Well, I bit the bullet and bought a Diamond Stealth III S540 32MB AGP card. The official S3 Savage4 drivers do indeed work for both Windows 98 SE and Windows 3.11. The card also appears to perform just fine with the AGP bus overclocked. Lastly, the card performs great with DOS games on an LCD monitor just as described here: Best DOS video card?

here is the working link: https://web.archive.org/web/20090423064513/ht … re_archive.aspx

Eric-tile wrote:

I'm also interested in knowing whether or not the card will work with an overclocked AGP bus. I'll be using the card in an Asus P3B-F which has the Intel 440BX chipset. To get the full speed on my processor, I've overclocked the FSB to 133MHz, which unfortunately also overclocks the AGP bus. I've read that this causes problems for some AGP graphics cards. More information on the Intel 440BX chipset here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_440BX.

Well i do have a Savage 4 pro, but is not the Diamond one, and even without drivers in any (even slightly) overclocked AGP it just displays wrong colors, characters, everything bad.
Also, these cards are known to be incompatible with Ali/Uli and Via chipsets, due to their relatively poor implementation of the AGP standard in these days.

Going to the drivers, these drivers will work just right, but you might need to download and install the latest Metal driver from Vogons Drivers, if you want to use the Metal API in supported games. Also, the official Diamond drivers have some 3d graphics adjustments not present on the original generic drivers.

I had the Diamond Stealth S540 AGP card. Got it within a couple of weeks after it showed up on the shelves for the very low price of $129 (for a 32MB card, that was low back then). At the time I was running a Matsonic Super Socket7 motherboard based on the Ali Aladdin V chipset and it worked well with pretty much every game with only a few exceptions until S3 got their act together and released better drivers. By better drivers I mean drivers that had a full OpenGL ICD so I could play Quake 3 Test without issue (my i740 and Permedia 2 cards worked flawlessly with Quake 3 Test thanks to both of them having a complete OpenGL ICD from jump). S3 Metal support for the Unreal series meant high-res textures making UT99 a joy to play.

I ran that combo for a good while but ultimately replaced it with a Hercules Geforce2MX card.

misterjones wrote:

I had the Diamond Stealth S540 AGP card. Got it within a couple of weeks after it showed up on the shelves for the very low price of $129 (for a 32MB card, that was low back then). At the time I was running a Matsonic Super Socket7 motherboard based on the Ali Aladdin V chipset and it worked well with pretty much every game with only a few exceptions until S3 got their act together and released better drivers. By better drivers I mean drivers that had a full OpenGL ICD so I could play Quake 3 Test without issue (my i740 and Permedia 2 cards worked flawlessly with Quake 3 Test thanks to both of them having a complete OpenGL ICD from jump). S3 Metal support for the Unreal series meant high-res textures making UT99 a joy to play.

I ran that combo for a good while but ultimately replaced it with a Hercules Geforce2MX card.

I'm suprised you actually ran that card on an Ali chipset and ran well. Maybe it was my board that had problems, I think it had an older chipset. But in older S7/SS7 and slot 1/socket 370 Via chipsets with agp implementation, the board mostly won't run, i've tested that better.

I am currently searching for an S4pro PCI card to test in a p4 thinclient.
S4pro should give me win3x/9x/2k drivers and these fine hires-textures.

Creative Labs 3D Blaster Savage 4 32 MB Savage 4 Pro 110 MHz 125 MHz 8.0 ns 300 MHz passiv Diamond Stealth III S540 32 MB Savage […]
Show full quote

Creative Labs 3D Blaster Savage 4 32 MB Savage 4 Pro 110 MHz 125 MHz 8.0 ns 300 MHz passiv
Diamond Stealth III S540 32 MB Savage4 Pro+ 125 MHz 143 MHz 7.0 ns 300 MHz passiv
Elsa Winner II-32 32 MB Savage4 Pro+ 125 MHz 135 MHz 7.0 ns 300 MHz passiv
Elsa Winner II-16 16 MB Savage4 Pro+ 125 MHz 143 MHz 7.0 ns 300 MHz passiv
Hercules Beast 99 Savage4 Pro 32 MB Savage4 Pro 110 MHz 125 MHz 8.0 ns 300 MHz passiv
Number Nine SR9 32MB 32 MB Savage4 Pro 110 MHz 125 MHz 8.0 ns 300 MHz passiv
Number Nine SR9 16MB 16 MB Savage4 Pro 110 MHz 125 MHz 8.0 ns 300 MHz passiv

Hopefully there are PCI-Cards existing.

dr.zeissler wrote:

I am currently searching for an S4pro PCI card to test in a p4 thinclient. S4pro should give me win3x/9x/2k drivers and these fi […]
Show full quote

I am currently searching for an S4pro PCI card to test in a p4 thinclient.
S4pro should give me win3x/9x/2k drivers and these fine hires-textures.

Creative Labs 3D Blaster Savage 4 32 MB Savage 4 Pro 110 MHz 125 MHz 8.0 ns 300 MHz passiv Diamond Stealth III S540 32 MB Savage […]
Show full quote

Creative Labs 3D Blaster Savage 4 32 MB Savage 4 Pro 110 MHz 125 MHz 8.0 ns 300 MHz passiv
Diamond Stealth III S540 32 MB Savage4 Pro+ 125 MHz 143 MHz 7.0 ns 300 MHz passiv
Elsa Winner II-32 32 MB Savage4 Pro+ 125 MHz 135 MHz 7.0 ns 300 MHz passiv
Elsa Winner II-16 16 MB Savage4 Pro+ 125 MHz 143 MHz 7.0 ns 300 MHz passiv
Elsa Winner II-32 32 MB Savage4 Pro+ 125 MHz 135 MHz 7.0 ns 300 MHz passiv
Hercules Beast 99 Savage4 Pro 32 MB Savage4 Pro 110 MHz 125 MHz 8.0 ns 300 MHz passiv
Number Nine SR9 32MB 32 MB Savage4 Pro 110 MHz 125 MHz 8.0 ns 300 MHz passiv
Number Nine SR9 16MB 16 MB Savage4 Pro 110 MHz 125 MHz 8.0 ns 300 MHz passiv

Hopefully there are PCI-Cards existing.

There were. IIRC Creative made a PCI variant and MAYBE Number 9. I'm about 99.99992365263% certain Creative did it but not so sure about Number 9.

N9 made one using the S4 LT chip, I own one.

Why is this in emulation instead of Marvin?

perhaps because it's from 2013 ?

Moved.

misterjones wrote:

There were. IIRC Creative made a PCI variant and MAYBE Number 9. I'm about 99.99992365263% certain Creative did it but not so sure about Number 9.

Of course there were. Even the ones from Diamond all exist as PCI. I'm using a 8 MB Savage4 Pro PCI in my s7 retro PC as well. Really nice cards.

what CPU is minimum if I want to play s3tc games ?
are there newer cards with the same feature in older games? (ut99 got a patch for the savage2000)

misterjones wrote:

There were. IIRC Creative made a PCI variant and MAYBE Number 9. I'm about 99.99992365263% certain Creative did it but not so sure about Number 9.

You are probably speaking of the CT6850: http://retronn.de/imports/hwgal/hw_creative_s … pro_ct6850.html

Thats what I am searching for! Thx Mr Huth.

appiah4 wrote:

N9 made one using the S4 LT chip, I own one.

This information is wrong please disregard, the S4 LT I have is actually an AGP apparently, and they never made any PCI cards beyond Virge. 😊

appiah4 wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

N9 made one using the S4 LT chip, I own one.

This information is wrong please disregard, the S4 LT I have is actually an AGP apparently, and they never made any PCI cards beyond Virge. 😊

Actually, Number 9 made cards with their own chipsets (Imagine and Ticket To Ride) initially with PCI then later with PCI and AGP variants.

I owned a 32MB card with their Ticket 2 Ride IV chip on it briefly, mainly because it was pitched in 3D Animation magazines as being good for OpenGL stuff and they could play games. It was slow as turtle shit but had really nice display quality and a good number of features for it's time. After that I ended up separating my CGI stuff and gaming by going with a Diamond FireGL 3000 and every other card I owned for gaming.

dr.zeissler wrote:

what CPU is minimum if I want to play s3tc games ?
are there newer cards with the same feature in older games? (ut99 got a patch for the savage2000)

System requirements won't change when using S3TC.

S3TC became DXTC in DirectX 6.0, so every DirectX 6.0 card should have that feature. At least in theory. I don't know if the implementation is backward compatible. The only games with native S3TC support I know of are Quake 3 and the Unreal games anyway...

But the savage4 has native win3x drivers and a good dos compatibility, these two things are very important for me.
TNL is not needed in my case.