. OpenGL support for Quake2 and maybe some Win98 DirectX support might be useful too I guess.

For the best Win9x compatibility/performance ratio on that system, I recommend a GeForce 4 Ti4200. It will run the vast majority of games released before 2002 at a rock solid 60+ FPS when using the 1280x1024 resolution or below. For many games, you might be able to go up to 1600x1200 as well, although without any Anti Aliasing and likely with minimal Anisotropic Filtering. In terms of DOS compatibility, it's decent enough, but I do remember experiencing some screen tearing in games such as Quake (software renderer) and Duke Nukem 3D.

For the sound card, I suggest an Audigy 2 for Win9x gaming and an ESS Solo-1 for DOS games. Both can coexist together without any issues or conflicts. Lastly, if you plan on dropping down to pure DOS, you may want to disable the on-board SATA and RAID controllers since they take up memory space, making it difficult to squeeze out enough conventional memory for some DOS games.

Great, awesome tips.... thanks Joseph 👍

What are the pros/cons of the Audigy 2 vs a sound blaster live PCI for what I want to do?

NovaCoder wrote on 2023-07-31, 06:17:

What are the pros/cons of the Audigy 2 vs a sound blaster live PCI for what I want to do?

You get EAX3 support on the Audigy vs. EAX2 on the Live. This is nice if you want to play something like the first two Splinter Cell games, which make good use of EAX3. The Audigy also has 64 hardware channels vs. 32 on the Live, which might help even with some EAX2 games. Lastly, Audigy 2 cards tend to have better SNR than most SBLive cards, meaning you get cleaner sound.

Also, if you plan on running a set of surround sound speakers, the Audigy is a much better choice. The Live auto-expands stereo sources (like CD Audio and DOS games) to surround which is highly undesirable and cannot be bypassed easily. With the Audigy, you can disable that behavior by turning off CMSS.

Great 👍

Thanks again 😊