If ISA slot(s) requirement is a concern for a "reasonably fast" system with upto Windows 2000, or Win98SE/ME with DOS preferably, then a PIII system with ISA slots will be good. It can take over a Socket 7 system as the main later-DOS based gaming machine, and leave the earlier dos gaming to dosbox in a faster machine.

The ISA slot may help in adding a real MPU-401 based card too.

On the other hand, some chipsets running a fast PIII with more than 256MB RAM may require tweaking with the memory management and other speed tweaks to make sure some DOS games run properly.

I had a good experience with a PIII system last time - A DFI CA61 motherboard with a Socket 370 - had a 1GHz CPU in there. My Roland MPU-IPC-T card and AWE64 Gold were playing along smoothly in DOS, together with my Live! with digital optical out using the Live! Drive in Windows 98SE. (Just had to adjust the 8-bit I/O recovery time to 8 in bios to have a good 8-bit ISA operation).

Terracide comes to mind, being a 1997 or so release that doesn't run on anything later than Win98SE, hanging on the developer logo screen.

Then there's MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries when patched to version 1.1, and especially with MeX installed on top of that. Not even MechVM can help there.

Well, I have the pentium edition of MW2 and thats actually one of the games I specifically built my S7 rig for. Damn thing refused to run on the p3 with win98.

When DirectX9.0c ditched accelerated directdraw, it broke a lot of games for win95/win98, so I would build a dedicated win98se machine for such games, later 90's and early 2000's stuff.

I keep my 1.6ghz Tualatin with Win98 for DK2, Star Wars Pod Racer, early NFS games, Kingpin etc. Mostly stuff that might run but is a pain to get running in XP. Very useful indeed.

The board has an ISA slot, but I doubt I'd need it.

I guess I need to figure out what games specifically I would want to play from that era that also specifically need a fast win98 system vs playing on either of the other two machines.

This will be a pure windows machine, so I'm thinking of going to ME just for the better USB and other such support.

How important is Glide for this period? I'm thinking of sticking at least a single V2 into my SS7 board when I eventually swap out the p200mmx for the k6-2/500. Though, I could also just SLI V2s on the p3 since it's in the right speed range to support them.

Theres nothing wrong with having a spare rig, right? 😁

I had a SS7 running a K6-III/400, but somehow the Windows install broke when I fired her up after it having been in the closet for a while. Was glad that I could simply fire up the Celeron-800 (also with ME) that was standing right next to it, without having to first rebuild the SS7 rig before being able to play some of the older games. 😉

I'm thinking I should make a target game list that fall under the following requirements: Does NOT run under 2k/XP in general, REQUIRES DX9b or earlier.

Anyone happen to know anything like this off hand?

South Park doesn't seem to run in XP. I tried fixing it without success.

Well, I ordered a Radeon 9700 Pro from ebay. That should take care of video on this thing. It's currently got a SBLive! ct-4760 sitting in it but I found an Audigy SE in a parts box. Should I swap that in or should I be ok with the Live?

Star Trek Armada doesn't work in 2k/XP either.

Demo of ST:Armada seems to work for me.

The CT4760 is a high end SB Live 5.1 card which supports Dolby playback but only supports up to EAX 2.0 (Hardware based)
The Audigy SE basically replaced the SB Live! Value range and doesn’t support Dolby but is able to use EAX 4.0 (Software based)

What does this all really mean?
Unless the games you end up playing support anything higher then EAX 2.0 or the sound quality is noticeably better with the Audigy I’d stick with the CT4760

I'm a bit wary of Creative's software-based DirectSound3D and OpenAL implementations now, coming from the Recon3D USB and X-Fi MB driver package for Realtek codecs.

Then again, that was on Windows 7 64-bit with ALchemy. I've noticed that attempting to run Thief 1 and 2 (and probably System Shock 2 as well) results in muted cutscenes and in-game audio not quite sounding right...if it's a software OpenAL device that ALchemy's wrapping for.

If it's an actual hardware OpenAL device like my X-Fi Prelude or Titanium HD, then the problems don't occur at all.

Things might be a bit different under XP; I'll have to test things out some more once my X-Fi Go! SB1100 arrives.

senrew: unless you already have a (hardware) firewall. Then you could always make the computer into a firewall 😀

WolverineDK wrote:

senrew: unless you already have a (hardware) firewall. Then you could always make the computer into a firewall 😀

HA! Finally a practical response.

Most of the time I'm playing games with headphones on, so all that fancy stuff the sound cards can do usually doesn't enter into the equation.

What I WANT to do is find a GOOD pair of headphones and see how well the sound card can handle all that 3D positional stuff over headphones.

P3's make nice makeshift 386s. 😉

naaaah

This will be a 100% windows machine. That SS7 rig I'm building will be for DOS stuff.

Actually, I have great plans for using that older machine as a testbed for me to finally experience all the different graphics cards I missed way back when. I'm looking for a few verite and powervr cards. Ever since I saw the ads for the Sierra Screamin 3D I was hooked on wanting to try out all those new fangled accelerated games. All I ever had to work with though was the Trio3D (I think that's what it was) in my Compaq of the time.

This machine seems to be shaping up to be purely for the few games I can't get to work on my other machines, or that simply need more raw oomph that the SS7 can't provide.