feipoa wrote:

386SX wrote:

I'd probably win using the (cheap) 386SX-20, 4MB (upgraded) and Oak 512Kb until the late 1998 when I switched to the K6-2 350 and S3 Trio3D system. 😈 😵 🤣

So you didn't have Internet until late 1998?

I should add that my friends stopped poking fun at me when I purchased a dual PII-400 in Dec. 1998. I still have that system.

No, internet/phone costs were high anyway.
A dual P2-400 sound powerful for those days! I remember a friend Pentium 2-333 with Matrox card crashing my K62-350 any days... 😵

For my builds I try to keep the ISA/PCI/VLB/AGP/etc cards within +/- 2 years of the release of the CPU. But when it comes to HDD/CD/floppy drives I care a lot less about period-correctness. As long as it is beige and the machine is beige, I'm fine. Although I wouldn't go as far as putting a DVD drive in a 486 or something like that, I actually prefer having newer drives in my machines as they are generally more reliable, quieter and usually faster.

My 486 machine is a little weird as it's a later (mid 1997) industrial board with a PCI slot, which 90% of Socket 3 machines did not have. I'm still keeping it within the 1992-1996 range for the rest of the parts. It has an early 1996 S3 Vision968 card, probably the oldest PCI graphics card I own, and just barely at the cutoff point.

The Pentium machine is sort of aiming at a early-mid 1997 range, a maxed out PMMX just before the first P2s released. A machine like this should probably have a Voodoo1 instead of a Voodoo2, but the former is getting prohibitively expensive now, and the PMMX233 can still get a little more performance out of a V2 compared to the V1.

Over time my Dell Dimension 4100 has become a "mid-late 2000" machine. In terms of equipment it is probably the most period-correct of all my machines. Right now with a Geforce2 Ultra and Turtle Beach Santa Cruz it is very close to the top-end configuration Dell offered for the 4100, whereas it was a low-mid range config with a GF2 MX and SB Live Value when I first got it.

Generally speaking , I prefer going for hardware thats faster within reason than the target games that system is being asked to run.

For instance using a Pentium Pro for DOS , or using a P3 Tualatin for WIn98.

It really also depends on how much space you have, and if you dont have much room , somewhat faster yet still very compatible systems win , at least for me.

Aren't pentium pro actually slower than regular pentiums when running DOS games ?

Deksor wrote:

Aren't pentium pro actually slower than regular pentiums when running DOS games ?

yes and no.

it really depends on the game, in a game like Quake, or Tomb Raider, the Pro will have the advantage , while lots of other games won't show any improvement (or may be a bit slower)

that said, given a Pentium Pro is still overkill for a game like Doom , or Jazz Jackrabbit , its a great setup for DOS (Doom will run fine on either , but Quake and such will be faster on the Pro)

Darkman wrote:

yes and no. […]
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Deksor wrote:

Aren't pentium pro actually slower than regular pentiums when running DOS games ?

yes and no.

it really depends on the game, in a game like Quake, or Tomb Raider, the Pro will have the advantage , while lots of other games won't show any improvement (or may be a bit slower)

that said, given a Pentium Pro is still overkill for a game like Doom , or Jazz Jackrabbit , its a great setup for DOS (Doom will run fine on either , but Quake and such will be faster on the Pro)

Does Quake really show improvement on a PPro? I thought that game was coded specifically for the P5 architecture, which is why a PMMX gets better benchmark results than a P2.

ElementalChaos wrote:

Darkman wrote:

yes and no. […]
Show full quote

Deksor wrote:

Aren't pentium pro actually slower than regular pentiums when running DOS games ?

yes and no.

it really depends on the game, in a game like Quake, or Tomb Raider, the Pro will have the advantage , while lots of other games won't show any improvement (or may be a bit slower)

that said, given a Pentium Pro is still overkill for a game like Doom , or Jazz Jackrabbit , its a great setup for DOS (Doom will run fine on either , but Quake and such will be faster on the Pro)

Does Quake really show improvement on a PPro? I thought that game was coded specifically for the P5 architecture, which is why a PMMX gets better benchmark results than a P2.

well it obviously also depends on other factors, but on my setup (200Mhz PPro 1MB , 96MB EDO , 8MB ATI Rage Pro) , at the default 320X200 res , it gets 50.1 frames , at 640X480 it gets 18 frames.

Thats without running FASTVID , btw.

not quite sure if its better than the fastest MMX , but its certainly a fair improvement over a standard Pentium

Of course the Pro is happiest when its running Quake2 in NT4, but it does a decent job with DOS as well.

Darkman wrote:

Generally speaking , I prefer going for hardware thats faster within reason than the target games that system is being asked to run.

For instance using a Pentium Pro for DOS , or using a P3 Tualatin for WIn98.

It really also depends on how much space you have, and if you dont have much room, somewhat faster yet still very compatible systems win , at least for me.

My Pentium Pro/Voodoo is actually my favourite computer overall. For late DOS/early Windows games it's a machine that is both period-correct AND overkill. And I really like it that way 😀

I just do whatever I want provided it is not too expensive the I do period correct builds to a point but nothing ridiculous unless it adds spice to the build. Chasing this or that is getting to be more and more expensive as time goes on.

jarreboum wrote:

Hence a stupid amount of RAM

More ram doesn't mean faster system. In fact with older machines it usually means slower performance due to cache limitation. In general it's more trouble then it's worth.

jarreboum wrote:

a super fast CF as HDD

CF cards are not SSDs. Most are as fast if not slower then a real period correct HDD, and suffer from severe slowdowns when trying to read from different locations - even worse then mecanical HDDs. I find sometimes a machine using a CF card as a HDD will freeze for a a few seconds when it's doing a lot of work. They make really poor HDD replacements. If you really want to go solid state, get industrial disk on modules. Those are designed to replace HDDs and handle the task much better then a CF card ever could.

Darkman wrote:

Generally speaking , I prefer going for hardware thats faster within reason than the target games that system is being asked to run.

For instance using a Pentium Pro for DOS , or using a P3 Tualatin for WIn98.

When going overboard I like to use super socket 7 for DOS and socket 939 / 754 for high-end win98se.

^^

Athlon 64 is a lot of fun for Widows 98 gaming. Such a system can run nGlide quite well and will perform better than a real V5 in such a system. It also boots and shuts down super fast and games load very fast also.

I'm a little bit of both. I like to build systems that are little speed demons and pushed to their limits - but there are also things for which authenticity is key. For instance I could never enjoy truly X-COM on anything else but a Pentium-75.

I don't follow any particular rules. There are really two types of projects that interest me. The first is something purpose built to do something I want it to do, and second something that is interesting of itself without any specific purpose.

Being able to play my favorite old games with graphical and audio authenticity and maximizing the performance of those games is one important goal. Period correctness of the internals is not as hugely important to me but the authenticity of the experience definitely is.

I do have a tendency to want to minmax when it comes to hardware, I hate to see a system with wasted potential if one particular component is bottlenecking the system. I know sometimes this is intentional in order to slow a system down intentionally but it's just one of those things that causes a little tick in me.

To take 3DFX for an example. I need to have a system with a Voodoo 5 which doesn't leave any performance on the table that I could be squeezing out of it, but I also need that really high end Windows 98 system with nGlide to run those same games and 1600x1200.

kanecvr wrote:

When going overboard I like to use super socket 7 for DOS and socket 939 / 754 for high-end win98se.

Wow. I have to admit, I never, ever ran w98 on a socket939. That has always been clear XP territory for me, with w98 going to mid-upper P3/socket462 era. That is probably in part due to the fact that I never built a single-core 939 system either. 😀 I jumped directly from Barton to A64X2

I like to get one of the more powerful systems of the era/socket. It doesn't have to be the most powerful one.
For example a 100MHz AMD DX4, 233MHz Pentium MMX, Dual 1GHz Pentium III.

I'd classify most of the PCs I have as "overkill" for the period. I do tend to keep them period accurate though, use parts that were available back then. For example I won't use a Pentium 4 for Windows 98 games much. On the other side I also won't use a Pentium III for XP.

I don't have any strict rules set for me, I just like to mess with old hardware and like to play games sometimes. It's always fun to see if Tualatin will work on some board that it originally did not meant to and/or to get it to work well. Heck, I have put 1.3 GHz Celeron to run at 133 MHz bus speed (1.73 Ghz) on a BX board back in 2004 coupled with Ti4200, that thing flew! Nowadays things have changed just little, I think there's not many people who would mess with Asus XG-DLS board and put big cache Xeon to run at 133 MHz but I did it and it is FUN! 😀

Weird but as of late I'll rather play WinQuake on my 166@292 MMX/128mb/s3 Trio64v/SB16/ system at 320x400 all day long than on any of my much faster Tualatin machines! There's something that feels so 'right' and geniune about that socket 7 system I cannot seem to replicate on anything else than a Pentium 2 350 + early BX board, no matter how much 'Voodoo2 SLI/5500/Uber Tualatin/Barton" I attempt to throw in . 😁

subhuman@xgtx wrote:

Weird but as of late I'll rather play WinQuake on my 166@292 MMX/128mb/s3 Trio64v/SB16/ system at 320x400 all day long than on any of my much faster Tualatin machines! There's something that feels so 'right' and geniune about that socket 7 system I cannot seem to replicate on anything else than a Pentium 2 350 + early BX board, no matter how much 'Voodoo2 SLI/5500/Uber Tualatin/Barton" I attempt to throw in . 😁

Sadhu! Sadhu! Sadhu! Finally someone who likes playing Quake slower rather than faster!

kanecvr wrote:

CF cards are not SSDs. Most are as fast if not slower then a real period correct HDD, and suffer from severe slowdowns when trying to read from different locations - even worse then mecanical HDDs. I find sometimes a machine using a CF card as a HDD will freeze for a a few seconds when it's doing a lot of work. They make really poor HDD replacements. If you really want to go solid state, get industrial disk on modules. Those are designed to replace HDDs and handle the task much better then a CF card ever could.

That hasn't been my experience at all? CF have no wake-up period and have blazing fast access to files. My only use is for gaming though, not general OS use. I know of the DOM solution, but the prices don't agree with me.

stamasd wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

When going overboard I like to use super socket 7 for DOS and socket 939 / 754 for high-end win98se.

Wow. I have to admit, I never, ever ran w98 on a socket939. That has always been clear XP territory for me, with w98 going to mid-upper P3/socket462 era. That is probably in part due to the fact that I never built a single-core 939 system either. 😀 I jumped directly from Barton to A64X2

Take a look at this thread then: Win98 Socket 939 Voodoo 2 SLi Build! (a.k.a. Glide Overkill)