Here's a chart of cards I've run with Quake on my P200. All cards circa 1997. Any one run the early ATI cards in their retro systems? The Rage Pro Turbo (Xpert@Play) was not a bad chip at the time, but I would pick a Viper 330 over it.
The ET6000 has the same Super-EGA Scrolling bug as the Matrox cards.
As for the Matrox urban legend, I would like to add some fact to the ET6000 urban legend:
http://www.xfree86.org/3.3.6/tseng13.html
Go in the thread a bit up and down 😀.
And for 2D speed tests using Duke3D see this: http://www.dosforum.de/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=53 … rtenspeed#p3653
wrote:Why? What problems?
VGA ModeX games look like this:
The above screenshots are taken from Jazz Jackrabbit, running on a Hercules Dynamite 128.
BTW, I just checked a Radeon 7200 and a Rage 128 Pro for VESA compatibility. Haven't tested for a long, but their VESA video mode list is more complete than any other card from the same time.
just to add that the Riva128zx card plays Jazz fine!
wrote:commander keen is an EGA game, sensitive with the vga etc etc.. maybe it just changes some register in the v3 and output more red or something...
I tried keen4 with my voodoo3 2000 pci but noticed no excessive red, was it on a specific level?
What! No mention of the famous (or infamous) Cirrus Logic chips? I remember many oem 486 and early Pentium PC's were plagued with these things.
My 486 DX4-100 system is using a 1mb Cirrus VLB card and it's actually not that bad for Dos games. I find it better than the Cirrus chip i had in my old crap HP Deskpro PC (which was a p200 mmx).
Cirrus is fine for DOS, but getting a good card is somewhat difficult :p
had cirrus'es too, never had a prob
Has anyone tried out one of the old PowerVR chips with Dos? I'm talking about the PCX-1/2, Neon 250 and Kyro 1/2 chips 😀
PCX1/2 are secondary boards so you can't try those with DOS. Why the Apocalypse 3DX is on bushwack's test chart (along with Monster3D) for testing DOSQuake on is unknown, as those two cards only have support in GLQuake.
Kyro2 could be used however. I haven't done extensive DOS testing on that though, but give me examples to try and watch out for, and i'll do them
wrote:yep, a 486 system with a 5x86/133 cpu , pci based mobo (a NOS Soyo SY-4SAW) ...
I am about to try a pci voodoo3 2000 and 3000 card, sure they will go to waste but if they are nice 2D cards it is fine 😊
FYI, I ran a Voodoo3 2000 in a 486. It works but you have to use some older drivers because I think the later revisions require Pentium instructions. The newer drivers wouldn't work on it, the desktop would come up in 16 color mode, the usual non-functioning display driver thing. But some older ones, whatever revision they were, worked perfect even with 3D games.
wrote:Cirrus is fine for DOS, but getting a good card is somewhat difficult :p
had cirrus'es too, never had a prob
Yup for DOS they can be fine. Stay away from Windows though, especially with any of the VLB and ISA chips. Very slow.
wrote:wrote:yep, a 486 system with a 5x86/133 cpu , pci based mobo (a NOS Soyo SY-4SAW) ...
I am about to try a pci voodoo3 2000 and 3000 card, sure they will go to waste but if they are nice 2D cards it is fine 😊
FYI, I ran a Voodoo3 2000 in a 486. It works but you have to use some older drivers because I think the later revisions require Pentium instructions. The newer drivers wouldn't work on it, the desktop would come up in 16 color mode, the usual non-functioning display driver thing. But some older ones, whatever revision they were, worked perfect even with 3D games.
How did you manage that?
All 3 of my 486 boards fail to post with a voodoo3 installed.
They only come up with a solid red, green or white screen.
wrote:PCX1/2 are secondary boards so you can't try those with DOS. Why the Apocalypse 3DX is on bushwack's test chart (along with Monster3D) for testing DOSQuake on is unknown, as those two cards only have support in GLQuake.
Yup, thats why they scored a big fat nothing. 🤣
How about Trident video cards? I have an old 4mb (or could be 8mb?) Trident 3D Image 9750 around here somewhere... Does anyone know if they are any good for Dos gaming?
I'm going to root through my big box of old hardware and see what i find 🤣
Mid 90's Tridents (i.e. 986) have poor buffering and UniVBE support, Blade3D and later are a bit better though, and have picky 2d accelleration (1:1 hardware scaling is fastest, any other aspect goes into slug mode). I haven't seen any Jazz anomalies in those, but I do remember having a Keen scrolling jerk problem.
wrote:How did you manage that?
All 3 of my 486 boards fail to post with a voodoo3 installed.They only come up with a solid red, green or white screen.
PCI quality among 486s varies wildly so that could be your problem.
Spec'wise the RIVA128 boards are great, but I never had one that looked good. Their 2D text quality was the blurriest of any card I ever owned. The best was Matrox and the 3dFX Voodoo series. If you got a good one, then hold onto it. If this is for DOS games only, I'd stick with a higher end S3.
I've got an ELSA riva128 card, it has no display issues at all 😀
Higher end S3 are nice, but still need univbe in some cases, the elsa card is vesa3.0 😀
RIVA 128 has a really annoying issue. It has some sort of quirk that causes games to pause and stutter occasionally for no apparent reason. I think it's related to texture loading. It's similar to when the hard drive causes a game pause, but it's not the hard drive in this case. I ran into this with Jedi Knight when I was playing with my STB Velocity 128 AGP that I got a few years ago.
TNT (NV4) doesn't have this problem so I'm thinking that it's a hardware problem with NV3.
A few retro conversations about it:
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?hl=en& … rch&sitesearch=
swaaye, you realise that he is looking for a DOS card? Are you refering to problems in DOS or is this just a general observation for Riva128?
Retro PC warning: The things you own end up owning you.
General observation. Others are suggesting RIVA 128 as a possible option and I wanted to mention how its 3D aspect is not that great. 😁 Not that NVIDIA wasn't making rapid progress. NV1 is garbage and NV3 was an astonishing step forward.
I think if one is looking for a card for DOS 2D, S3 is really the best choice if one wants the hardware most likely to work with everything. Almost everything else will be unusable with some games. Matrox, 3dfx, ATI, NVIDIA all have DOS issues galore.
