brostenen wrote:

I have nearly that exact spec, wich you are running now. Same motherboard. Running it with an P-III 500, 512mb Ram, G400-Max, V2 […]
Show full quote

I have nearly that exact spec, wich you are running now. Same motherboard.
Running it with an P-III 500, 512mb Ram, G400-Max, V2-SLI And AWE64-Gold.
The case is an A-Open HX-45 and an A-Open 300 watt PSU.

The picture is an older one, before the finished selection of hardware.
I even think that the main-GFX is not the MAX on that picture (do not remember)
Notice that I have not yet installed the second V2.

SAM_0440.JPG

I've always had a soft spot for those 300W FSP PSUs 😁

Too bad about some of them when it comes to leaking caps, but most of the second hand 300W FSP units I acquired didn't even have any leaking caps, even after having been used for years before I got them. The 250W FSP units I managed to find did seem to have been more severely affected by leaking caps, even though most of the 235W ones did not (or at least fewer of them).

Great for Athlon XP too 😀

Damn is this thing good.

It creams DOS games. DOOM via ZDoom (the most modern version still works on 98SE is creamed, with it being playable at around 30 FPS on 1024x768, or a bit less for more stable gameplay. As the CPU is a tad slow it does tax the system, but it blows what my 486 can do (To the surprise of nobody)

Duke Nukem 3D is a dream. There is perfect soundcard compatibility with the SB Live with DOS in Windows mode. 800x600 VESA/SVGA caps FPS and while the general midi doesn't sound GREAT, that can be fixed with soundfonts.

Speaking of which, what is a good soundfont at or under 128MB for general MIDI?

And for actual heavy weight games, Half-Life runs PERFECTLY at 1280x1024 (My monitor's max resolution) and will never dip below 30FPS. Massive amounts of gibing can slow it down a bit, but it's perfectly playable. The bottleneck here is DEFINITELY the CPU.

Also for the guy who is looking for a noisy ass HDD. Get a WD400. That f**ker is loud. I mean it sounds like a friggin air raid siren, seriously.

I am loving this machine. I just threw it in it's case (Which arrived today, well it's 12:17AM, so which arrived yesterday) and it looks gorgeous. It's truly a beauty.

I have that same exact motherboard from that same guy as well. Rock solid board and yes max ram is 768MB 256x3, mine runs a geforce4 4200Ti 128MB and a 1.4GHz celeron.

Damn. Whatever, 384MB is plenty.

Well I can confirm that my WS440BX can use up to 768mb's of ram.

However 98 has a baby over 512 soooooooooooo (which is weird because I used to be able to limit it) I'm limited to 512mb's of ram.

Nicely specced system! My motherboard is the same model as yours from the same eBay seller. I guess we all got lucky huh?

I have a 1 GHz Coppermine PIII and it works great as long as you don't use the very latest BIOS. Fortunately mine comes with version 15.

loading it up with all the goodies. It's amazing how much modern software has versions for Windows 98.

The stupidest thing to install was the Soundblaster Live! Value drivers. While you can get core drivers for Windows 98 from Creative's website, this doesn't include AudioHQ, so you can't
change soundfonts for MIDI. and, youknow, mixer, if you ever use that. 🤣

But thanks for the VOGONS driver library. I first tried one disc which was for the Soundblaster 5.1, and holy shit, that disc had some bloatware. I mean wow.

Anyways, that didn't work, so one uninstall later, I now found the Sound Blaster Live! Value disc, and that works fine.

I will post audio clips of some MIDI stuff, I found a really good soundfont that's actually pretty small, almost small enough to fit onto a decked out AWE32.

And of course, Tomb Raider steam declines to work without a CD. I have a tomb raider CD somewhere.

I did some recording of some Half Life gameplay, but only @ 640x480. I could do PAL resolution, but I didn't. My TV out on my video card doesn't scale 1280x1024 down and instead just shows a stupid window moving around the picture.

But I am decking it with Audacity, 7-Zip, CDBurnerXP. I mean this software is stuff I use quite often, and it all works (Older versions) on Windows 98.