good luck with those. compaqs tend to have the most unreliable adapters ever and their batteries don't age well. I learned the hard way. Don't take the adapter to a lot of places often 😒

the power adapter was lost so I replaced it anyway. And as for the battery well how many Li-Ion batts last 9 years? 😀 It still works but I imagine the capacity is rather limited. I am almost always on AC with notebooks anyway.

I managed to find generic drivers for my Linksys WPC54G v2 PC card that work in 98SE with full WPA2 AES support. Totally wondrous it is.

Thats pretty good actually! Nice rig. I just thought of a nice addition to it though, to make it perfect: Roland SCP-55. Portable, yet perfect retro rig 😀

dude thats bad ass compared to my sattelite 805-s202

I discovered that 98SE installs in APM mode by default on here. It's a bit curious as XP installed in ACPI mode. So, I reinstalled 98SE with /pj to force ACPI and it seems to work fine. I like my CPU getting HLT commands to run cooler without the need for Rain or some such app.

I haven't been able to figure out a way to get the CPU to dynamically change clock in 98 though. This CPU has speedstep and in XP it works as it should but in 98, even with the Intel Speedstep applet, it will only change clock if I manually set it to the speed or if I go on battery. Not much of an issue of course, but it would make the fan run less. 😀

I've never actually had a Rage Pro before so this is an interesting bit of kit to have to play old games on. JK MotS seems to run pretty smooth at 1024x768x16 (game is 16-bit only) but does occasionally slow down a bit. Rage Pro seems to be about as fast as a Voodoo1 while looking better. Less blur. No 640x480 limitation. I need to try more games on it. Maybe I should overclock the Rage heh heh!!

swaaye wrote:

Rage Pro seems to be about as fast as a Voodoo1 while looking better. Less blur. No 640x480 limitation. I need to try more games on it. Maybe I should overclock the Rage heh heh!!

This is an interesting point of view... Care to share some screenshots? 😀

I really cant belive that any card can look better then 3dfx in 16-bit. In fact, I used to compare 3dfx glide 16-bit with 32-bit DirectX. Only 32-bit DX rendering had comparable quality. Though, I must admit, I havent played with V1 in a while. Have been testing on V2, V3 and V5.

Voodoo1 was a speed demon and had lots of features. There's no denying that it was the best 3D accel out there by far in 1996/7. But I found it to be somewhat blurry and really didn't like how it blurred out the 2D card. With the Righteous 3D at least, they blur out the 2D card much more than a Voodoo2. Even 1024x768 is rather soft and going above that becomes quite unpleasant .

Voodoo3 and up are really great cards overall because they dropped the pass-thru requirement. Their 2D is very fast and clear. And yeah they do really great 16-bit output. The best of all Voodoos is V5 with its AA, of course.

Rage Pro seems to be ok. But I've only played JK MotS on it so far so I'm not really an expert yet heh. I can tell that the GUI accelerator part of it is not a speed demon though. Compared to cards like Voodoo3/TNT/Matrox G200.

There's no denying that being able to run >640x480 on every game is a major advantage as long as the game is rendering okay too. Voodoo 1&2's segregated memory pools were a disadvantage with how they limited framebuffer resolution.

^^ sounds like something is wrong with your Voodoo1 card. My V1 of that time, Flash 3D, didnt really affect the 2D picture. Virge DX which was behind it was pretty sharp up to 1024x768. At that time, my 15" CRT didnt support much more then that, so I cannot say anything about higher res. The first blurred 2D I ever saw was on Eagle (el cheapo) GF 2 MX. Man how I hated that card...

I've had two Orchid Righteous 3D cards and both blurred the picture from the 2D card at >1024x768. Fortunately back when Voodoo1 was the hottest thing around most people had 15-17" monitors and weren't going above 1024x768 anyway.

I remember when there was an urban myth on usenet about Righteous 3D's mechanical relays being superior for image quality compared to Diamond Monster 3D's non-mechanical design. Funny stuff. 😀 Click click!

And yeah NVIDIA had some garbage back during the GF256-GF3 days. I've seen some seriously awful quality come out of their cards from those days. Some are ok though.