Looking forward to updates!

Marvin, yes. You got the right place. Good luck!

rkrenicki wrote:

I worked at a computer repair store back in the mid 90s ...

...I have been spending a lot of time (and money) recently re-acquiring all of the parts that I used to have, as well as other parts that I always wanted but couldn't afford.

This is so so familiar to more people than you can imagine! A few years before/after, same story/background for many.

My story is similar. My experience computers started with a DX2-50 Packard Bell in freshman year high school, but once I got into computers, I played with 8088s and Pentiums (I got a middle of the road PCs, but helped people with either better or worse than I had). My DX2-50 got replaced by a P133 (Circuit City lemon policy) around Jr or Sr year - big jump in performance! I then worked at a PC shop when I started college, and when I finally earned enough, I built my first PC - a PII-450 (another big jump for me). The shop helped with confidence with piecing things together, so I wasn't nervous about that part. I was more nervous about buying crappy hardware.

My next upgrade was replacing that PII-450 CPU to a Celeron OC'd to 900 on the same mobo (also a big jump) - but then it's a blur because I upgraded more frequently. Basically anything after that didn't seem so special to me anymore, 🤣.

So I'm trying to reacquire stuff from that period when I upgraded less frequently (mostly because of money) because that era just felt more special to me.

I did not get as much done today as I expected.. but I did manage to sort my box of cards into types, and began testing the video cards. Since I had each one fired up, I figured I would run some 3dMark on the cards that I decided to keep. All of the cards today were tested on a VIA 694T motherboard with a Tualatin 1.13Ghz Pentium 3, 768MB of PC133 RAM and Windows 98SE. Here are the results of the cards tested today.

1								3 D  M A R K
2Card                        1999    2000    2001SE
3------------------------------------------------------
43DFX Voodoo5 5500           5915    4756    1924
5ATI Radeon 9800 Pro         7344    8699    8515
6nVidia Geforce 4 Ti 4200    7221    7832    6475
7nVidia Geforce 5200         7140    6080    4280
8Hercules 3D Prophet 4500    7323    5669    2394
9Matrox G400 Max Dual Head   7096    3472    1611

So, I take two things away from these results. 1) Weird chipsets are weird. The G400 and the Broadcom Kryo II of the Prophet cards are just not great chips, and they do not scale very well beyond DirectX 6.1. 2) Never meet your heroes. I never expected the Voodoo5 to do worse than just about everything else. It even was slower than a Geforce4 MX440 (which is not on this list, as I am not keeping it)

I have a couple of other Voodoo cards too, but the Voodoo3 would not POST on this board, and the Voodoo 2 just is not in this league.. it will end up in one of the Socket 7 machines I will build later on.

It always takes more time than planned 😊

This hobby is a black hole when it comes to time. It just goes away.

The Voodoo 5 does have cult status, but performance is often overrated. It doesn't have Transform and Lighting engine, so the processors does this, and this is the reason why many V5 owners use a fast Athlon or Pentium 4. But like you find out, anything newer and you're better off looking elsewhere.

And yes, some of the other cards you mentioned are best for older DX6 games. Performance back in the day exploded, so the performance difference from one generation to the next can be surprising. Same goes for CPU power.

Your retro journey has started, enjoy the ride 🤣

This performance drop off is a consequence of the graphics pipeline not being fully accelerated in the GPU. The Voodoo 5, as Phil noted, plus the G400 and Kyro don't have hardware T&L, so geometry operations have to be emulated in the CPU with 3DMark 2000. The same with programmable pixel and vertex shaders in 3DMark 2001. If a card such as a Geforce 256 or Geforce 2 were featured, you would see a similar fall-off moving from 3DMark 2000 to 2001.

I have a Geforce 2 Ti 200, but I have not yet tested it. I do have a number of other video cards on the way, so I will test it in that batch.

After a couple of hours of the same benchmark videos over and over again.. I decided to work on my Compaq Prolinea 4/66, but it has a dead, soldered-on, CMOS battery which was making it quite frustrating to get much done. I will need to source a couple of sockets for CR2032s.. I guess that machine is halted until then.

I did not get any time to work on hardware today, but I am excited to win a couple of eBay auctions this evening. I won three different listings for original 5.25" copies of Sierra games. 110 total disks, 13 games. There are a couple of duplicates, and a few games that I am not interested in, so those will end up getting resold at some point.

Hero's Quest I: So You Want To Be A Hero (two copies)
Quest For Glory II: Trial by Fire
Conquests of Camelot
King's Quest 3
King's Quest 4 (Both AGI and SCI copies)
Leisure Suit Larry 1
Leisure Suit Larry 2
Leisure Suit Larry 3
Space Quest 2
Space Quest 3 (two copies)
Manhunter: San Francisco
Codename: Iceman
The Colonel's Bequest

I also picked up a copy of Quest for Glory Anthology on CD for $8 and Wing Commander 3 for $1 which are both pretty amazing prices in my opinion. I also found my old copies of Wing Commander 4, Privateer and Wing Commander Academy in the basement along with a couple of old backup CD-Rs that likely have other games from that era. I will have to see what I can recover off these CDs during the week.

Some actual retro activity!

First up, I received an admittedly non-retro item. a NEC MultiSync LCD 2070NX. It is a 1600x1200 capable 20" LCD. I know that the 2170NX has been talked about lately, but the 2070 is a good bit cheaper to source.

After I set it all up, I turned my attention to my Compaq Prolinea 4/66. I discovered that the system is wildly unstable if there is no CMOS battery installed. I ended up soldering in a CR2032 that I had around for Super Nintendo game refurbishing. I upgraded the 486DX2-66 to an Am5x86-133 based PNY Quickchip and slapped a fan on top of it.

I also installed a 2GB Compact Flash card, a CT1600 Sound Blaster Pro 2, 3Com 3C509B-TX Ethernet card, and a clone of the Roland MIF-IPC-B that I built the other week.

I have not sorted out the software yet, I just have DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 installed along with the drivers for everything. I have not hooked up my Roland MT-32 as my MIDI cables have not yet arrived.

Lookin' good! Also, nice find on the games. I hope to one day find a bunch of original box/disk Sierra games.

GuyTechie wrote:

Lookin' good! Also, nice find on the games. I hope to one day find a bunch of original box/disk Sierra games.

I am a little bummed that these are not boxed, but they are better than nothing. I also forgot to update that the seller noticed that I had duplicates, and let me exchange some of them. I do not recall what the replacement games were off the top of my head, but once I have them all loaded up, I will post about it. According to the USPS, I will be receiving them later today along with a number of other retro items.

I also ended up making a bunch of offers for some game CDs last night and a number of them were accepted at half their asking price! Grand total for all fo these games was $64. It is a fairly long list, but here it is:

Bioshock
Star Wars Tie Fighter
SimCity 2000
Wing Commander Academy
Wing Commander Armada
Wing Commander 2
Wing Commander 4
Ultima Underworld - The Stygian Abyss
Descent II
Duke Nukem 3D + Manhattan Project
Doom 3
Laura Bow: The Dagger of Amon Ra
Star Trek The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual
Police Quest Collection (1 to 4)
Baldur's Gate
Baldur's Gate II
Forgotten Realms - The Archives
EcoQuest - The Search for Cetus
Kings Quest V
Leisure Suit Larry 5
Leisure Suit Larry 6
Rollercoaster Tycoon + Corkscrew Follies

rkrenicki wrote:

I have been spending a lot of time (and money) recently re-acquiring all of the parts that I used to have, as well as other parts that I always wanted but couldn't afford..

This is the tagline for this movie called V.o.g.o.n.s!! 🤣 .
i am in the same boat too 😊

rkrenicki wrote:

I upgraded the 486DX2-66 to an Am5x86-133 based PNY Quickchip and slapped a fan on top of it.

How you do that?
the MoBo recognize the CPU?...i tried the same in a Unisys 486 (intel i425 mobo), but the bios recognize the cpu as 468SX enhanced 😵

Anyways, welcome to your doom!! 🤣

So, this is what a metric butt-load of Sierra 5.25" floppy disks looks like. Each bag contains one game, each having anywhere between 2 and 10 disks.

The seller threw in a backup copy of all of the games on CD-R, which is nice since my Prolinea does not have a 5.25" drive currently installed. I have a Teac FD-505 that I could have used, but this is much much faster.

manuelink64 wrote:

How you do that? the MoBo recognize the CPU?...i tried the same in a Unisys 486 (intel i425 mobo), but the bios recognize the cp […]
Show full quote

rkrenicki wrote:

I upgraded the 486DX2-66 to an Am5x86-133 based PNY Quickchip and slapped a fan on top of it.

How you do that?
the MoBo recognize the CPU?...i tried the same in a Unisys 486 (intel i425 mobo), but the bios recognize the cpu as 468SX enhanced 😵

Anyways, welcome to your doom!! 🤣

I just slapped it in. The F10 Diagnostics shows it as a DX4-100, but this motherboard apparently supports that chip. I changed the jumper from x2 (from the DX2-66) to x3, but I havent checked the Diagnostics yet.

Since the motherboard has jumper settings for the DX4-100, It stands to reason that I could use a native Am5x86-P75/Am486DX5-133... but I see no jumpers for CPU voltage.

I am still waiting for my MIDI cables to show up, so my 486 Sierra Gaming build has slightly stalled for now. I did run into an odd issue where Windows 3.11 would lock up any time the CDROM was accessed, but I will figure that one out later one.

In the meantime, the Quadro FX3000 showed up today, so I am rebuilding my VIA Apollo Pro 133T/Pentium III 1.13GHz Tualatin based Windows 98 box. The 20GB Western Digital hard drive that I had been using is extremely loud. I am formatting a 40GB Western Digital drive now which is significantly quieter. Once that is done I will pick out a sound and network card and get it built into a final case.

The lot of CD games showed up today. I am quite excited to get into these once I finish assembling my machines. I didnt notice when I bid, but the Leisure Suit Larry 6 is actually for the Mac. Sounds like a task for the G4 iBook that I picked up a couple of weeks ago 😀

You've got more retro activity than I have since I started!

Good luck returning to the hobby. A few years back I got the itch as well and started buying up all the pieces of hardware I thought were interesting or thingss that people just wanted to get rid of for cheap. I ended up not having as much time as I would like for the hobby however. Still looking for the stuff just looking for the time to work on all the projects I have.