appiah4 wrote:the_ultra_code wrote:Upgraded my Pentium 3 machine from my Asus P3B-F Slot 1 motherboard with an 800MHz Slot 1 P3 to an Asus TUSL2-C Tualatin-compatible Socket 370 motherboard with the 1.4GHz S370 PIII-S.
I read the entire thing with interest.. I'm in the process of converting my Slot 1 P3-700 system into a Socket 370 Celeron 1000A@1330 so I found it really fascinating. I have a GeForce 2 GTS in my Slot 1 build right now, I will upgrade to a GF3 Ti200 for the Tualatin build. Don't you find the Voodoo 3 restrictively slow for such a build? I feel it really shines in slower (300-450 Mhz) Slot-1 builds, but gets seriously outclassed beyond that..
Oh, yeah, it's "slow" alright. 🤣
I got the Voodoo3 back when they were cheap a year ago on Philscomputerlab's recommendation for being an all-around AGP GPU for both DOS and well into the Win9X era, and since the focus of the PC was an all-around DOS/Win9X first-retro-build of a PC, it fit the bill. Of course. by the time you reach NFS3 at 1280x1024, you start to notice its limitations, and that sucks, since I mostly played Win9x games on the PC, with the occasional DOOM or Tomb Raider session.
However, with the introduction of my Pentium 1 rig (which, sadly, the 2D PCI card has now been severely hurt by either a non-spec passthrough cable, the Voodoo1 I got for the system, or both, so it is out-of-order for now), DOS gaming didn't have to be done on this machine anymore, and if I felt the desire for utmost convenience, I could always just use DOSBox or source ports (which I am planning to do with some games such as DOOM). So, I felt like the best thing to do for this system is to specialize it further: make it the best early-mid Win9x PC I could with Glide support. I was planning to just upgrade the CPU using a slocket, but since it became a pain and I already had the Asus TUSL2-C motherboard and 1.4GHz PIII-S, I thought I would just go full-in, ditching all "native" DOS compatibility for best near-late Win9x performance.
The Voodoo3 at this point is just a stop-gap. I want to go ahead and upgrade it to either a working Voodoo5 or, if it's a better deal, a Voodoo4 (if I can find one), to really make this build what it should be. The first Voodoo5 I got my hands on, well, it didn't make it (whether it was my fault or not, it's debatable). I could go ahead and throw in a Nvidia GeForce FX 5900XT I have lying around and do Glide emulation, but, well, A) the CPU isn't the best for that (a Pentium 4 would be better, I think), B) it would kinda be a bit of a pain to get the Glide emulation to work on a game-by-game basis, IMO (I'm already tired of troubleshooting retro PCs - just want to make things as plug-'n-play as possible), and C) from what I heard, the emulated Glide graphics just doesn't look "the same" as natively-rendered Glide graphics. Now I could just run all of the Glide games I want to run on my Pentium 4 machine which has an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and a 3.4GHz Prescott P4 in it (it'll have a Nvidia GeForce 6800GS shortly 😀 ), but, well, IDK, would kind of reduce the point of the P3 system a bit, no? 😀
Actually, I would like to make an edit: regarding my point B), I know that Philscomputerlab did a video on using nGlide, but does nGlide work system wide without the need to have to individually patch every single game with some nGlide wrapper file, or will some games need an additional file to work with nGlide?