VOGONS


First post, by WasteOfHeadspace

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So, I've got some old cases, and a few little things here and there, but I'm looking for advice on good combos of hardware to build up a good Pentium 3 gaming rig.

I'm hoping to run a Sound Blaster audio card, Windows 98 SE, and maybe a VooDoo card or something similar. I was always into this kind of stuff back in high school, but honestly I've very limited experience in hardware builds. It's been almost 15 years since the last time I really tinkered under the hood of a machine. Now that I've got some time and a little bit of spending cash, I really want to sort of build my "Dream Machine" from my high school years.

Any help, ideas, or suggestions are totally welcome and appreciated!

Oh, and thanks to Clint from Lazy Game Reviews for pointing me to this forum. Seems like a really awesome place to start for me!

Looking to build a Windows 98 SE / Pentium 3 gaming rig

Reply 1 of 27, by Ampera

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Pentium 3 is a bit of a broad topic. When I think of a "Dream Machine" Pentium 3, I think of a top of the line Slot 1 P3, a Voodoo 2 setup in SLI (also, capitalizing the D in Voodoo will probably bring a few people's blood to a boil) with a Sound Blaster AWE32 original (non CQM model) with another MPU compatible card for an ideal MIDI mountain like LGR made. Throw as much RAM as unreasonable in there, throw a 4 15k drive RAID 1+0 Ultra160/320 SCSI setup in there (if you can find it, on something faster than 32-bit and/or 33mhz PCI) and you have something that would make anybody from that time period shit their pants in envy.

However I imagine you are not prepared to spend well over a thousand dollars on this machine, so there are of course things to chop off.

I personally run a Pentium 3 450mhz Slot 1 with 384MB of SDRAM on 3 DIMMs with a GeForce 2MX, Sound Blaster Live!, and 40GB IDE hard disk. This is a cheap setup, and you can probably throw it together for a few hundred off E-Bay parts, or stick around and get lucky with some other systems.

Reply 2 of 27, by BeginnerGuy

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Welcome aboard. Retro computing is all consuming, prepare yourself.

I'm curious what you have in your stash and how much you're looking to spend to get your machine running? As Ampera said, you can spend a fortune going for SLI voodoo set ups with a full on Awe32 with true OPL3 (or awe64 gold with memory adapter) or you can go ahead and grab a cheaper sound card (SB 16, SB32, Awe64 value) + geforce FX 4200 and run a wrapper for Glide games. Geforce FX 4 isn't time period accurate and It's not "authentic" but it's super fast and cheap.

I've managed to get a Slot 1 Pentium 3 800/256/100 off of ebay for around 12 dollars, so you can get pretty high end slot 1 coppermines if you're patient. Just don't bother looking for the 1000/256/100 model cheaply. Another cheap option I opted for was to go with dual sound cards, Sound Blaster 32 CT3600 paired with any true OPL3 Sound Blaster 16. (If you aren't familiar with any of the terms like OPL3, we'll help out) can usually be had for less than a single card setup if you look carefully, it's a bit more of a hassle but can save a few bucks.

One last bit: Be careful plugging in 20 year old power supplies without inspecting and possibly recapping them 😊

Sup. I like computers. Are you a computer?

Reply 3 of 27, by firage

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The case would be a fine starting point in any retro build, in general. While hunting for a cool period chassis, you'll probably find most of your candidates come with some kind of system already built in. Parts you can use in your own build are a boon.

My big-red-switch 486

Reply 4 of 27, by WasteOfHeadspace

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Wow, didn't expect such quick responses, thanks for the welcome and advice so far!

As for the tech terms, yeah, I'm kind of a newbie in that regard. But I do have a bunch of Pentium 4 / Athalon 64 stuff floating around, a few old PCs in varying states of disrepair. I Have a Sound Blaster Live! card floating around in there, a fair few power supplies and such. the cases I do have are a bit too new for the look of the system I'd like to build, but I have been on the lookout for Pentium 3 era PCs at various goodwills, thrift stores, pawn shops, etc. I live in FL, and you'd be surprised what you can find in the brick & mortar stores down here. I don't have any GPUs or CPUs though, and maybe one or two motherboards but again a bit too new for what I'd like to build.

As far as price range, I'm looking to keep it as cheap as possible, and I don't mind taking alot of time putting this together. I'm in no rush, it's more a labor of love. I just want to run old Win98 games, maybe some later DOS games (Not sure if that's possible with a Pentium 3 setup), and just kind of putz around with it.

Oh, and yeah, the Voodoo card spelling format, my bad. I just ALWAYS remembered it being formatted like that, 🤣 😉

Looking to build a Windows 98 SE / Pentium 3 gaming rig

Reply 5 of 27, by Ampera

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DOS and Pentium 3s is always a point of disagreement. Personally I do not consider the Slot 1 platform to be a good idea for DOS, with the Pentium Pro/MMX being the best option for high end DOS gaming, but that is just my opinion.

Reply 6 of 27, by CkRtech

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WasteOfHeadspace wrote:

a few old PCs in varying states of disrepair.

Care to list them out?

Displaced Gamers (YouTube) - DOS Gaming Aspect Ratio - 320x200 || The History of 240p || Dithering on the Sega Genesis with Composite Video

Reply 7 of 27, by FFXIhealer

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I have a Pentium 3 gaming PC, but it started off as a rebuild of my original Pentium 2 gaming PC. I still had the motherboard and the CPU and the memory, but nothing else. I got that 350MHz Pentium 2 computer back working, but when I dropped the Voodoo2 SLI pair in there, I didn't really get much performance improvement over the single Voodoo2 card. Turns out, the CPU was the bottleneck. So I researched and found out that the fastest CPU that the motherboard could support was a 600MHz Pentium III Katmai processor. I got one fairly reasonable priced on Ebay and it worked. Now it's pretty sweet. I also have a DIamond Viper V770. It's got the nVidia RIVA TNT2 graphics chip and 32MB of memory on the AGP bus, so it's on-par with the Voodoo2 SLI in benchmarks and a bit faster on DirectX. The Voodoo2s are only there for Glide gaming anyway.

I'm interested to see what you do with this, because they had Pentium III processors in the 1GHz range (Coppermine or Tualatin) with socket 370. And you may go with GeForce or Radeon in order to have hardware T&L and also that whole CPU off-loading thing. I went older, back to 1999 with my system because I already have XP gaming from 2005 with my Dell XPS laptop.

Fun Fact: Did you know I can access this forum and web page perfectly using Firefox 2 on my Windows 98 system?

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Reply 8 of 27, by WasteOfHeadspace

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CkRtech wrote:
WasteOfHeadspace wrote:

a few old PCs in varying states of disrepair.

Care to list them out?

Sure! But I can't get to them at the moment, due to sleeping family members. I shall get a list up tomorrow!

Also, thanks all so far for the ideas. I'm really getting even more psyched for this. Man, I cannot wait to start sourcing parts and building this thing, however slowly it may go. Heck, I might even use some of my Athalon stuff and do a Win XP build as well!

You guys were right, this is all-consuming, and quickly... Retro PC Gaming is a helluva drug. 😁

Looking to build a Windows 98 SE / Pentium 3 gaming rig

Reply 10 of 27, by okenido

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Ampera wrote:

It's an addiction. I have spent way too much on useless old computers that don't do anything anymore.

Same, i didnt spend much but i have this sort of addiction. I recently bought 10 old computers for $30, only because I like old hardware. I often find some parts "pretty" : slot1 cpus, colorful or well made motherboards, old ISA sound cards... 🤣

I tried to use a P3 for modern usage, i can accomodate the speed but got definitely stopped by this f*cking SSE2 required everywhere 😒

Reply 11 of 27, by FFXIhealer

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okenido wrote:

I tried to use a P3 for modern usage, i can accomodate the speed but got definitely stopped by this f*cking SSE2 required everywhere :/

SO MUCH THIS!!! (This is why I can't get Half-Life 2 working on my Windows XP retro gaming rig! >.< )

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Reply 12 of 27, by alvaro84

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P3 gaming rig? My preferences include DOS and therefore ISA so the newest i815 boards aren't for me. But I couldn't get really convenient around Voodoo cards so I can't really advise about them though I plan to take a look in their realm too...

My 3 attempts by now:

- Classic early, BX based: Probably the nicest, most hassle-free one. With nVidia cards I swapped to find the ideal one for Unreal because it was what I played back then. BX chipset doesn't officially support 133-FSB CPUs but they run well anyway, with an overclocked AGP bus. My TNT2->GF3 cards didn't mind. But I downgraded it to play around with the classic Celeron 300A @ 450MHz. I loved this one.

- Very late: Tualatin but with ISA. It needed picking a VIA chipset board that works with a GUS because I built it mainly for DOS. So much it doesn't even have Windows installed yet. But it's great for the latest DOS demos and good for high resolution DOS FPS games. My choice was MSI 694T Pro and the VGA is a humble MSI Radeon 9250 because it has a great VESA 3.0 BIOS with almost any video mode you can think of. The last nVidia card I've seen with this kind of feature rich BIOS is Riva 128 but I'd like it to function as a limited Win98 gaming/demo rig too. Its VIA chipset often gives worse (DOS VGA) performance than Intel ones but Phil says it's okay under Windows.

- Mid-range, hipster path: i820 with RDRAM. No one in their right mind bought an RDRAM P3 so I had to build one 🤣 This one does officially support 133 MHz FSB but I had a bunch of problems with its HP KC19+ board. Now I replaced it with another one that seems to handle 8GB+ HDDs well. I don't know what the hell was with the first one but I surely couldn't google another BIOS for it. It tended to forget about the Vortex 2 sound card on any hardware change too. I hope the new board solves the sound card issue too. All in all, once settled and working I like this one too because it's so strange. RDRAM has no advantage over SDRAM here but at least isn't mainstream 😎

Shame on us, doomed from the start
May God have mercy on our dirty little hearts

Reply 13 of 27, by chinny22

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P3 Slot 1 is good starting point I think as it can play majority of Win9x games, and has ISA slot so you can drop back to DOS and play the vast majority of games.

Graphics
Depending on what AGP cards you have already, you could pair it up with PCI based Voodoo card which I'll assume you don't have and will cost a bit, This would give you the flexibility for Glide and D3D gaming from the same PC, or maybe a high end card and use a wrapper

Audio
I prefer the Audigy 2 ZS which is the final card to support Win9x. cleaner output, nicer drivers, supports any version of EAX your going to come across. That said SB Live is a fine card if you already have it so start with that and decide if you want to spend the money to upgrade down the track.

ISA soundcard, depends on how old you want to go. If your not playing early 90's adlib games, you don't have to worry about true OPL and just get a AWE64. If you are into older games, things get bit more complicated, although P3 may no longer be the best system now anyway.

This is all assuming your P3 is Slot based, If its socket 370 its not really end of the world. Your SB Live has good support for playing dos games from within windows and a P3 will have enough horsepower to do this, you just loose the nostalgic sensation of messing round with config.sys, autoexec.bat, dos drivers and the like.

Reply 14 of 27, by Deksor

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For my upcoming pentium 2 build, I chose not to chose for the sound. How ?

I'm just going to use 3 sound cards 🤣
SB AWE64 + Yamaha YMF744 + aureal vortex. I hope I'll be able to fit all of them simultaneously

The awe64 is there for SB16 sound + AWE64
The YMF744 is here for XG sound + OPL3 + SB pro compatibility
The Aureal is here for Windows sound and A3D

That way I will not really have anything that won't have proper sound (except if I'm looking for Gravis Ultrasound stuff, but my 5x86 is here for that task and I don't have any more slots left anyways)

Trying to identify old hardware ? Visit The retro web - Project's thread The Retro Web project - a stason.org/TH99 alternative

Reply 15 of 27, by Tetrium

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okenido wrote:
Ampera wrote:

It's an addiction. I have spent way too much on useless old computers that don't do anything anymore.

Same, i didnt spend much but i have this sort of addiction. I recently bought 10 old computers for $30, only because I like old hardware. I often find some parts "pretty" : slot1 cpus, colorful or well made motherboards, old ISA sound cards... 🤣

I tried to use a P3 for modern usage, i can accomodate the speed but got definitely stopped by this f*cking SSE2 required everywhere 😒

$30 for 10 old PCs is a very good deal!

Yes, I can relate to this 🤣
It makes inventorying parts really time consuming and the same goes for going through my stash of old games 😜

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
Report spammers here!

Reply 17 of 27, by KT7AGuy

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Inventory what you already have, decide if you want to use any of it, and then make decisions from there.

You haven't given us enough information to really help you.

Are GLIDE games important to you? If so, you'll want some sort of Voodoo card, or combination of Voodoo cards. If not, then a GF4 or FX series card would be better.

If you want the ultimate in GLIDE support, you can run both a Voodoo 3 and a Voodoo 1 card at the same time. Be careful though, as Voodoo 1 cards can be funny when it comes to CPU and FSB speeds.

If you want the best of both worlds, you could run a GF4 or FX along with a Voodoo 1, Voodoo 2, or two Voodoo 2 cards in SLI.

If you're just trying to keep costs down, a GLIDE wrapper may be the alternative you want.

Is DOS support important to you? If so, you'll probably want to use an AWE64 ISA card for sound. If not, then an SB Live or Audigy 2ZS is a good choice.

What you build will depend entirely upon what your goals are, and what sorts of games/software you want to run.

Phil had a nice video that may give you some ideas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcAqRbFFQPU

Reply 18 of 27, by Ampera

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FFXIhealer wrote:
okenido wrote:

I tried to use a P3 for modern usage, i can accomodate the speed but got definitely stopped by this f*cking SSE2 required everywhere :/

SO MUCH THIS!!! (This is why I can't get Half-Life 2 working on my Windows XP retro gaming rig! >.< )

I've pondered the feasibility of running Half-Life 2 in any form on a 486, but more importantly the docks E3 demo shown in I think 2002 or 2003. While Half-Life 2 as a whole will never run on a 486, Half-Life 2's leaked beta could, as it has a lot more similarities with the GoldSrc engine, and could likely be run on a machine without the proper instruction sets needed to run the full Half-Life 2. It will never run fast, but it's just to laugh at the guy who asked Gabe Newell if Half-Life 2 would run on his old 486.

Reply 19 of 27, by buckeye

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Ampera wrote:

Pentium 3 is a bit of a broad topic. When I think of a "Dream Machine" Pentium 3, I think of a top of the line Slot 1 P3, a Voodoo 2 setup in SLI (also, capitalizing the D in Voodoo will probably bring a few people's blood to a boil) with a Sound Blaster AWE32 original (non CQM model) with another MPU compatible card for an ideal MIDI mountain like LGR made. Throw as much RAM as unreasonable in there, throw a 4 15k drive RAID 1+0 Ultra160/320 SCSI setup in there (if you can find it, on something faster than 32-bit and/or 33mhz PCI) and you have something that would make anybody from that time period shit their pants in envy.

However I imagine you are not prepared to spend well over a thousand dollars on this machine, so there are of course things to chop off.

I personally run a Pentium 3 450mhz Slot 1 with 384MB of SDRAM on 3 DIMMs with a GeForce 2MX, Sound Blaster Live!, and 40GB IDE hard disk. This is a cheap setup, and you can probably throw it together for a few hundred off E-Bay parts, or stick around and get lucky with some other systems.

This almost a carbon copy of my system with the exception being a GF2 GTS video card. This has served me well for games ranging from Rogue Squadron to Castle Wolfenstein in Win98SE. Been looking for a higher grade slot 1 cpu but the price is at a premium.

Asus P5N-E Intel Core 2 Duo 3.33ghz. 4GB DDR2 Geforce 470 1GB SB X-Fi Titanium 650W XP SP3
Intel SE440BX P3 450 256MB 80GB SSD Radeon 7200 64mb SB 32pnp 350W 98SE
MSI x570 Gaming Pro Carbon Ryzen 3700x 32GB DDR4 Zotac RTX 3070 8GB WD Black 1TB 850W