How's GTA8 on that thing? I know GTA24 is a no-go on a 486.

GTA24 works totally fine on a 486 as long as you lower the resolution from the default 640x480.

Okay what are these two things and why can't google look it up? I mean I wans't able to find any download regarding to these two titles.

Shodan486 wrote:

I'm unable to OC my CPU to those 160MHz, which could help smoothing a few titles I play and need a little tickle to run properly.

You'll have the best luck with running your AMD X5 at 160 MHz if you use the ADZ version instead of the ADW version. While some ADW versions do work at 160 MHz, or higher, they are rare occurances. The ADZ chips are cheap and common enough if you have patience - actually, most things are! They go for $6 - $12 on CPUworld from time to time.

I've replied to your other questions/comments below.

If you do not need OpenGL, a Matrox Millennium G200 card may work with driver version 4.33c, however I have found some SiS boards to not like the Millennium G200, while others work fine with it. If I recall correctly, your particular Asus board does not like the Millennium G200. Other PCI-based SiS boards which did not have the VLB slot did, however, work with the G200.

The G200 MMS will not work on UMC/SiS boards, you need to find an original Millennium G200 w/8MB of RAM (upgradeable to 16 MB if desired). The original G200 has become harder to find in the past 2 years. Some old driver versions for the Voodoo3 should work on your SiS board. I think 1.01 - 1.05 worked fine for me. Stick with version 1.01 if you are using DirectX 6.x.

It is unfortunate that you were not able to get an NVIDIA RIVA TNT1 working on a SiS board. I know my UMC board at least powers on with this card inserted. On my list of many things to experiment with is to find the latest Windows driver version which will work properly with a TNT1 on a UMC/SiS motherboard. I would not skimp on the sub versions either. You might have better luck with Win98SE over Win95 OSR 2.5.

I find 60 ns memory to work fine, even with a 486, 66 MHz bus. Memory performance on these motherboards is mostly determined by wait states, rather than memory response time.

I don't think you'll be able to get many, or any, USB devices working in Win95 OSR 2.5, with the excpetion of some very specific USB peripherals, whereby the now out-of-business vendor had provided a Win95 driver. I recommend using Windows 98SE and start with a USB 1.x PCI card.

Best of luck!

Shodan486 wrote:

Okay what are these two things and why can't google look it up? I mean I wans't able to find any download regarding to these two titles.

If you have GTA3DFX, you should also have GTA8 and GTA24 in the same directory. GTA24 is the representative one that was ported to windows while GTA8 features paletted graphics that are also incidentially much older from earlier in development as well as being fixed in mode 13h

Hi all again!

So first I'd like to inform that I've been successful in setting up the VT300 card - according to the diags test, all is OK, so i'm looking for some oldie camera equipment just to test the real performance of such application on a 486 class system.

As for the GTAs of those various modes, I didn't bother running the gta24 per leileilol's opinion (and my experience with the normal gta mode), but gta8 runs a bit better I say, although it looks a lot like being played on a PS1 😀. No matter, the 3Dfx mode is a much more sustainable choice, but thanks anyway, I really did not know about these two executables.

Thanks Feipoa for accompanying us as I've been gazing on your "The Ultimate 486 Benchmark Comparison", which provides bottomless information about various chips of the 486 era. My out of the topic question to this is where or how did you get the info about the Cyrix's register enablers / disablers?

As for the advice upon the ADZ variant - Yes, I've considered such walkaround, but I really wanna stick with this one, because I've seen some people run this one @ 160MHz, but I concur that it was very hard, rather impossible for some people. My experience is that I can run up the computer to the bios and all, can set up everything, but the moment I pass the ''Starting Windows 95 ... '' phase, I can get erratic errors of BSODs or Windows protection errors, sometimes maybe getting into the desktop is quite lucky, but will freeze on the spot. Voltage change changes nothing. But nevertheless I'm looking for the chip here in Slovakia, no need to pay more getting it from other countries - not this one, I'm waiting for a pentium overdrive as mentioned above.

I really wanted to play with the G200MMS and the TV tuner, again for the purpose of measuring efficiency of this solution in such a system. Unfortunately, I'd have to pass this one, would't I? So I decide to go for these two: Millenium II or Mystique 220. Millentium II is confirmed to work on the chipset as well as the mobo. I recall somebody confirming this here. As for the Mystique, that would be a blind shot, but I'll go for this one. Another reason why these two is their core clock (66MHz vs 60MHz) , but I really don't know which one of these still, for Millenium is equipped with WRAM, the latter relies on SGRAM. To my knowledge SGRAM should be better, but how far better from the WRAM, which are supposedly quite better than their counterpart, also produced at low cost. Really this is some old technology I got no experience using yet. Here are the details upon Matrox products http://www.512bit.net/matrox.html .

Windows 98SE would kill the machine as a whole, providing unnecessary process bottlenecks etc. I know many things can be tweaked in the windows, but I really don't need that as OSR 2.5 provides more than enough for my needs.

Now the USB - I'm quite lucky, I've discovered a a proper row of drivers and apps to be installed and to get the USB working with no argues. But as you said feipoa, it requires a special driver to get it working. Well, by this proper installation, I've managed to ''wake up'' the so called ''USB Mass Storage Interface'' driver, which is (I hope) trying to act as an universal tool for managing such devices. Well, yes, with flash drives it works normally, I'll let it eat the driver it requires and everthing is smooth, except that I cannot get into the drive. Presumably because it is formatted as NTFS, need to check today at job. As for other devices (Ext. HDD / DVD-RW), during the driver crunching the computer freezes...rather said mgsrv32 is not responding and requires to get manually shut, otherwise it stands there for ages.

Any thoughts on this one? I feel I'm quite close to the core of the problem, will reinstall the system again and analyze the steps further.

Shodan486 wrote:

...where or how did you get the info about the Cyrix's register enablers / disablers?

I went into the register enabler programs in some detail in the tread, Cyrix Register Enhancements Revealed. Please refer to the link in my signature. Official information on the registers can be found from Cyrix specification sheets, particuarly the 5 found here,
http://datasheets.chipdb.org/Cyrix/5x86/

Shodan486 wrote:

I really wanna stick with this one [the ADW], because I've seen some people run this one @ 160MHz...

With a little persistence, I have no doubt you can find an ADZ shipped for $10. I am personally only excited by the POD if it can run long term stable at 100 MHz. On my list of retro things to do is to modify the POD to run internally at 0.1 - 0.3 V higher than it is currently. Having that external voltage regulator makes this all too tempting.

Shodan486 wrote:

Any thoughts on this one? I feel I'm quite close to the core of the problem, will reinstall the system again and analyze the steps further.

If you are going to insist upon using Windows 95 OSR 2.5 in the final setup, at least install Windows 98SE first to confirm that there are no hardware conflicts with the USB card and your motherboard. If it works to your satisfaction in Win98SE, then you can install Win95 OSR 2.5 and start battling through the Win95 USB driver issues.

Thanks for the data about the Cyrix stuff!

Well, as I said I'll try to be more precise and start stalking at our home sites for the ADZ version. The POD plan seems to be very interesting, which brings up a question : Is the POD stable in regards to long term usage under the stress of 100MHz - with no mods? Are any required, or is it due to high core temperature that cannot be extracted as easy as from current CPU packages, requiring to use some ''McGuyver'' abilities?

I've come to a little progress with the USB problem - Reinstalled the OS as planned, did all the things same and installed other required drivers for the devices I use. This time I was able to control my colleagues 2GB USB. A question like this has struck me : Is the 8GB storage limit in the BIOS affecting the ability to view 8GB+ storage devices? I will try my 4GB flash drive when I get back home and get some sleep. Anyways I suppose that the question is stupid... I'm gonna play more with the rig now.

Shodan486 wrote:

Is the POD stable in regards to long term usage under the stress of 100MHz - with no mods?

Probably not. While I was able to run all the benchmarks fine at 100 MHz, Quake 1 required some trickery to get the score. I had to cool the chip down to 0 degrees celsius for Quake to complete. Of the 3 POD chips I have, 1 operated horribly at 100 MHz (crashed in Windows after a few benchmarks), another one ran fine except for Quake, and for the third, I do not recall exactly how it did, but it was somewhere in the middle.

Shodan486 wrote:

Is the 8GB storage limit in the BIOS affecting the ability to view 8GB+ storage devices?

I don't think the computer's BIOS has anything to do with the storage limit on the USB card. The limiting factor is probably the USB driver, either from a storage size cap or due to the increased memory density of the 8 GB device. What PCI USB card are you using? 2.0 or 1.x? What was the outcome when you tried it in Win98SE?