VOGONS


Reply 40 of 77, by ReeseRiverson

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Also, if you want to make the directory go from C:\WINDOWS, seeing as the CD command in autoexec portion of the short cut doesn't seem to work... I discovered that you can simply just load a .bat file with the change directory command and it works. At least it did for me. 😀

Reply 42 of 77, by sliderider

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Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Voodoo is a CPU scaling beast. Especially when you have 2 in SLI.

But on the classic Voodoo you are stuck to 640 x 480 resolution in most games. At least the ones I tried didn't have any option to change the resolution. This card does well on a Pentium 166 or MMX. But I do remember that many who upgraded from a Voodoo to Voodoo 2 in their Pentium machines saw little performance boost.

You know I could just stick a PIII 700 in this machine and compare, but I haven't got a decent benchmark. All the games I tried ran at, what appears to be, constant 60 fps with maybe a few hiccups here and there.

Do the 6 or 8mb cards do higher resolutions? I also vaguely remember something about a Quantum3D dual Voodoo 1 card. Surely that must be able to do more than 640x480.

Reply 43 of 77, by Mau1wurf1977

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Not sure but the Diamond Monster 3D that I have, in Unreal Gold, does only 640 x 480.

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Reply 44 of 77, by Artex

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Now that I've been running my Win98SE box for a while, I've been thinking about moving from my 4MB Diamond Voodoo 1 card to a 2x Diamond Monster 3d II (Voodoo2) SLI setup to push higher resolutions (800x600 & 1024x768). I know these cards scale pretty well with CPU speed, but I'm wondering if I should swap out my board/processor and move to a Pentium II 450Mhz or Pentium III setup (possibly Tualatin)? I have all kinds of parts laying around, just wondering what would provide the most horsepower for these two cards without being overkill.

Current Setup
Win98SE
Gigabyte GA-5AX Rev 5.2
AMD K6 III+ 400ATZ running at 500Mhz (5x100 @ 1.6V)
512MB PC133 SDRAM
ELSA Riva TNT2 Ultra (2D)
Diamond Monster 3D (Voodoo) (3D)
AWE64 (WAVE)
Ensoniq SoundScape (MIDI)

I have a few Asus 440BX boards (P2B, P2B-S, P2B-LS) laying around along with some slot one P2's, but I also have a couple P3's laying around too - including my newly acquired ASUS CUSL2-C and 1.4Ghz Tualatin. I know you can reach a point of diminishing returns when the Voodoo2s become the bottleneck and not the processor. Would I be ok with my current setup and just throw in the 2 x Voodoo 2's?

I'm pretty sure my K6-III+ @ 500Mhz would behave close to an Intel P2-450, although the floating point would suffer a bit compared to the Intel proc.

Thoughts?

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Reply 45 of 77, by vetz

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The problem with switching to 440BX is that you will loose the possibility to slow your computer down with cache/FSB/multiplier settings like you can with Socket 7.

500mhz AMD K6-III fits well with Voodoo2 SLI imo. I'm doing the same in my Compaq (400mhz), but here I'm using them as my main 3D accelerator.

3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)
3D Acceleration Comparison Episodes

Reply 46 of 77, by Artex

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vetz wrote:

The problem with switching to 440BX is that you will loose the possibility to slow your computer down with cache/FSB/multiplier settings like you can with Socket 7.

500mhz AMD K6-III fits well with Voodoo2 SLI imo. I'm doing the same in my Compaq (400mhz), but here I'm using them as my main 3D accelerator.

Good point. I'd still like to play some of the DOS games as well that are more sensitive to those settings.

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Reply 47 of 77, by rodimus80

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I walk away for a few days and you go ahead and do this. Something I did just last week. Ugh. Starting the first video now.

UPDATE: Love the videos. I recently did this with my Gateway G6-333 Pentium II. Where I went different was I disabled onboard video, threw in a nvidia Mach64 and a Voodoo 2 alongside it. I also am using the AWE64 Gold. The big difference between my build and yours though is I went with 2 HDDs. One for DOS 6.22/Windows 3.11 and the other is Windows 95. Any reason you didn't go the same?

Reply 48 of 77, by Mau1wurf1977

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The entire point was to build a hybrid machine and show how to configure it as this question pops up all the time 😀

Having read old reviews, 3DFX seems to have had a soft spot for AMD and their drives worked quite well on the K6-III. I'm sure a slot 1 system with a 1GHz PIII would be faster, but by how much and is it worth giving up all the other benefits of the SS7 platform like disabling caches and changing the multiplier through software.

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Reply 49 of 77, by rodimus80

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I see your point. Your video is making me go back to my Windows 95 machine and run mixerset. I did not disable the mic and such. Also, I've noticed the quality of games like Doom II were not as blocky on your video. Is this because of your recording setup?

EDIT: I guess Doom only had one resolution and that was 320x200. My LCD stretches that. I'm going to try a CRT.

Reply 50 of 77, by Mau1wurf1977

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I don't think Doom can get any more blocky 😀

Yes it's 320 x 200 stretched. Not much you can do about it. Just make sure you don't use a widescreen monitor, unless it has a setting for 4:3 correction.

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Reply 52 of 77, by Artex

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I'm using my 25.5" Asus VW266H, but it doesn't do 4:3 at 320x200 (or at least I cannot figure out why). It only seems to handle 640x480 or higher @ 4:3. So sadly, DOOM is stretched for me.

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Reply 53 of 77, by Mau1wurf1977

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All the 15" are 4:3 but they use really old LCD panels and the image isn't that great. However they are really good for early 3D games with the 1024 x 768 resolution.

I wonder how 800 x 600 would look on a 1600 x 1200 screen. It should look ok.

One day I will grab a 20" 1600 x 1200, but they are quite expensive and the shipping makes it worse.

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Reply 54 of 77, by vetz

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My newer Dell U2412M Ultrasharp 24" have options to turn on 4:3 mode. It displays everything you throw at it correctly. The IPS screen shows the colors of DOS games very nicely. Only problem is that it is a bit too big and sharp for DOS 320x200 games 😜

I also have a Samsung 204b 20" 1600x1200 screen laying in my shed which needs resoldering as the caps have died (very common problem on the 204b)

3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)
3D Acceleration Comparison Episodes

Reply 55 of 77, by Artex

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vetz wrote:

I also have a Samsung 204b 20" 1600x1200 screen laying in my shed which needs resoldering as the caps have died (very common problem on the 204b)

Happened with my 19" Viewsonic VX922 as well. Great monitor for gaming (and 4:3) but I like the size (and 16:10 aspect ratio) of the Asus, so I'd rather use this as my main monitor.

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Reply 56 of 77, by Skyscraper

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I have a 12 year old 17" Viewsonic VG700.

Its the only one of my LCD screens I can stand in low res 4:3 games.
I think it is a TN panel but the colours are great.
The screen handles 50 - 75 HZ which is practical and 1024*768 looks almost as good as the native 1280*1024.

viewsonicvg700_font.jpg

http://www.viewsonic.com.au/products/ppspecs.php?id=31

New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.

Reply 57 of 77, by senrew

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I built a machine somewhat like this a little while ago.

ASUS P2B-S
PII-450mhz
64MB RAM
Diamond Stealth 3D 4000 AGP 4MB (S3d)
Generic V1-4MB (Glide+D3D)
Aureal Vortex2 card

I built it specifically to play the S3d and Glide versions of Mechwarrior 2. It's running W95 OSR2 and nothing more than original drivers. Works beautifully.

Halcyon: PC Chips M525, P100, 64MB, Millenium 1, Voodoo1, AWE64, DVD, Win95B

Reply 58 of 77, by Mau1wurf1977

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Vortex 2 is a great card it seems! Had zero issue with any of the games I tried. Drivers are also nice and compact and you don't need an installation CD, just the drivers.

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Reply 59 of 77, by Mau1wurf1977

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My google skills are letting me down.

Is there a utility or environment variable that lets you disable SLI?

And another question. The cards I have, have 12MB stickers. I assumed that in SLI you can play games at 1024 x 768. However both, Quake II and Unreal Gold don't work at that resolution.

In the driver panel it reports this:

7FNLmIx.png%29

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