What do you want to do with this? Gaming?

Win98 will definitely run on this CPU... it has a DX2/66 as minimum requirement and a PPro 200 runs circles around that. Bummer about it being the 256 KB cache version, but you can see how far you can go with games as Unreal, Half-Life etc. with this and maybe a Voodoo2. The lack of MMX will be quite limiting, but perhaps it will still do better than a P200 MMX for example...

Well I was going to use the DX2-66 for maybe a mix of DOS/Win95 era gaming and the P Pro 200 with a Voodoo 3 for later DOS 98/2000 era stuff. The 486 is the box with 256k cache, not sure what the P Pro has.

I don't necessarily know that I will keep both of them going, I guess I just have to see which I enjoy fooling with more. The 486 is currently the system that doesn't really have any disc drives, other than the floppy and the parallel port zip, which is going to make it tough to get an OS on there.

You can see how Quake 3 runs on Dual PPro 200 1MB and a 10 year newer graphics card... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK5QFySGpy4

Not exactly the smoothest experience 😉

d1stortion wrote:

You can see how Quake 3 runs on Dual PPro 200 1MB and a 10 year newer graphics card... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK5QFySGpy4

Not exactly the smoothest experience 😉

Is the game being run in SMP mode so both CPU's can get in on the action?

Hmm difficult...
Well I could only survive with a floppy disk, but you could use some windows 98 install that can boot from cd.
Or if you have some usb onboard or some usb pci board, you could try to make a cd that boots from usb.
If nothing works, I would get a dvd, put a simple linux on it plus windows on the same disc, format the hard drive, copy windows to hard drive then change to a dos bootable cd and install windows xD

Unless you have a lot of RAM, you probably shouldn't bother doing anything with Win9x on that 486, especially since you have another perfectly good machine for that. Stick with DOS.

The novelty of OS/2 will probably wear off in ten minutes and you will never use it again.

Jorpho wrote:

Unless you have a lot of RAM, you probably shouldn't bother doing anything with Win9x on that 486, especially since you have another perfectly good machine for that. Stick with DOS.

The novelty of OS/2 will probably wear off in ten minutes and you will never use it again.

I used to use Syquest removable drives as hard drives in my first 486 machine because I couldn't afford a proper hard drive and I had cartridges with Win3.1/DOS and OS/2 installed on them. All I had to do was make sure I had the proper cart installed in the primary drive before booting to switch between the two. I hadn't yet learned about multi-booting OS's back then, but the Syquest carts wouldn't have been big enough for multiple OS installations even if I had.

But yeah, OS/2 isn't so exciting that you would want to use it for any length of time. Native apps are expensive and hard to find now and the Win3.1 compatibility, while good, isn't perfect. There is a small list of Windows apps that either won't boot or generate errors that you don't get from a machine with Windows 3.1 on it.

I remember OS/2 being very useable on even a 486 DX-33. I did have something
like 12 meg of RAM at the time, though. It was a really nice little box.
And OS/2 was awesome at running Dos software. I was able to run Tie Fighter
or Doom in its own instance. I could also run 3D Studio or Autocad and
switch to Painter or Photoshop when needed and then back into my 3D app.
So I think OS/2 with win 3.11 would work, or maybe something like damn small
Linux. I could probably also do Win 95 but don't think I'd want to go later
than that. I should mention I only have an ISA slot and no USB.

sliderider wrote:

Jorpho wrote:

Unless you have a lot of RAM, you probably shouldn't bother doing anything with Win9x on that 486, especially since you have another perfectly good machine for that. Stick with DOS.

The novelty of OS/2 will probably wear off in ten minutes and you will never use it again.

I used to use Syquest removable drives as hard drives in my first 486 machine because I couldn't afford a proper hard drive and I had cartridges with Win3.1/DOS and OS/2 installed on them. All I had to do was make sure I had the proper cart installed in the primary drive before booting to switch between the two. I hadn't yet learned about multi-booting OS's back then, but the Syquest carts wouldn't have been big enough for multiple OS installations even if I had.

But yeah, OS/2 isn't so exciting that you would want to use it for any length of time. Native apps are expensive and hard to find now and the Win3.1 compatibility, while good, isn't perfect. There is a small list of Windows apps that either won't boot or generate errors that you don't get from a machine with Windows 3.1 on it.

I agree that other than novelty, it probably makes more sense to use Win 95
or Linux on that machine. Thank god I have some old licenses laying around.

sliderider wrote:

Is the game being run in SMP mode so both CPU's can get in on the action?

Who knows... SMP support was experimental anyway so major performance gains are very unlikely.