I have 2 similar systems with a pentium mmx and once I installed riva128(zx) cards I never looked back.
Keen games are fine, scrolling is awesome.
Fast and VBE3.0 out of the box 😀

If you dont care about 3d acceleration a s3 virge DX would be fine.

I was a big fan of the Matrox Millennium back in the early 90's. It was an awesome 2D card that never gave me any issues.

My preferred combo in the early Win98 days was a Millennium for 2D, and a Dual VooDoo 2s in SLI for 3D.

laxdragon wrote:

I was a big fan of the Matrox Millennium back in the early 90's. It was an awesome 2D card that never gave me any issues.

My preferred combo in the early Win98 days was a Millennium for 2D, and a Dual VooDoo 2s in SLI for 3D.

I'll sign under on that 😉

A Matrox Mystique or Millenium G100/G200 would probably handle most everything the rest of the parts in that system can without breaking the bank. I wouldn't waste a lot of money putting anything too powerful in such an old system because it would be wasted without a stronger CPU to back it up.

try a rendition v1000

Don't forget about the ATI 3D Rage Pro, I figure it's on par with the Riva 128.

Oh and those Pentium MMX's are all good overclockers. My 200 easily does 266 (75x3.5) and with a good motherboard, memory and cooling you can push them to 290 (83x3.5).

If you have a voodoo 2, then a nice matrox card will do you right. Matrox and voodoo seem to go together like apple pie and ice cream.

I have several cards. I'll send you a few in trade for your et6000.... ^.^ shoot me a pm if your interested.

A Matrox card is great for most things but not Keen:

Best DOS video card?

I was using an ET6100 up until recently in my socket 7 machine but found that it was causing corruption in Dune2.

^ riva128 based cards work fine with those 2 games... 🤣 🤣 🤣

Yeah when I first built my P200 I used a Matrox (Millennium or Mystique cant remember) after reading all the praise for so long. I didn't care for it, the Win95 driver was flaky and DOS, sometimes it did some weird stuff. The Virge isn't perfect either, but I've had better luck with it, for the games I play anyway. Maybe Matrox is aimed more at productivity. 😦

AFAIK Matrox almost always aimed at productivity.... IMHO they only "experimented" with the Mystique

keropi wrote:

I have 2 similar systems with a pentium mmx and once I installed riva128(zx) cards I never looked back.
Keen games are fine, scrolling is awesome.
Fast and VBE3.0 out of the box 😀

Sounds great, except all the Riva 128s currently on eBay are AGP, which my board does not have. Did they ever make a PCI version? If not, then this isn't an option for me.

bushwack wrote:

Don't forget about the ATI 3D Rage Pro, I figure it's on par with the Riva 128.

If it's anything like the on-board ATI 3D Rage II+DVD in my box, then all I can say is "no". It has compatibility issues (most notably with *all* Keen games), and it has a strange problem with thin lines quickly appearing across the screen, which is especially bad when displaying a per-pixel checkerboard pattern.

badmofo wrote:

A Matrox card is great for most things but not Keen:

Best DOS video card?

This thread is why I'm reluctant to go with a Matrox. I'm a big Keen fan and I'd hate to not be able to play it on my main retro machine, not to mention that it probably means that there are other compatibility issues.

dirkmirk wrote:

If you dont care about 3d acceleration a s3 virge DX would be fine.

This is currently what I'm leaning towards getting. The S3 Virge seems to be plentiful and cheap online, and I've read some good things about it. Any thoughts?

someperson42 wrote:

badmofo wrote:

A Matrox card is great for most things but not Keen:

Best DOS video card?

This thread is why I'm reluctant to go with a Matrox. I'm a big Keen fan and I'd hate to not be able to play it on my main retro machine, not to mention that it probably means that there are other compatibility issues.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned that before, but I think I found a "fix" for the keen games. Right now I'm using a Celeron 500 with a Matrox G200 card. Normally it won't play the commander keen games ok, but if I disable the L1 cache, all problems are gone and it plays great. But I haven't tested that with other Matrox cards so as to be sure that this applies to all of them.

S3 are surely a great cards and won't trouble you much! I can highly recommend the Virge/DX line, and personally it's what I used before I find out that riva cards are faster and have awesome compatibility as well.
Also riva128 cards did come in PCI form as well (I have a couple stashed) , so it is still an option 😀
But beware, the native win3.11 riva128 driver although speedy it can lead to serious system instabilities, I found that the hard way 🤣 .... s3 cards are fine though

S3 cards are definitely the choice if you want very good compatibility with DOS games/apps and Win 3.1. The RIVA 128/ZX cards would be a close second in my book, along with older Matrox cards.

noshutdown wrote:

try a rendition v1000

Not sure if serious or just trollin, but standard DOS VGA performance on those things is quite painful, especially with mode X games and apps. Of course, you can use the renutil utility to map standard VGA resolutions to VESA resolutions but it doesn't work with mode X.

keropi wrote:

S3 are surely a great cards and won't trouble you much! I can highly recommend the Virge/DX line, and personally it's what I used before I find out that riva cards are faster and have awesome compatibility as well.
Also riva128 cards did come in PCI form as well (I have a couple stashed) , so it is still an option 😀
But beware, the native win3.11 riva128 driver although speedy it can lead to serious system instabilities, I found that the hard way 🤣 .... s3 cards are fine though

Have but one question. Since I had little luck tracking down a pci version of the riva128 would a pci version of the riva tnt offer the same or similar compatibility? Plus the riva tnt has some sentimental value as well.

nforce4max wrote:

Have but one question. Since I had little luck tracking down a pci version of the riva128 would a pci version of the riva tnt offer the same or similar compatibility? Plus the riva tnt has some sentimental value as well.

what os do you use? most nvidia cards have good compatibility in dos so i guess tnt would be ok, but i doubt there would be any driver for windows3.1

nforce4max wrote:

Have but one question. Since I had little luck tracking down a pci version of the riva128 would a pci version of the riva tnt offer the same or similar compatibility? Plus the riva tnt has some sentimental value as well.

TNT should be fine for such applications. Only in extreme cases would you require SciTech Display Doctor.

noshutdown wrote:

what os do you use? most nvidia cards have good compatibility in dos so i guess tnt would be ok, but i doubt there would be any driver for windows3.1

Windows 3.1 drivers exist for the TNT, but they are quite buggy and crash-prone. And you are for the most part stuck with the 60 Hz refresh rate.

Windows 3.1x & Windows NT 3.51 Graphics Card Drivers Collection