Got some old versions of UberNES , ZSNES and Kega Fusion and a gamepad hooked up on my PII machine, lot's of fun and lots of memories... never tried PSX but I'm going to see if my system can handle it.

Part of the fun is building the system in which you're going to play.

Are you planning anything in particular to do with the fast general-purpose win98SE box (probably Celeron/PIII based) ?

My take on the W9x-only box (or WinMe) is that you might as well go for maximum power. You really want 60 fps from your games, after all. I will usually build either an Athlon XP or a PIII Tualatin setup for this. GeForce 6 cards are great for everything OpenGL and a lot of D3D games, while a Voodoo5 is superb for old Glide and some D3D games. I also suggest a Vortex2 sound card, although a Live!/Audigy with EAX has its benefits in some games like NFS3/4.

Athlon XP-M chips are very cheap these days, btw...

On the emulation topic, I too have been selling off old consoles. Many emulators are more than adequate for me and offer much better quality than hooking up an old console to a big modern TV. Plus other things like CDROM noise and delays, and memory card problems, are gone. I still have a N64 and Xbox 1 around though because N64 emulation is awful and my Xbox 1 is chipped and is an emulation powerhouse among other neat things.

My current computer line up, featuring a KVM switch receiving alot of love:

Tandy 1000 TX : For the really old stuff
AM386 40mhz : For the not as much old stuff.
Evergreen 586 133mhz ( fast 486) : Main DOS machine
440BX with Celeron 500mhz and Voodoo1 accelerator. For late DOS stuff and some windows stuff.

Planned builds:
PIII 1gz + Voodoo2 SLI ( already have the parts )

As far as console emulation is concerned I have a softmodded original XBOX that can emulate just about everything PRE PSX almost flawlessly Right on my TV.

That does not prevent me from having an extensive console collection and playing most of my games on genuine hardware.

There is simply something 'Magical' about using genuine hardware, cant fully explain it 😀

How do hook that Tandy 1000TX up to a KVM? Do you have a VGA adaptor in it? I have an ATI VGA Wonder in mine, which works great, but doesn't like my Belkin KVM. I'd be interested in hearing what you use.

Also, do you use the built in TGA adaptor ever? Do you remove the VGA card to do this? Or have you gotten tvdog's vswitch util to work on the 1000TX?

BTW, I have Voodoo 2 SLI in a PII-266 right now. I'm probably pretty CPU limited, I need to move these to a PIII. 🤣

Hatta wrote:

BTW, I have Voodoo 2 SLI in a PII-266 right now. I'm probably pretty CPU limited, I need to move these to a PIII. 🤣

Totally. Used to have Voodoo 2 SLI on a PII-233. I made the jump to a PIII-500 and saw a huge gain in performance! Later I went to a PIII-1GHz and the Voodoo 2 SLI scaled a little more. Not a huge gain as before, but I'd say it was about a 15% gain moving from the P3-500 to the P3-1000

RacoonRider wrote:

You i-want-single-computer-for-all-the-games guys don't know what you're loosing! It's not the games that are most interesting (although some of them are awesome), it's dealing with original hardware, designing, building, searching for information, comparing different specs to get the most suitable.

Except if you're not going to play games, how do you define what is "suitable" ?

Hatta wrote:

How do hook that Tandy 1000TX up to a KVM? Do you have a VGA adaptor in it? I have an ATI VGA Wonder in mine, which works great, but doesn't like my Belkin KVM. I'd be interested in hearing what you use.

Also, do you use the built in TGA adaptor ever? Do you remove the VGA card to do this? Or have you gotten tvdog's vswitch util to work on the 1000TX?

The KVM may not work well with the Tandy's custom keyboard interface. It is possible to use the TGA with VGA using the vswitch utility.

On a 1000TX? The txt says it should work on the authors TL. I tried it on my TX, and it deactivated VGA but I never got the TGA to come on. I may try it again if it's supposed to work, that'd be really nice.

Filosofia wrote:

Got some old versions of UberNES , ZSNES and Kega Fusion and a gamepad hooked up on my PII machine, lot's of fun and lots of memories... never tried PSX but I'm going to see if my system can handle it.

The only reason why i'd use an older machine for older console games is to relive early quirky emulator and bad rom dump bugs. Snes9x 0.2x, Esnes, Nesticle 0.4x (for Windows), and Pasofami were my "favorites". 😜

PSX emulators consisted of Bleem! (commercial) and PSEmuPro, and i've had bad luck with performance. Some games WERE playable though

An early N64 emulator is UltraHLE which pretty much put emulation in the mainstream more than Nesticle did, for the wrong, unfortunate "HOW DO PLAY OCARINA TIME ON MY eMACHINES!?" reasons, and it was glide only which led to a explosion of Glide wrappers dedicated to running Ocarina of Time on UltraHLE with a TNT. The fastest N64 emulator you can use on such a PII is a little known one called Corn which used Direct3D. It's so fast, even a crappy K6 or P2 with a Trident Blade can handle Super Mario 64 at full speed. Shame that Corn discontinued in 2000 😒

I'd like to come back to some comments made earlier in this thread:

For a strictly 386/486/Pentium-1/Pentium-MMX era DOS gaming rig with a bootable w98se for easier file maintenance ...

> After reading Overclocking software for AMD K6 CPUs I immediately
> thought " It's a no-brainer" ... , you can have a 3DPower-Now!K6-2
> 550MHz and choose the multiplier with config.sys , even making a
> menu.bat to choose at boot? Am I missing something here?

Exactly what I came up to myself.
Then, considering ... Socket 7 - FSB scaling results with L1 Cache disabled ...

... which should correctly handle, with all options maxed out, ALL speed issues, for absolutely ALL games requiring a minimum 386/486/Pentium/Pentium-MMX. Yes or No ?

If not, what games still have problems ?
Or what exactly am I possibly missing ?

Then ...

Is anybody aware of any DOS games requiring a minimum 486/50 that have speed problems when played on a SS7 or on a Coppermine PIII (500-1000 MHz) rig ? Which games, what issues ?

> you can pick up Slot 1/Socket 370 hardware just as cheaply
> as you can Super 7 hardware and get a better performing system
> with fewer hardware glitches ...

Exactly what hardware glitches ?

> and (fewer) Windows crashes to deal with.

I'm not aware of any such SS7 related glitches.
May i kindly ask to explain and provide details ?
Which version of windows ? What kind of crashes ?
Why would using SS7 hardware cause glitches or windows crashes ?

Regarding DOS games that run perfectly fine on any SS7 main hardware, provided of course that all auxiliary (video, sound, storage, midi) hardware is supported by the mobo and the software, is anybody aware of ANY problems when the rig is scaled up to a high-end PIII ?

Finally ...

... is anybody aware of any Win95/Win98/WinME native games that show any kind of problem when played on a high end Athlon XP, provided of course that all OS and hardware specific constraints (like max 512MB of RAM) are accounted for ?

Thanks to all for your input.

Ofcourse everyone has an own opinion and preference.
For me SS7 is a flexible platform with a broad range of CPUs to choose from. It has the advantage of PCI local bus and onboard IDE controller while still implementing ISA slots.
Also for me the performance discussion is not relevant, you can get the old stuff cheap, so you can choose whatever you like. From my own experience I can not agree that a Slot-1 / S370 platform shows fewer glitches/crashes. This strongly depends on the specific hardware/driver choice. There are mature solutions on each platform as 430HX or 440BX. If you use exotic newer Slot-1/S370 hardware the driver support might be better as early S7 was introduced before Win9x hit the market.

Speed issues with games were already discussed extensively elsewhere here. The typical problems that come up with newer systems and DOS are that there is additional hardware that uses ISA resources (especially IRQ) and that may not be possible to disable by BIOS. Just to give some examples: PS/2, USB, SMB.
Also a typical problem is that user of newer systems tend to use also newer graphics cards that hook up more upper memory for BIOS ROMs. This results in less available UMBs and reduces memory to load TSRs high. Also plugging a lot of RAM can give issues because certain games (like WC IV) expect their loaded resources at memory locations that have a physical address lower than f.e. 16 MB. As a workaround f.e. a ramdrive can be loaded that uses the RAM at high physical addresses. Then the graphics cards VESA compatibility has to be considered. Coincidentally the cards with the best compatibility (thinking of Voodoo3/Riva128/VBE3) appeared in the SS7 time, later the compatibility decreased again.