Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-16, 12:23:

Will make a killer GPU for my old 2500K system if I ever decide to turn that into an overpowered Windows XP rig. Could drop a PCI Voodoo 5 5500 and a Vortex 2 in there for some stupid 98SE\XP dual boot action as well. 🤣

Win98 on a Sandy Bridge system? I'm guessing there's some driver Tomfoolery going on there.

DundyTheCroc wrote on 2022-12-16, 10:58:

Do you believe in Christmas miracles? I was not sure, but now know, that sometimes they happen.
Just got nice working Voodoo 5 5500 from a local Bulgarian seller for the price of two cigarette packs.
5500.jpg

Nice! congratulation I also found mine under similar circumstances

I could not help myself from buying this Canon VP1000 typewriter terminal. It's in great condition and very clean inside. Keyboard doesn't work, but that should not be a big problem. I had a vision porting Digger or Space Invaders in it, in other words: disassemble it, break it and leave it to collect dust for about 10 years. Well, it's in assembled state again...for some time. Dumped the firmware ROM. It included no information about version etc.

Found this shiny chrome ps/2 mouse on eBay, sold new for 6€.

It came with a floppy disk (drivers) and an useful ps/2 - serial adapter.

I really like it, even because I've never saw something similar before.

Jaron wrote on 2022-12-16, 14:37:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-16, 12:23:

Will make a killer GPU for my old 2500K system if I ever decide to turn that into an overpowered Windows XP rig. Could drop a PCI Voodoo 5 5500 and a Vortex 2 in there for some stupid 98SE\XP dual boot action as well. 🤣

Win98 on a Sandy Bridge system? I'm guessing there's some driver Tomfoolery going on there.

That project has been floating around in the back of my mind for years, but has never made it much farther than that because I could just use other computers that are more suitable for 98SE... but this thread serves as a proof of concept, at least up to a 1st Gen core system on a P55 chipset. I'm not sure if a P67 would be different since I haven't looked into it in detail.

Obviously it's not necessary, but... well... neither is most of what we do here. 😁

Picked up some late 90s PC junk today, should be fun. These Acer Aspires are pretty rare nowadays.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-16, 21:05:

Jaron wrote on 2022-12-16, 14:37:

Win98 on a Sandy Bridge system? I'm guessing there's some driver Tomfoolery going on there.

That project has been floating around in the back of my mind for years, but has never made it much farther than that because I could just use other computers that are more suitable for 98SE... but this thread serves as a proof of concept, at least up to a 1st Gen core system on a P55 chipset. I'm not sure if a P67 would be different since I haven't looked into it in detail.

Ok, that's not Tomfoolery, that's Tom, Dick, and ALL the Janes Foolery. I mean, I can appreciate the "Well, why not?" aspect of it. But I mostly do experiments to to see if I can make a better or more convenient system, not just because I can. Consolidating retro systems to save desk and storage space is great, but only if it's still simple to use. From the look of things there, that's gone way past my level of "simple enough to use."

Dual-booting XP and 7 is a pretty simple affair since there's so much hardware overlap. And it makes a lot of sense to do since an "overkill" XP system with relatively modern hardware can also serve as a nice mainstream Win7 system if you have some titles that don't like Win10 ( like a lot of GOG versions can be ). Dualing 98 and XP isn't too bad, but it requires a little more thought and effort, and it does limit top-end XP performance. Technically, a dual XP/7 system also limits top-end Win7 performance, but I figure anything that can benefit from more than a GTX 950 or 750 Ti has no problem with Win10. My philosophy is to only make something as old as it needs to be; if a game or program can run well on a newer system, then it goes on the newer system. My XP box has a far bigger library on it because I have only a handful of games that run better on 98.

On an unrelated note, this arrived today. That means all my EAX dreams come true, right?

Jaron wrote on 2022-12-16, 22:22:

Ok, that's not Tomfoolery, that's Tom, Dick, and ALL the Janes Foolery. I mean, I can appreciate the "Well, why not?" aspect of […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-16, 21:05:

Jaron wrote on 2022-12-16, 14:37:

Win98 on a Sandy Bridge system? I'm guessing there's some driver Tomfoolery going on there.

That project has been floating around in the back of my mind for years, but has never made it much farther than that because I could just use other computers that are more suitable for 98SE... but this thread serves as a proof of concept, at least up to a 1st Gen core system on a P55 chipset. I'm not sure if a P67 would be different since I haven't looked into it in detail.

Ok, that's not Tomfoolery, that's Tom, Dick, and ALL the Janes Foolery. I mean, I can appreciate the "Well, why not?" aspect of it. But I mostly do experiments to to see if I can make a better or more convenient system, not just because I can. Consolidating retro systems to save desk and storage space is great, but only if it's still simple to use. From the look of things there, that's gone way past my level of "simple enough to use."

Dual-booting XP and 7 is a pretty simple affair since there's so much hardware overlap. And it makes a lot of sense to do since an "overkill" XP system with relatively modern hardware can also serve as a nice mainstream Win7 system if you have some titles that don't like Win10 ( like a lot of GOG versions can be ). Dualing 98 and XP isn't too bad, but it requires a little more thought and effort, and it does limit top-end XP performance. Technically, a dual XP/7 system also limits top-end Win7 performance, but I figure anything that can benefit from more than a GTX 950 or 750 Ti has no problem with Win10. My philosophy is to only make something as old as it needs to be; if a game or program can run well on a newer system, then it goes on the newer system. My XP box has a far bigger library on it because I have only a handful of games that run better on 98.

On an unrelated note, this arrived today. That means all my EAX dreams come true, right?

I agree with pretty much everything you said, which is why I haven't spent any time on the project myself. I have had enough trouble getting, for example, a Dell desktop from the early\mid 2000s that came with XP to work properly under 98SE. Chipset and storage controller drivers can be a HUGE problem especially. Some systems work without much hassle, while others are a nightmare of PnP resources being shuffled around with every reboot, not knowing if everything will work fine or if your video card, sound card or drives will suddenly be totally broken or rendered useless by some fallback compatibility mode.

I'm not a fan of all the background garbage that Windows 10\11 does, but I will say that we are truly spoiled by how modern OSes handle hardware these days. If I have to let MS spy on me in exchange for such conveniences as being able to swap an entire OS SSD to a new (and totally different) computer without any blue screens, hardware\software\driver conflicts or even OS activation issues, I will take the trade off. 🤣

EDIT: Oh, and nice card! I've never used a Prelude but I used an X-Fi XtremeMusic for years, but haven't really bothered with them for a long time now. I have several in my stockpile of cards, but I have yet to run into a situation where I needed one. So few games that I would play used any of their features. I ended up getting an Asus Xonar DX back in ~2009 I think, and I still use that in my main PC (5800X3D, X570, 3060Ti). Still saddens me that hardware accelerated sound is so thoroughly dead. Every time some promising tech pops up that claims to do what our old sound cards did (A3D, EAX, etc.) it seems to fade into obscurity. I read something not long ago about using Ray Tracing hardware for sound, but I don't think anything ever came of it. I think that is, arguably, a far better use of RT hardware than to simply make games run like garbage for improved lighting accuracy.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-17, 04:59:

Some systems work without much hassle, while others are a nightmare of PnP resources being shuffled around with every reboot, not knowing if everything will work fine or if your video card, sound card or drives will suddenly be totally broken or rendered useless by some fallback compatibility mode.

I'm not a fan of all the background garbage that Windows 10\11 does, but I will say that we are truly spoiled by how modern OSes handle hardware these days. If I have to let MS spy on me in exchange for such conveniences as being able to swap an entire OS SSD to a new (and totally different) computer without any blue screens, hardware\software\driver conflicts or even OS activation issues, I will take the trade off. 🤣

The bloat is real evident when you look at the install size jump from 98 to XP, and especially from XP to 7. Kinda boggles the mind that so much of the extra storage space is used just for pre-included device drivers. Also on your system, does the BIOS have a setting to disable PnP? It shouldn't affect system performance at all, but it should lock down resources and interrupts in the BIOS instead of handing it all over to the OS.

Jaron wrote on 2022-12-17, 05:15:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-17, 04:59:

Some systems work without much hassle, while others are a nightmare of PnP resources being shuffled around with every reboot, not knowing if everything will work fine or if your video card, sound card or drives will suddenly be totally broken or rendered useless by some fallback compatibility mode.

I'm not a fan of all the background garbage that Windows 10\11 does, but I will say that we are truly spoiled by how modern OSes handle hardware these days. If I have to let MS spy on me in exchange for such conveniences as being able to swap an entire OS SSD to a new (and totally different) computer without any blue screens, hardware\software\driver conflicts or even OS activation issues, I will take the trade off. 🤣

Also on your system, does the BIOS have a setting to disable PnP? It shouldn't affect system performance at all, but it should lock down resources and interrupts in the BIOS instead of handing it all over to the OS.

Not sure which system we're talking about, but if it's my P67 + 2500K system, I don't know if it has those settings the way older systems do. I know it uses a UEFI setup, so it's decidedly NOT old school.

It's worth mentioning what spurred on the whole idea of using that computer. I had installed a multi-card-reader in the system and one time I left a CF card with DOS+Windows 98SE on it (destined for one of my retro PCs) when I rebooted. To my surprise, it actually tried to boot! I had that system booting to the command prompt, so it loaded DOS 7.1 just fine. When I tried to load Windows out of morbid curiosity it gave an error that I looked up and tracked down to being related to having way too much memory (16GB... 🤣). That's as far as I'd taken it at the time (5+ years ago), but it really got me thinking. 😁

Beyond that, I have no idea if the system is even remotely capable of running 98SE properly, but if it can boot to DOS and it has PCI slots, that's a good start.

I thought you were referring to your Dell that you said you were trying to get 98 running on. I may have misunderstood.

Jaron wrote on 2022-12-17, 06:47:

I thought you were referring to your Dell that you said you were trying to get 98 running on. I may have misunderstood.

Oh I see, sorry. If I remember correctly, that was just a one off thing for a person that wanted a system that dual booted XP and 98SE. I did that about 3 years ago and in the end it did work, but it was a bear to get around all of the quirks. I probably took some notes on some of the fixes for issues I had, but to be honest it was such a pain I have since wiped most of that from my memory. Now that I think about it, I believe I made a disk image of the drive when I was done so I could plunk it into other similar Dell systems without jumping through so many hoops. Without knowing all of the BIOS settings I used though, I'm not sure how easy that will be either.

I do have a couple of those computers in storage now. Whether I attempt that again will just depend on the going rate of a similar dual boot system on Ebay. 😮

To get back on topic, I just picked up an Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro and a Matrox Ultima Plus PCI (2MB, with sockets for another 2MB!) for a very good price.

(Seller's Photos)

I can't believe it took me so many years to get a first generation Sound Galaxy with COVOX support.

And that Matrox card is a beast for such an early PCI card. Not sure what kind of build it would be ideal for... but I guess it would be quite unique to make a strictly Windows 3.11 focused system which has a basic VGA card and uses the Matrox for Windows acceleration. With minimal focus on DOS and DOS compatibility, that could be a really interesting project now that I think about it. I guess it would just depend if the Matrox was not just good at accelerating Windows but good at running games that run in Windows 3.11.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-17, 08:08:

And that Matrox card is a beast for such an early PCI card. Not sure what kind of build it would be ideal for... but I guess it would be quite unique to make a strictly Windows 3.11 focused system which has a basic VGA card and uses the Matrox for Windows acceleration. With minimal focus on DOS and DOS compatibility, that could be a really interesting project now that I think about it. I guess it would just depend if the Matrox was not just good at accelerating Windows but good at running games that run in Windows 3.11.

You have a later revision card than I once had. I wonder what they revised? Hmmm... Regardless, mine most certainly had abysmal DOS performance.

Bought it pretty much for the case (with unknown and untested hardware) just in time before it was scrapped. Turns out to be a very nice system with some nice components. The previous owner got taste 😀
Added 1GB more, installed a fresh XP and had to work on the optical drives a bit.

Murugan wrote on 2022-12-17, 17:43:

Bought it pretty much for the case (with unknown and untested)just in time before it was scrapped. Turns out to be a very nice system with some nice components. The previous owner got taste 😀
Added 1GB more, installed a fresh XP and had to work on the optical drives a bit.

Absolutely great
Whats cpu in there ? Does it more than 3ghz ? and which gf 6800 ?

P4 3,2 and the Ultra 😀

Murugan wrote on 2022-12-17, 17:43:

Bought it pretty much for the case (with unknown and untested)just in time before it was scrapped. Turns out to be a very nice system with some nice components. The previous owner got taste 😀
Added 1GB more, installed a fresh XP and had to work on the optical drives a bit.

Wow, that's an insanely nice find if you had no idea what was in it!

Looks like an AGP 6800 Ultra, and maybe an X-Fi soundcard?

Also, I would inspect that old Antec power supply. Those could range from good to very very bad. Is it True Power or a Smart?

It's an Audigy 2 card.
I'll check the PSU type tomorrow.
The PC costed me 20€ so this was a great deal!

Murugan wrote on 2022-12-17, 17:43:

Turns out to be a very nice system with some nice components. The previous owner got taste 😀

Very nice.

I bought some cards and a PC case. Any good?