soviet conscript wrote:

wow....Pentium III and 4? my "fast" DOS machine is a 200mhz mmx Pentium with a awe32 and a PCI s3 trio 64v2/GX and it plays games like Duke3d maxed silky smooth. had no idea you needed that much power for some of those titles.

"Maxed"? You certainly could argue about those higher VESA modes being not for the machines of that time, but they are there in the original game nonetheless 😀

d1stortion wrote:

soviet conscript wrote:

wow....Pentium III and 4? my "fast" DOS machine is a 200mhz mmx Pentium with a awe32 and a PCI s3 trio 64v2/GX and it plays games like Duke3d maxed silky smooth. had no idea you needed that much power for some of those titles.

"Maxed"? You certainly could argue about those higher VESA modes being not for the machines of that time, but they are there in the original game nonetheless 😀

I'm running the atomic edition and the highest resolution option it lets me pick is 800X600. am I missing something?

Nope, but I am apparently. Can't see how a Pentium would run Build games playable in 800x600. When stepping it up to Shadow Warrior I get some slowdown in some scenes in that resolution even on a Pentium III.

For me, my Pentium II Overdrive (333MHz Pentium II Deschutes core with Xeon-like full speed L2 cache) Dual Socket 8 system is _the_ DOS heaven. Of course only one CPU is used in DOS but damn these puppies are fast as hell 😀
In contrast to that expensive machine any PII from 300MHz will do the job. Celerons actually are great for late DOS games, too. Totally underrated retro gaming CPUs.
Most, if not all late DOS games will run very well with cheap to obtain TNT and Rage128 graphics cards. But don't forget to use tools like FastVid to speed up the CPUs access to the VGA framebuffer (P6 architecture only).

I don't know....I've never played anything super demanding on it but i swear duke3d runs just fine at that resolution. I actually just booted it up and played to make sure. unless my eyes are weird. I actually always thought 200mhz was fast for most late dos games but looks like I'm wrong or maybe I've just never experienced truely smooth frame rates so I don't know...looks fine to me, never had slowdown or stuttering.

soviet conscript wrote:

I don't know....I've never played anything super demanding on it but i swear duke3d runs just fine at that resolution. I actually just booted it up and played to make sure. unless my eyes are weird. I actually always thought 200mhz was fast for most late dos games but looks like I'm wrong or maybe I've just never experienced truely smooth frame rates so I don't know...looks fine to me, never had slowdown or stuttering.

I agree. My "super fast" machine for running DOS games is a P2 @ 233mhz and I already have to slow it down for games from the early 90's. Not sure I would want anything faster than that. But hey, that's just me.

I have a Windows 98 machine for anything that requires more power- looking back to summer 1995 the best available would have been around the 133-166 Mhz range and if you maxed out at that time your system would have been considered moderately "fast" for a year or so; say 1997... and after that DOS was pretty much done so far as new development went... so I am not sure how DOS games of the time would have required any more than that.

Maybe I am missing something as well?

Just run Quake or Blood in 1024x768 on such a machine... not much to discuss here really.

soviet conscript wrote:

wow....Pentium III and 4? my "fast" DOS machine is a 200mhz mmx Pentium with a awe32 and a PCI s3 trio 64v2/GX and it plays games like Duke3d maxed silky smooth. had no idea you needed that much power for some of those titles.

well, I was trying to play Nascar Racing SVGA recently on my pII 400 and it was far from perfect, framerate on the outside camera with all the cars on the screen was extremely bad

some games are pretty hard.

Don't forget FASTVID!!!

Jorpho wrote:

It is good to know that a Pentium 4 motherboard does not necessarily lack PCI soundcard capability, but last time this came up i […]
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Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

So this means it will work on a TON of P4 boards.

It is good to know that a Pentium 4 motherboard does not necessarily lack PCI soundcard capability, but last time this came up it was suggested that a particular chipset alone is not necessarily an indication of compatibility.
PCI sound cards and Chipsets from various manufacturers...

I really wish this sort of thing wasn't so shrouded in mystery.

Thanks for the link. Quite thorough to be honest!

I'm looking at this bit of information:

[img]So far the southbridge compatibilities for PCI audio cards are as follows:
Intel: Up to ICH5x through PC-PCI. Only FM/Adlib possible on ICH6+, except Aureal AU88x0 where SFX may partially work.[/img]

I'm pretty sure the board I have has ICH5x. I'll get two more Intel boards soon (one Abit, one AOpen) and an SIS board (AOpen).

Still got to figure out why the Voodoo cards don't work but I don't expect this to be an issue.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Still got to figure out why the Voodoo cards don't work but I don't expect this to be an issue.

Historically they get upset when the FSB exceeds 100MHz (like 133mhz) in the P3 era. Perhaps that's related, since P4s tend to have insane FSB speeds?

Is this related to the overclocking the FSB and therefore the PCI clock?

Oh well I will investigate this as soon as I have some time on my hands 😀

I also found Windows 98SE picky with storage. After loading the chipset driver the machine would lock at the loading screen. The workaround was going into safe mode, disabling something in the file mode settings (protected mode driver or something like that), then rebooting and then the chipset drivers would install.

The Voodoo cards show up fine in device manager, no issues, drivers install fine, but when you right click onto the desktop to access the display properties nothing happens. And dxdiag and games don't "see" the Voodoo either.

I just remembered that I have a Dell Dimension 4100 somewhere in storage. It's quite a nice box, easy to work on, great performance in Win98 and Win2000. The last time I checked it had:

- an 866MHz Pentium III Coppermine (or maybe a 933MHz, I don't exactly remember if I upgraded it or not)
- 256MB PC133 SDRAM
- 64MB Radeon 9000 AGP
- original Dell mobo w/ Intel i815e chipset
- original Dell power supply (I believe 200w)
- Soundblaster PCI128
- 20GB Western Digital hard drive
- some random 3Com ethernet card (not that this really matters)

All in all, nothing too fancy, just a typical early 2000s system. It lacks ISA, though I remember having audio on Warcraft II when I ran it on Win98. I don't remember what the DOS VESA support was like on the video card, but I suspect it's not all that great. I'm tempted to install a Voodoo 3, but then that would reduce performance in a lot of Windows games. If I want 3DFX support, I'd much rather throw in a pair of Voodoo IIs. As well, I'd really like to throw in a Tualatin, though the board doesn't officially support them, and I'm not quite comfortable with pinmodding one myself (though I may still give it a shot).

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I just remembered that I have a Dell Dimension 4100 somewhere in storage.

Sounds good to me although I prefer to have an ISA sound card in my PIII for booting directly to DOS and not having to worry about drivers for a PCI sound card. And I can recommend a Geforce 2 Ultra for a good 3D card that is also a nice 2D DOS card with solid VESA support.

d1stortion wrote:

Just run Quake or Blood in 1024x768 on such a machine... not much to discuss here really.

If your goal is to run Quake or Blood at 1024x768 - then build whatever machine it takes to accomplish that goal. Heck ye! But to then call it a DOS or even a Windows 95 machine... well, you could "say that" if it makes you happy. I'd call it my Blood or Quake at 1024x768 machine! 😎

well I don't have blood but I do have shareware quake and just for kicks I wanted to see how my 200mhz would run it in 1024x768 but the highest option I get is 360×480. I thought the S3 trio/v2 DX was VESA 2.0? or is this a limitation of the DOS/shareware version?

You'll have to get the S3VBE20 TSR and run that to extend the VBE bios to access the higher resolutions. The shareware version has no technical limitations.

I recently bought Blood on GoG.com, and Shadow Warrior Classic Redux on Steam, which just happens to include the original DOS version of SW! This gives me more Build engine games to play around with. 😁

d1stortion wrote:

Just run Quake or Blood in 1024x768 on such a machine... not much to discuss here really.

Alright, point taken, it ran like crap. it still runs duke3d smooth on highest and Im still surprised we need a P3 to run some of the DOS stuff on highest. I was tempted to throw a k6-3 into the rig since apparently its not as capable as i figured but I think I'll just do like Joe and run any games that don't play so smoothly on highest on my much faster win 9x machines.

I think we should start with a collection of shareware games that:

- have high resolution support
- built-in benchmarks

Eager to start a VESA benchmarking project...