Among the games on the list, I think Unreal and Shogo need 3D capabilities. An 440BX mobo with Pentium III CPU should work great. You still need a video card though.

Why V2 SLI? You never had one, so why bother with "nostalgia"? Get a V3 and perhaps a single V1 or V2 for the few titles that will give trouble on the V3.
V2 SLI is a hype. I was over 30 when they were available and I do have an identical pair now, but I never really use it. The V3 is way better.

Other than that, I would look into speed issues - there are some threads here about P2 slowdown. If flexible speed matters to you, get a special P2 400 with an adequate board. If it is not important, get a P3, as Kreshna suggested. While Athlon is an option, I'd rather go with a P3.

As for soundcards, there are plenty of threads regarding practical or purists choices. Since you seem to have no reference nostalgia, go for the practical choices. A Maestro 32/96 might be a nice all in one deal. But we have threads here were you can read all about the pros and cons.

Ok, well what about one V2 (which I already have, its a BlackMagic 8MB card) and a decent 2D/3D (for direct3d)?

I have a couple PII and PIIIs laying around but, will have to dig them out to check the speed, I have a 300MHz AMD K6-2 as well but it seems the majority of the motherboards available but have undesirable chipsets from what I've saw on the forum.

Say I go with the Pentium III (400-500MHz sounds good) and the 440BX board, what would I accompany with it? I only ask because I never got into computers still about 2003/4 and kinda missed out on anything before that. I want to play the old games but want to do so on hardware of the era.

Private_Ops wrote:

Ok, well what about one V2 (which I already have, its a BlackMagic 8MB card) and a decent 2D/3D (for direct3d)?

I have a couple PII and PIIIs laying around but, will have to dig them out to check the speed, I have a 300MHz AMD K6-2 as well but it seems the majority of the motherboards available but have undesirable chipsets from what I've saw on the forum.

Say I go with the Pentium III (400-500MHz sounds good) and the 440BX board, what would I accompany with it? I only ask because I never got into computers still about 2003/4 and kinda missed out on anything before that. I want to play the old games but want to do so on hardware of the era.

I'd say go for a voodoo 3. They are easy to set up and support glide. The BX would be a good choice if you're relatively inexperienced with building computers (of that era). It's far easier to set up without running into problems then any other system of that era (super 7, 440LX and VIA P2/3 chipsets).

It's basically how you wan't to go, it's a choice. Building a slot 1 BX is the easiest with the least possibility of you running into stuped problems that might make you give up the efford in the end 😉

And about the non-liked chipsets on this forum (for instance VIA P3 chipsets), they run good on their own but might be trickier to get the drivers right. Also their performance isn't as good as BX. Then again, when building RETRO computers, speed isn't all THAT important 😉

Since Doom is on your list and you're going the purist route, I also recommend getting a good OPL3 card, such as a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold. Certain Sound Blaster 16s and AWE32s and AWE64s, the mislabeled ones (really ViBRAs, sb32 and sb64s but lie it's a Sound Blaster 16/ AWE32/ 64 right on the box) will suck at the polyphony and leave notes hanging or just skipping a bunch of instruments in songs on Doom.

Voodoo3 is excellent though its dithering matrix differs from what the Voodoo2 does, IIRC. Voodoo2 had a bigger dither grid than the Voodoo3, and I don't know if that can be reproduced on V3, never really looked into it. but Glide Wrappers need to fake it in shaders IMO!!!!!

You could compare by zooming in on her face: v2 vs vb (ok so that's a Voodoo Banshee screenshot, but it's still the same dither v3 has)

I am pretty certain that the SB AWE64 gold has _NO_ OPL3. It is one card I would not recommend. Besides, the TS is not used to any particular sound as being the "right retro".

Again, the TS is not used to how a game looked like "before". Besides, these issues are part of the logic why I suggested a V3 _and_ a V2 or V1. As long as performance matters, a V3 (or V5) will be the better choice. The few titles that give trouble will enjoy the V2 or V1 instead.

Hi, I'm one of those with the unfortunate VIA P3 chipset. From 1st hand experience I can tell you that they utterly suck and are to be avoided like the plague at all costs. If you're hell bent on building your own P3 system, go with a 440BX or 815 chipset. You could also save yourself a ton a hassle and consider just getting an old OEM P3 like a Hp Vectra, IBM 300PL, Dell 4100 or similar.

Video card wise I'm partial to the Matrox G400 and Voodoo3 AGP - these seem to be the most stable and easiest to set up, plus they're pretty fast and will play most anything from 95-00.

You say Matrox G400, I've head of these, but have not heard much about their performance of the day, how do they match up to the Voodoo3?

Turns out I have a Voodoo 3 already (thought I did), its a "210-0364-003" model which with a quick google search it seems to be the 16MB model. Also, I have a 500 and 550MHz PIII.

ux-3 wrote:

I am pretty certain that the SB AWE64 gold has _NO_ OPL3. It is one card I would not recommend.

The AWE64 emulates OPL3 using Creative's proprietary method. It sounds harsh and metalic compared to a real Yamaha OPL2 or 3.

Private_Ops wrote:

You say Matrox G400, I've head of these, but have not heard much about their performance of the day, how do they match up to the Voodoo3?

Turns out I have a Voodoo 3 already (thought I did), its a "210-0364-003" model which with a quick google search it seems to be the 16MB model. Also, I have a 500 and 550MHz PIII.

The G400 is slower in opengl and faster in d3d. it also has the advantage of 32 bit rendering, not that any games from that era benefit from it i think. All in I think they're pretty much equal, of course the Voodoo has more 'sticker' value 😜 but if you already have a v3, might as well go with it.

Voodoo3/5 all the way IMO. For games from 2001 and older they are great.

I was a G400 guy back then and today I wouldn't recommend one at all after getting more experience with the other options. 32-bit color was vastly overrated for those games and G400 frequently has rendering bugs.

sgt76 wrote:

Hi, I'm one of those with the unfortunate VIA P3 chipset. From 1st hand experience I can tell you that they utterly suck and are to be avoided like the plague at all costs.....

What was your experience with that chipset anyway? It's always good to hear first hand experience in matters like there 😉

I never used such a chipset, I had a BX back then 😁

Also regarding the soundcard, he might aswell start with a simple SB 128 or a Live and 'upgrade' later. I'm no sound guru but I did notice a significant difference in how sound sounded using a SB128 PCI and a Vortex 2.

I think most will disagree with me here but even the 'normal' soundcards still sound OK enough if you don't know any better (and yes, I don't know any better! 😁 )

Okay, and here's my advice:

The Cheap and Easy:

If you have a PIII and mobo for it, just take it. Don't care about via or intel chipsets, just avoid to install a lot of programs you rarely used in 1999 and will never need in 2010.
If you still have a Vooddo 3 - just try, together with a p3 500mhz this card will give you a great Unreal experience! All other games should work as well. And - as Tetrium mentioned - if you never had a top notch soundcard an Ensoniq Audio PCI aka Soundblaster 64 / 128 PCI will do the job just fine, and you will also have the dos compatibility you need for playing doom.

The Luxury (mad) variant:

Be patient and wait until you can get a Voodoo 5 for - let's say - less than 25$. If you have a highly paid job this will of course cost your company a lot more than 25$ because of all the time you spend infront of your screen, searching for the voodoo (during your work) and getting it for a low price. But as you're allready a retro maniac, who cares? Nothing beats shooting a voodoo5 for less than 25$. I got mine for €2.72.
When you have it you need a Vortex2 based soundcard together with a Soundblaster Live Platinum and a board that supports a P3 1Ghz (there are faster ones, but I understand that you want to stay in the "90s"). One ISA slot is obligatory and you will plug in a Terratec Maestro 32/96 with a Roland SCB-55 wavetable board attached.

The Exotic (and not so expensive) way:

Your first idea with the voodoo SLI wasn't so bad. If you have allready one voodoo2 8mb, getting a second with 8mb should be easy. With this combination you should be able to play Unreal in 1024x768. The advantage over the V3 is the fact that you will also be able to play older glide glames designed for the original Voodoo graphics (voodoo1) that with some tinkering will run with a V2 but never with a V3.
As host card the Matrox G400 isn't bad, because of the very good image quality. If it has a DVI output you can connect the adapter directly to the voodo2, avoiding a loss in image quality.
A Savage 4 based card would be an alternative, as you should be able to use the S3Metal api in Unreal.
If you have a board with a P3 1 Ghz dosbox will become an option, and a Yamaha YMF-724 based pci soundcard interesting. With the passthrough patch you will have a real OPL in dosbox and not-so-bad GM support. And you will have directsound3d, A3d 1.0 and Sensaura as apis in Windows. The Yamaha YMF724 has also limited dos support, but for all needs an ISA card will come in handy. If it passes your ways, a Turtle Beach Tropez or an Ensonq Soundscape 2000 (an OEM version was part of many gateway computers) will be a nice addition.

I do have a 500MHz Pentium III. I also dug out a motherboard, an ASUS P2XBL REV.D2. plus a stick of PC100 128MB RAM.

So far:

500MHz Pentium III
DFI P2XBL Motherboard (oops this is a DFI board not an ASUS)
128MB of PC100 SDram
16MB voodoo AGP Voodoo 3

I do have some sort of Ensonq sound card that came out of a Gateway, will dig it out here in a bit.

I had a BX board in the year 2000, with 650 MHz Pentium III Coppermine... it was a good stable system. Very little cooling is required on a Coppermine CPU.

What do you guys recommend for hard drives in a vintage PC? I would think a CompactFlash card w/ IDE adapter does nicely assuming you can boot off it.

Yes but flashcards have limited read/write lifecycle.
If you have any, from around 20GB harddrives started to get really silent.
The IBM Deathstar and U series X drives are amongst my favorites of that grade

Tetrium wrote:

Yes but flashcards have limited read/write lifecycle.

Since the introduction of wear leveling, this is not a problem with CF cards any more.
The only drawbacks I've experienced are the rather slow write speeds and the high price (compared to conventional HDDs).

Tetrium wrote:

If you have any, from around 20GB harddrives started to get really silent.
The IBM Deathstar and U series X drives are amongst my favorites of that grade

I like the Deathstars as well, those few which survived the first months will last forever! 😉
However, my Deathstar is the loudest piece of hardware I own.

Tetrium wrote:

sgt76 wrote:

Hi, I'm one of those with the unfortunate VIA P3 chipset. From 1st hand experience I can tell you that they utterly suck and are to be avoided like the plague at all costs.....

What was your experience with that chipset anyway? It's always good to hear first hand experience in matters like there 😉

I never used such a chipset, I had a BX back then 😁

I still have it...it's currently in my P3 retro rig- which is supposed to be my "final" P3 rig but I'm actually on the lookout for a nice 440BX/ 815 mobo...then it's rebuild time again.

OK, to summarize my experience with it-

1) its very picky with add-on pci cards - sound, usb and video cards. These usually cause the system to slow down to a crawl which I thought at first to be incompatibility with Coppermine chips and
2) it's noticeably slower and less stable than 440bx/ 815 chipset motherboards.

Back in the day, I too never had a VIA chipset . All the others were OEM- HP Vectra VL600 (840 RDRam - woot!), IBM 300PL (440BX) and Dell Dimension 4100 (815). They were great. Come to think of it, I might just scrap the idea of rebuilding my home-made and get one of these old OEMs instead.

5u3 wrote:

Since the introduction of wear leveling, this is not a problem with CF cards any more.
The only drawbacks I've experienced are the rather slow write speeds and the high price (compared to conventional HDDs).

Ah, I didn't know that. Thanks for the heads up! 😉

5u3 wrote:

I like the Deathstars as well, those few which survived the first months will last forever! 😉
However, my Deathstar is the loudest piece of hardware I own.

Yup, I just LOVED my deathstar which was in my now also dead A7V333. It was kinda loud when doing read/write things but other then that it was dead silent!
...and dead it sure is now! One morning I turned my system on and heard "tick tick tick tick tick" until I powered it off.
I still think these are great drives, just don't put ANYTHING crucial on it.
I already knew those drives could suddenly die so it was no big loss to me, and the drive had been a free pull anyway 😁

Other drives I could recommend are U series X (though not sure if ALL of them can be recommended) and for sub-10GB the most silent ones I tried were Fujitsu drives. I read old reports about those drives being horribly slow but I reckon when the rest of the system is horribly slow aswell, that doesn't really matter much now does it? 😉

Just stay away from..well..basically most other drives!
Maxtor...ugh, I kinda hate that brand. Always loud except for one 60GB one I once found.
Quantum, either very loud or just 'loud', but atleast they are fast.

Old laptop drives are a good bet. I did quite a lot of trial and error because I simply can't afford to equip all my machines with flashcards and I have the drives laying around anyway 😜