alvaro84 wrote:

It seems it is indeed picky with the graphic card! And in many cases write combining seemed to be off on the LFB area and Blood ran a lot better with NOLFB loaded! My Tualatin+R9250 system is a good example. Or my Abit KT7A. So I don't know the real potential of the K7(->K12) clade here 🙁 S939 should be okay but I don't have a test board right now 🙁

Yes, MX300+i865 works just fine to me, not with Quake, though. Blood is good, except for the weak OPL emulation, of course.

Edit. Oh I forgot about the GPU. In the 478 build it's a humble Asus TNT2 now, this may be my smallest AGP4x card as GPU power doesn't count under these DOS games.

I looked up NOLFB (http://advsys.net/ken/build.htm) and gave it at try in Blood. According to the built in frame counter it only gives a boost of about 1 FPS (from 9 to 10 at 1600x1200) but it actually feels a lot smoother... I'm not sure that the ingame "rate" or "dnrate" counters are reliable. On the other hand, I get pretty awful screen tearing now. I tried this 'vsync' version NOLFBLIM (updated NOLFB) - Enables VSYNC for DOS Games but it made no difference... which I guess would make sense if I'm supposedly only getting 10FPS in Blood -- on a Athlon 64 4000+? There's got to be something else wrong here.

I have one socket 775 P4 with 256MB of DDR 400 , 80GB IDE HD , IDE DVD-RW, Creative SB Live! and a Radeon 9600 pro and it worked perfectly good for all windows 98 games that i thrown into it, for DOS games i use DOSBox(i know its redundant but my SB16 emulation didn't worked properly even with VxD drivers and this also solve the CPU speed issue)
the video card even have DVI so in the future when i aquire some HDMI capture device i should be able to capture with ease and quality.
About the SATA to IDE adapter for SSD if you don't mind wasting the SSD go for it.

.legaCy wrote:

About the SATA to IDE adapter for SSD if you don't mind wasting the SSD go for it.

I would still get the full speed of the SATA interface and no noise from any mechanical parts. For the same money I could by a big HDD, but I'm not planning to use this computer for storage.

What about a Voodoo 4? will it be powerful enough to run games at 1600x1200?

I've been digging around and I'm trying to understand which will be the most appropriate GPU to play Windows 98 games (like Shogo, or even older like Blood and Duke Nukem 3D) at 1600x1200 and I can't really decide. I came across a Voodoo 4 and it seems to be the best GPU I can buy in my country, but I know it is not optimal for that resolution; I would guess a Voodoo 5 would be a better choice, but I can't get one in my country. Also, there are some other alternatives which I have considered, like an ATI X850 XT PE or even a GeForce 6800 GT Ultra, which I can't find in my country.

Could you give me an advice?

dr_st wrote:

xjas wrote:

Okay, I'm game. 😜 I have a P4/3.0 right here. When I get some time later I'll throw Quake & Descent 2 on it and see how they do in 1280x1024, pure software. I suspect they'll be playable but probably not hundreds of FPS. They might not even hit 60.

We also need someone with a P-III system to pitch in on how it works for them. 😀 Unfortunately, it seems that neither you nor I have such a system. 🙁

Getting back to this, I did run some tests on my 3GHz P4 and new-to-me 1GHz Celeron, but in order not to sidetrack this thread I spun them off into their own thing here. The conclusion I came to is that a fast P4 is absolutely still working its ass off to run these games at high resolutions and isn't even sufficient in all cases. I invite you guys to contribute more results. 😁 Maybe I'll try my 3GHz Core2Duo later.

MalcomYork wrote:

I've been digging around and I'm trying to understand which will be the most appropriate GPU to play Windows 98 games (like Shogo, or even older like Blood and Duke Nukem 3D) at 1600x1200 and I can't really decide. I came across a Voodoo 4 and it seems to be the best GPU I can buy in my country, but I know it is not optimal for that resolution; I would guess a Voodoo 5 would be a better choice, but I can't get one in my country. Also, there are some other alternatives which I have considered, like an ATI X850 XT PE or even a GeForce 6800 GT Ultra, which I can't find in my country.

Could you give me an advice?

I don't know about shogo, but Duke3D and Blood is not Win98 games. They are Dos games. Voodoo4 is a nice card for what I have heard, just stay away from anything FX-5xxx and newer for Win98 games. By that I mean that a card such as GF-6800 GT Ultra that you can find, bring too many compatibility issues. Drivers as an example, will break Win98 compatibility. Such a card is a WinXP card. I do not know about Radeon cards, what card is the newest that still have 100% compatibility.

As someone said previous in this post, a P4 with a Radeon9600 is a solid choice for a ultra fast Win98 machine. The one I build, was a bit different, as it was an Socket 754 Sempron 2000+, Radeon-9800-XXL, and YMF-724. Yet people who build upon a Socket-775 platform, get a faster and more powerfull machine than the one that I did. There is a complete and seperate thread here on Vogons on what is the fastest Win98 machine that can be build.

For GFX... Keep to GF4-ti4xxx cards, if you want nVidia. Radeon I have no clue on, though 9800 is a really fast choice.
Regarding Voodoo, then V3 is fair and fast for early Win98, and V4 I have no clue on. (Phil has a Voodoo comparison video)
You can check out Kyro cards as well... They might or might not suit you.

EDIT:
Yes.... I did this build a long time ago, before dropbox closed my access to sharing pictures, because of bandwith useage.
I might be able to source the pictures in some way or another. Anyway... The beast wich were a Sempron 3300+ and not 2000+
Yeahhh... I forgot that I used so many different GFX cards on that build.

New high end Win98se build. Renamed "The Beast"

EDIT #2:
Found these pictures of the machine. Not much, though at least I have some of it.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bzzas … dUU?usp=sharing

xjas wrote:

I did run some tests on my 3GHz P4

Maybe I'll try my 3GHz Core2Duo later.

I don't really know how much of a difference there is going to be between these two processors for the particular software you are executing. Seems like raw clock speed differences would be the only advantage and reason for switching.