swaaye wrote:

Q3A does use HW T&L. You can even tweak a few vars in-game to up triangle subdivisions if you have a T&L card and want more curvy, less polygonal. HW T&L and Q3-engines worked right off the bat, as I recall.

Any card regardless of T&L can set those. It's just the GF2 had a fillrate that can handle all of that. Q3A uses a lot more efficient use of triangle strips and primitives that the detonator OpenGL ICD drivers loved, which made the game quite speedy some 9 years back. Q3A does not use HW T&L as it was suspected to. The OpenGL drivers however, does vertex transform in hardware so it's partially transparent T&L.

swaaye wrote:

There's even a special map made for Quake 3 to show off NV15 (GeForce 2 GTS). Gobs of geometry. Apparently this hits the CPU pretty hard too though.

My Geforce2 GTS sucked on that map on my slow computer. Had there been any HW T&L considered for use complete with vertex arrays and vbos it would be actually playable

Hey look, leileilol replied to my very ancient post!!! 😀

Yeah I should have said that while the game isn't designed to use T&L, the OpenGL drivers do take some advantage of it regardless.

I was looking around for some screens of the nv15demo yesterday and ran across some nice benchmark results. I'd say it shows CPU being the bottleneck. They were using an Athlon Tbird 1.33GHz.
http://www.3dnews.ru/video/radeon-8500/index4.htm

I also remember how putting a GeForce 256 into a K6-2 didn't make the game much more playable than with a Voodoo3. Hate K6s. 😀

So if I get a 233 can it use the 3.0x multipler setting?

Yes, 233s should have 3.0x.

Just remember that u may not get lucky with the overclockability. I have 3 200s that can't handle 300 even with gobs of voltage....

Sweet, I had read some conflicting info about that and I wanted to be sure before I buy one. I'll go ahead and get the 233 since it should ideally have more head room, and in the event that it won't take it I can still fall back to 233. I found a nice copper heatsink for socket 7, ad I figure that I'll try a max of 3.0v and if it doesn't work that's okay. It's too bad that all the desktop versions are on the .35 fab, and the mobiles are on the .25, especially since they had a mobile version that was rated at 300mhz. But since those are soldered to a module... not much I can do about that.

The desktop 233 MMXs are on .28u actually. 😀
http://www.sandpile.org/impl/p55.htm

You can get a socket7 version of mobile P266MMX (Tillamook). As mentioned earlier, I have one of these. The only real problem is that you are pretty much limited to boards that have the TX chipset, and then it will only really function on the ones that support the correct voltages.

swaaye wrote:

The desktop 233 MMXs are on .28u actually.

So as long as it is the PPGA instead of the ceramic it should be the .28 process? Definitely gonna make sure I get one of those. So those 200's taht you have, are they ceramic? And you mentioned that you got one to work somewhat a while ago, was that one the PPGA?

No my 200s are the PPGA variety.

I did have a 233 that did 300 a while back but it apparently got thrown away or something cuz I don't have it anymore. I think I may have accidentally given it to the recycle people years ago when I dropped a bunch of extra off there.

Okay cool, I don't think they make a 233 with the ceramic I should be set. I don't think it will make too much of a difference, but I'd like to know if the motherboard you had was based off ALi or Via. The one I'm getting is based off the ALi.

This retro project sounds exciting! 😀 Do you mind if I join the party? I've spotted an SS7 ALi chipset mobo on you'll-never-guess-where, and I might go for it. prophase_j, do you want to do some benchies to compare results? If so, lemme know, and please tell me what CPU I ought to get.

Sure man, your more than welcome to.

This what the processor should look like:

Here is a heatsink I just bought for it:

Cooljag Skiving JAC311C:

OK, I have an Iwill XA100 Plus Super7 mobo on the way. A review & specification can be found here -

http://active-hardware.com/english/reviews/ma … d/xa100plus.htm

On this webpage, it mentions this mobo supports the AMD K6-2 400mhz. What's the most interesting/useful thing to do here - get one of these AMD CPUs, or get an Intel Pentium MMX @ 233mhz CPU? The following Wikipedia webpage mentions that for a 233 speed Pentium MMX CPU, there are 3 process sizes: 35, 28 and 25. Any thoughts on which one to pick please?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium (table at bottom of page)

For the AGP slot, I will use a Voodoo3 card. For RAM, I've got some PC-100 SDRAM somewhere..

I think I'll get an Intel Pentium MMX @ 233mhz. A seller on ebay has several for sale:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … e=STRK:MEWAX:IT

I don't think you will be able to find any on the .25 process, those are mobile versions and they are usually soldered into a module, and as AC pointed out, then need really low core voltages to run. I think I'm going to use some PC133 ram, since I can use lower latency settings compared to a module that is rated for PC100. For video, I'm going to use a TNT based card. Depending on how loud the fan on the heatsink is, I may use a fan speed controller, or get a 60mm to 80mm converter and use a quieter 80mm fan.

The TNT series was great, but I'd probably go with a Voodoo3 instead since it would allow you to play the few Glide-only games that were made back then.

I agree that a V3 is an awesome card, but I think i'm going to take my V2SLI out of my rocket and put them in there for now. I used to have one but I gave it up some time ago.

I've got some "cheap as chips" bits ready! 😀 They are, from top left, clockwise:

Kingston value ram, PC-100, 256mb
Voodoo3 AGP
Yamaha SP 724 PCI
IWill XA100 Plus
Backplate
Abit 66 speed IDE (Why not? 😉 )

I'm just waiting for a Pentium MMX 233mhz CPU (code SL27S) to arrive. And a cheapo heatsink. Then, I think I'll set it up for Win95.

I just ordered my processor today, I think it will still be about another week before I get the motherboard. I hadn't given much thought to what to use for a soundcard, but for now i'll probably use my AWE64 since it 99.5% dos compatible and has super clean output.

I wanted to test out these bits, before my P MMX 233 CPU arrived. So I used a P MMX 166 CPU instead. I tested glQuake at 800x600x16, and was quite surprised that I only got 56 fps. On a non-super socket 7 board with the P MMX 166 CPU, using SLI Voodoo2, I get 70 fps. SLI Voodoo2 seems rather good! If I disable "SLI mode" on that board, I still get 54 fps, which is approximately what I get on the SS7 board using the AGP V3.