I'd go i815 chipset cuz you will have much better luck with AGP cards if you want a 133MHz FSB. I'm running a 440BX + Tualatin 1.4/133 and AGP is very iffy on there with just about any card. Some cards simply will not work while others may only be somewhat unstable.

Note that not all i815 boards can run Tualatin. Make sure you look into which can. ASUS TUSL2-C can, for ex. There are Tualatin mobo roundups out there.

Software mode vs. Glide will be a big difference in visual quality. Glide wrappers are interesting but not perfect on any level. And yes Voodoo2's passthru will work for any VGA output regardless of how new it is. Lots of these Glide games that will run on a Voodoo2 will also run on a Voodoo3/4/5.

Most Windows 9x games don't use MIDI at all. Windows has a semi-decent Roland-based softsynth built into newer DirectX versions, or you can get something like the software-based Yamaha S-YXG50. No need for fancy hardware MIDI really unless you are interested in messing with huge soundfonts on a Live/Audigy. Live! has fairly capable SB16 support whereas Aureal unfortunately only does up to 8-bit/22kHz/stereo SBPro2.

My recommendations:

ASUS P2B BX chipset board with Powerleap PL-IP3/T and Celeron 1.4Ghz CPU
3Dfx Voodoo3 3000 or better video card
Aureal SQ2500 or Diamond 3D sound card

I have a PC just like that, and another fairly close for Win9x retro goodness.
Pair of Retro PC's

Yeah the "Celeron" Tualatin CPUs are great choices for BX boards cuz of their 100MHz FSB. I have a 1200MHz Celery myself. They are still faster than a Coppermine P3, I believe, cuz they have the same amount of cache but also have Tualatin improvements.

Voodoo3 is also very good.

I am torn between Vortex2 and Live! though. Live! has much better MIDI options, comparable sound quality, but also has that SB16 support which can be very nice for late DOS games. Aureal on the other hand has vastly superior 2 speaker 3D audio for A3D games and a cool MPU-401 header for those daughtercards.

So, that's 2 votes for Voodoo3 cards. Why is that? Didn't their usefulness for later games dry up pretty quickly in 99 or so?

I'm seeing a trend to the 440 boards. I take it 100mhz is good enough for the bus for the application I stated?

Voodoo3 isn't super exciting, but even the Voodoo3 2000 is faster than Voodoo2 SLI and puts out better image quality. I'd rather run a Voodoo3/4/5 than a Voodoo2 setup. Only catch is that some Glide games will be troublesome unless you run them on the hardware they were designed for.

One advantage to Voodoo2 is that you can pair it up with anything. Stick that GeForce 4 MX440 in there, which is way faster than a Voodoo3 for OpenGL & D3D, and just use the Voodoo2 for Glide games.

100MHz FSB is fine for these systems. 133MHz obviously is a little bit faster, but it's probably tough to notice. We're not talking speed demon machines here regardless. If you want 133MHz, go i815.

You could always go with a the VC820 intel desktop board:

I had recently been following them and figured that you could get one of the motherboards and a full 512mb of rambus for it for around $65.00. It is kinda pricey, but it should give you the fastest non-overclocked P3 system.

senrew wrote:

After lots of reading and soul searching, I've decided to forgo an older machine in favor of dosbox. That covers my itch for older games but still leaves a nice gap of Win9x era games that hate being run on NT-based systems. <snip>

I understand you want a win9x only machine. I don't know whether you want win98 or win95. I'll assume it's 98.

Consider getting an Athlon based mobo with 1 ISA slot. Like the one prophase_j has. There are others. A mobo like this will run windows 98 software very fast. The 1 ISA slot can be used for soundblaster, for games like (3dfx) Redguard which needs windows but still uses these older cards. (You also mention running the occasional DOS game inside the win desktop - for eg some latter 3D Realms' games, etc.)

You mention the GeForce 4 MX4400 AGP, and why not it's a good card, but you could max out your rig with either -

AGP Radeon 9800
AGP nVidia 6800

Both these series cards were the last to have win98 drivers.

For Glide, you can use any 3dfx card setup (2D + 3dfx 3D, or just 3dfx 3D) even with your AGP card installed. (Use win98's "hardware profiles" to keep them more or less apart from one another.) If you get fed up with voodoo1/2 "blur-o-vision" for instance, switch back to the AGP card using the mobo's "AGP/PCI BIOS" option. Please note - I've heard that very old 3dfx hardware (eg V1, V2) may fail on very fast mobos. (Also, a good "sharp image" 2D card is a Matrox Millennium 1.)

Sound cards - why not max your rig out and get a Creative audigy 2 ZS? It has win98 drivers. You could get one of those fancy Pro versions, with all the midi options and stuff. Cable jungle! 😀 Win98's "Control Panel -> System - resource management" should be able to keep your older ISA soundcard and newer PCI Audigy card from squabbling with each other.

Nero drivespeed will keep an optical drive quiet. If you go for a 1 ISA slot mobo, there's plenty of PCI slots left over for stuff like a NIC and extra HDD card if you need one.

Best of luck! 😀

An i815 mainboard seems a bit of an odd one for gaming. As it is not much faster than a 440BX mainboard, but a lot less DOS friendly. Mostly in regard to getting sound, as the i815 has No ISA and no DDMA support. As you say you don't care for DOS much, then why not get a much faster AMD Athlon system and run Windows 9X on that? Example

You find a Geforce MX440 crappy, Why is that?
Geforce 6 series cards may give you some glitches with some older Windows games.

Creative audigy 2 ZS sounds nice. Vortex-2 and SB Live are nice too. Vortex-2 has A3D and better DOS support, better SNR too. But an Audigy or Live comes with Soundfont support and EAX. Yet soundfont support can also be obtained by using timidity software. For windows 9X gaming I would also consider the praised Turtle Beach Santa Cruz soundcard. That is well designed soundcard with quality components. You can upgrade it with a midi daughterboard when desired. Has some EAX support too.

senrew,
I believe the two differing recommendations are based upon whether you want to have a Win98 box with one foot in the past (DOS), or something totally Windows 98 with one eye to the future.

I like to keep DOS compatibility with my Win9x box, hence my recommendation for hardware fitting the middle of that time period. Good DOS, SB Pro, wavetable MIDI and VESA support is important.

Retro's post is more for a later model Win98 box with no DOS support. Neither of us are wrong. It depends on what you want to do with it.

(PS. I second the recommendation for a TB Santa Cruz if you don't need DOS support. It rocks! 'twas my longest running sound card in my main rig because of that WT header)

valnar wrote:

Retro's post is more for a later model Win98 box with no DOS support.

Not no DOS support, as you can use "pure DOS 7" or "desktop DOS" with win98. You mention that "SB Pro, wavetable MIDI and VESA support is important." With the rig I outlined above, you can have all of that if you wanted to. Well, just about. The SB Pro can go in the 1 ISA slot, although you're stuffed when it comes to funky tunes. 😉 [Although, maybe you can connect an external MIDI module to the SB Pro's MIDI port?] Wavetable MIDI can be mounted on an ISA-based card, such as a "DSP bug free" SB16 or AWE32. (There are others.) VESA support would also work with any appropriate PCI-based graphics card - alongside a more powerful AGP card for windows intensive stuff.

Wow...didn't expect the polarization...awesome though. I like seeing strong opinions.

A little help clarifying. I'm imagining this as a pure win98 box. I've got other machines for DOS stuff if I absolutely need to run them outside of dosbox.

I'm leaning toward a pure win98 box though. Games that won't run on 2k/xp. Games that do run fine on those OSs I've got a newer rig for.

The GeForce card is specifically a GeForce 4 MX 4000/64MB AGP-something. I think 4x. All reports I've seen of this card equate it in power to a GF2.

Assuming I go with a dual card setup, maybe a voodoo3 for stuff that want it, and a 6800 for everything else?

I think the oldest games I'll be running on here are like the early "Designed for Windows 95" stickered games like SU-27 and the like. Also, any DOS games that were rereleased in Windows versions. WC3 etc.

I'm guessing 133mhz ram isn't all that important, but I'd like to find a board with the basics built-in. Onboard drive controllers, NIC, etc.

Any specific board recommendations?

prophase_j wrote:

You could always go with a the VC820 intel desktop board: It is kinda pricey, but it should give you the fastest non-overclocked P3 system.

Not worth it IMO. The speed difference borders negligible in the best of cases and it loses to 440BX/i815 occasionally.

The problem is that P6's bus lines up perfectly with the bandwidth provided by a single channel of 64-bit SDRAM and that RDRAM has worse latency.

The only time to mess with RDRAM is with i840 (dual proc P3) or i850 (P4 quad pumped bus).

senrew wrote:

A little help clarifying. I'm imagining this as a pure win98 box. […]
Show full quote

A little help clarifying. I'm imagining this as a pure win98 box.

The GeForce card is specifically a GeForce 4 MX 4000/64MB AGP-something.

Assuming I go with a dual card setup, maybe a voodoo3 for stuff that want it, and a 6800 for everything else?

I'm guessing 133mhz ram isn't all that important, but I'd like to find a board with the basics built-in. Onboard drive controllers, NIC, etc.

Any specific board recommendations?

Since you said you want a Tualatin, I'd get a ASUS TUSL2-C or other Tualatin-supporting motherboard. Most boards from those days don't have onboard ethernet. Cards are cheap though and PCI slots are plentiful. The i815 boards have Universal AGP 4x slots, UDMA 100, and FSB 133 support. Very nice. Has some AC97 audio that you can use too if you want. It does have a CNR slot for ethernet, but good luck finding the card....

GeForce4MX runs from about as fast as a GeForce2 MX to a GeForce2 Ultra, depending on the model. Depends on the memory bus width, mainly. http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce4mx.html

Unlike with 440BX mobos that only support AGP 2x or lower at 3.3v, you can run any AGP card you like in an i815 board. Go nuts. 😀

You can actually run a Voodoo3-5 PCI rather easily alongside an AGP card as long as you can choose which is the primary card in the mobo BIOS. For example, you set the BIOS run the PCI Voodoo 3/4/5 card as primary when you want to play a Glide game. Windows will still see the secondary card, but the primary card is what displays the "primary" stuff. I'd look up mobo manuals and see if their BIOSs have this option (most do).

TUSL2-C manual
Xbit Labs TUSL2-C review
Tualatin mobo roundup (ASUS TUSL2-C, Intel D815EEA2U, Soyo SY-TISU, and Tyan Tomcat i815T (S2080)

I went with a tualatin in the spec because they just happened to be the bad-bitch intel chips of the era before the p4 got it's stride. Would any of the Slot 1/A Athlons be a good alternative?

As a side note, this whole thing started because I wanted to put together a badass K6-III box but figured I may as well max out the Win98 abilities of it, and the III-S 1.4 happened to be what I remember as king of the hill for the time.

As for the Video Cards, I guess the world was divided between left-over glide support and D3D/OpenGL at the time? Do any of the later Voodoo cards have any specific incompatabilities with games that were written for the 2s? As for the second AGP card, I'm thinking a GeForce 6800ish. I have a soft spot for NV over ATI.

swaaye wrote:

Since you said you want a Tualatin, I'd get a ASUS TUSL2-C or other Tualatin-supporting motherboard.

senrew, If you need no ISA support, I highly recommend this board as well. It was one of the best i815EP chipset boards out there. I had one for awhile. But then again...if you need no ISA support, you can go beyond this to a P4. At that point, then question then is....Which chipset was the last made to have Win98 drivers?

Well you can run some VIA K8 chipsets in 9x. 😉 You better stick to AGP though cuz I doubt very many PCIe cards will do 9x....

Last NV chipset to do 9x was nForce2, I believe.

swaaye wrote:

You can actually run a Voodoo3-5 PCI rather easily alongside an AGP card as long as you can choose which is the primary card in the mobo BIOS. For example, you set the BIOS run the PCI Voodoo 3/4/5 card as primary when you want to play a Glide game. Windows will still see the secondary card, but the primary card is what displays the "primary" stuff.

When I was messing about with hardware profiles, I noticed something interesting about having both an AGP and a PCI graphics card in the machine at the same time. Say if you select your "PCI hardware configuration" at boot-up time, and your AGP graphics card happens to have "auxillary software" which always loads up at boot-up - software which is typically represented by an icon sitting in your taskbar for instance. What I noticed is that Windows 98 attempts to run this "aux/helper software", despite selecting "PCI config" at boot-up. Luckily, it doesn't appear to derail Windows 98. All that seems to go wrong is that you're shown an error message to say that this AGP-based software can't be run, which is understandable! 😀 (Of course, the same problem occurs the other way around, that is if you select your "AGP config" at boot-up time, and your PCI graphics card happens to always load up "aux software" for it.)

Ok, next question.

Are there any games made for Win9x that will have speed issues with newer hardware or is that kind of thing a byproduct of past ages?

senrew wrote:

Are there any games made for Win9x that will have speed issues with newer hardware or is that kind of thing a byproduct of past ages?

Very good question! 😀 I really wish I could answer this more fully. From my very limited amount of games testing (I wish I had time to do more), I found one game, but I'm confident there are more. The game is called Outcast, circa 2000, the 3D action adventure game. The really interesting problem occurs if you try and run it on a machine roughly faster than say 1Ghz. When you walk through ponds and stuff, you slow down considerably. So much in fact, that the game becomes unplayable. Other problems occur, such as you can't ride the creatures which exist on one of the planets. As soon as you reduce the speed of the CPU down to about 800mhz or less, the problem disappears.