I'm going to be cliche here.

AGP voltage?

I had freezes with Geforces when they had too much (fry danger). I get artifacts from the boot to all when they don't get enough.

Also keep out the pair of Voodoos. Athlons and them don't get along (until those third-party hacks of course,, but i'm not sure how reliable those are myself)

Well the Albatron is pumping 1.5V which is the standard no?
Ok something weird, the mobo seems to support AGP8x, but it only goes up to AGP4x in the BIOS. 😖

Could it be bad caps? Or insufficient amps on some psu rails?

KT133 Kinetiz 7E-A and Duron 1800

Two dead "retro rocket" mobos?

First of all, you didnt mention what windows are you trying to run and how much RAM did you plug in? Can you please list the complete hardware you are using (PSU, HDD's, CD's and everything else included). You say 'everything' works on P3 - what everything? I suppose you mean GF's, Voodoos and Live! ? Did you use VIA 4in1 ?

My advice would be to remove everything from the system and assemble it like this:
1 PSU + 1 Mobo/CPU + max 512MB ram + 1 HDD + 1 CD + 1 graphic card (that 'worked' in P3, using drivers that 'worked') + keyboard/mouse + 1 monitor (that supposedly works)

Now, first go into BIOS, load setup defaults, reboot and then :
1) format the HDD, clean-install windows.
2) See if it loads the windows w/o any drivers
3) if so, then over a USB stick copy the freshly downloaded drivers (still zipped/rared/archived!) along with an installation of Winrar (or similar) and run only these on the freshly installed windows (one by one, rebooting after every driver!) and see if it works; if not, then its the driver issue - change driver that makes the fuss
4) if the windows does not load even w/o drivers or if you experience any errors then swap RAM, reboot, try again; if problem still occurs, swap PSU (I hope you got a spare), reboot, try again; then swap HDD, reboot, try again...

If you follow these steps, you will eliminate a possibility of software influence (bug/virus/etc) and quickly identify the component that fails. Hope I helped 😀

P.S. And ofc if everything goes fine, then install one add-on-card after another, one by one, with Live! being the LAST one (Live! had some issues with VIA chipsets, so I would advise installing it after VIA 4-in-1 has been installed)

We're talking about an Athlon XP 1700+, 512 MB RAM, GeForce 4 Ti4200, Voodoo 2 SLI cards, Sound Blaster Live! Value, a 10GB WD HDD and a simple DVD-ROM. OS is Win98SE.
Ok my PSU is pretty darn good, 400watt and 40A on 5V. Out of curiosity, I tried another one that I have laying around, 300watt and 30A on 5V. Same stuff so I switched back to the 400watt.
I removed all other add-on cards and only left the GF4 Ti 4200. Same stuff. I had two sticks of ram at the time, 256mb each. I removed one of those and it seemed to have fixed the problem. I then installed the Live! again, drivers installed nicely. Then they just didn't work for some reason and no sound would play. I uninstalled them, removed the card and then installed the Voodoo 2 cards back again. Drivers installed, CRASH! So right now I'm starting to get really pissed off. I'm going to try and install all the chipset drivers first, then install each card individually and see what happens. Then IF it works I'll try with the other RAM stick plugged in.
Gonna try that VIA 4in1 crap tomorrow.
If this doesn't work, I'll install the KK266-R and try there as well. If this doesn't work either, Pentium 3 and never look back.

Jesus...

Doing a quick search reveals many posts about your motherboard and problems.
Example: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=722374

Perhaps you should try another board before spending (and possibly wasting) another couple months?

The KK266R motherboard needs a BIOS flash to run the Athlon XP processors. That may have been your problem.

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/200210102232 … m#BiosDownloads

I don't know if the BIOS file got archived with the rest of the site or not but you need the one that just says KK266 NOT the one that says KK266Plus-R. It's a different file altogether and might fry your motherboard. The KK266 one is for both the KK266 and KK266R.

Your new Albatron board may also need a BIOS flash before it can run the Athlon XP reliably.

Ahh no Tetrium, I'm using the Albatron currently.
KK266 needs a bios update for Athlon XP which I succesfully installed a few weeks ago. I never tried any Athlon XPs on it though, just the vanila Athlon 1333.
My Albatron motherboard is from early 2003 so I really doubt that it's a BIOS problem.
I'll post up the results of the VIA 4in1 pack later.

You never said what Voodoo2 win98 driver have you been using? How about you try 3dfx Voodoo2 V3.03.00b DirectX 7 Beta driver from here: http://falconfly.de/voodoo2.htm
I read about a similar (solved) problem here:
http://www.falconfly.de/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1296016039

And you didnt read what I said about Live! being the LAST thing installed? 😜

P.S. And one last, but very important thing - install DirectX 8.1 (not 9, not 7, nor any other version) before you install ANY graphic/sound card drivers, especially before voodoo!

I'm using the latest Voodoo 2 drivers which is V3.02.02 and not the beta driver you refer too. I also read your message after I had done everything I described. Why install 8.1 and not 9? It has always worked for me just fine.

F2bnp wrote:

I'm using the latest Voodoo 2 drivers which is V3.02.02 and not the beta driver you refer too. I also read your message after I had done everything I described. Why install 8.1 and not 9? It has always worked for me just fine.

Because Voodoo 2 has no support for DX9. Its really unstable and btw, what DX9 game would you play anyway on a '99 computer, with a DX 8.1 video card (GF4 ti4200) or worse (GF 4 MX, DX 7)?

...and do try the mentioned drivers ok? 😉

...and also try not to use the newest VIA 4-in-1, but these (retro) instead (for KT133 mobo):
http://www.viaarena.com/Driver/4in1435v.zip

I did exactly what you said elfuego and everything seems to work just fine!
As a benchmark I installed UT2004 and it runs close to 60fps on High Details and 1024x768 resolution. Not half bad!
Also installed Unreal 1 and played for a straight hour. No problem for the Voodoo 2 cards 😁

Thank you all very much for you help!

Really glad you got your problem solved. 😀 BTW, is the Win98 unofficial service pack recommended?

retro games 100 wrote:

Really glad you got your problem solved. 😀 BTW, is the Win98 unofficial service pack recommended?

I use it...IF I used 98SE 🤣

RG100 I always use that one. SP 2.1 that is.
I don't know if it really makes a difference in the end, but that Windows 2000 scheme is great 😁

F2bnp wrote:

I did exactly what you said elfuego and everything seems to work just fine!
As a benchmark I installed UT2004 and it runs close to 60fps on High Details and 1024x768 resolution. Not half bad!
Also installed Unreal 1 and played for a straight hour. No problem for the Voodoo 2 cards 😁

Thats what I like to hear! 3dfx is still so fast, its kinda ridiculous 😜

@retro
Installing the unofficial Win98 patch brought me only headaches. The main reason I got interested in it is that they swear the >768MB RAM problem is solved by it, but thats a notorious lie. They just scripted the 'limit system memory' to 999mb. You can do that manually within msconfig.

And I personally hate win2000 scheme 😜 almost as much as I hate other useless junk-add-ons that are installed by default. For normal retro gaming, just install the newest internet explorer (contains most of the updates you need), DX 8.1 and a newer version of windows installer (if needed). Nothing more, nothing less 😀

I prefer the SP, because I'm lazy 😜

I've done all those tweaks so many times now, installing the SP is just that much easier and faster 😁
Then again, I'll install ME if I can get away with it 😁