I don't have any answers for you but I am wondering the same thing. I've been wanting to build a duel PPro machine for awhile now since I have a motherboard laying around. It seems the only real practical choice for mid 90's SMP machines is Windows NT.

Most DDraw3 games like Diablo and Starcraft require 2 MB graphics RAM. So a 4 MB card would be sufficient to run higher Modes as well. This could be f.e. a Riva128/S3 Vision968/Matrox Millenium . For 3D acceleration you could use Voodoo2 (SLI) as Glide runs well within NT4.

Thanks, I have a 4MB Millennium somewhere. I'll give that a try for starters.

Asides from Glide you can also use OpenGL if your card/driver supports that. Voodoo(2) and Riva 128 should work for glQuake. A Millennium might very well also have an OpenGL driver but since it doesn't accelerate texturing it is of no use for games here. See also http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/athlon-kx … dup,186-18.html (Quake 3 under NT 4.0 with GeForce 256).
If you don't want to try 3D acceleration a Millennium is certainly a fine choice.

Lots of early DX3 Games work fine on it and there's an unofficial DX5 patch that fools some games into working.
Some glide games work, and OGL games work really well.
I use it on a machines that have no USB ports that I also put Win95 on.
Its biggest downfall is no USB 🤣, it boots really fast compared to 2k, and the resource usage at boot is very low.

It might surprise you, but there is USB for NT4 for a long time: ftp://78.46.141.148/archiv/Windows/nt4/USB/
And it works pretty well with all common USB devices.

There is a certain Dell driver which gets USB working. At least it works with the VIA USB card I'm using.

Known about it but never tried it 🤣 .
Good to know it works.

NT4 was great. I used it with a Voodoo3 for a while. It's not without its shortcomings though. I think worse than lack of USB out of the box is the lack of device manager. Installing new hardware can be really awkward.

2fort5r wrote:

Not a gaming OS, but lots of games used to run on it nonetheless back in the day.

This aspect of NT annoyed me back in the 90's:
VESA doesn't work. see NOLFB - Disables LFB enabling DOS games to fallback to VESA 1.2 modes

I doubt he want to use NT4 to run DOS games in the NT virtual DOS machine. It might be better to use Dosbox for this then.

Depends.

If the machine is too old for mid 90's+ games in DOSBox using NT4 then NTVDM (with VDMSound & NOLFB)\Virtual PC\Vmware can be used.

It's best to have a 9x\NT4 dual-boot so you can use 9x\DOS when a game will not work or will not work well in NT4.

Google FTW
Windows NT 4.0

It's all just a little bit of history repeating...

No Directsound = no option 😀

Thanks for the info and links.

I've always wanted to try it, but never really had the chance. I'm kind of surprised it lacks a device manager.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I've always wanted to try it, but never really had the chance. I'm kind of surprised it lacks a device manager.

That is one of the major things I do not like about NT4.

Most recent graphics i've used on my nt4 machines was radeon 9600 with ibm driver: 7.86.4-030526a-009526E-IBM.
I haven't tested but there also is somekind a driver from scitech "snap graphics". They supports even gf6600 and radeon x850,as they wrote.
Posted here:
ftp://alter.org.ua/incoming/soft/vbe/snap318/snapfaq.htm#p3

Also for some modern cards-but without acceleration d3d/Ogl- is vbe project, i used this on my nt 3.51 wks.
http://www.navozhdeniye.narod.ru/vbemp.htm

Inside Out networks IonUsb 4.20 drivers are working very well on compaq ap550 and sp750 with Via controller!

Currently running with a Matrox Millennium G450. It runs OpenGL games very well (Q3A/HL/RTCW) with a 450Mhz P2. Results for other games are mixed. A lot of games from that era want DX8 and don't support OpenGL.

This reminds me, didn't early versions of WarCraft 3 support GL? I remember there was a command-line option to force it to run in GL mode instead of DX. Quality was inferior IIRC so that's why they probably removed it, but it would still be useful here.