cyclone3d wrote:

What about Slot-A and Socket-A? There are a lot of those with ISA slots.

I'm a bit Intel-centric, sorry. 😊 So of course I know about Slot A and Socket A, but I don't know whether there are boards with these chipsets that have an ISA slot but can also host CPUs that are significantly faster than an Intel Pentium 3@1.4 Ghz.

Some KT133A boards can run Tbred and Barton AXP easily at 2+ GHz. The question is - do we really need that kind of CPU power for ISA-equipped PC?

jheronimus wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

What about Slot-A and Socket-A? There are a lot of those with ISA slots.

I'm a bit Intel-centric, sorry. 😊 So of course I know about Slot A and Socket A, but I don't know whether there are boards with these chipsets that have an ISA slot but can also host CPUs that are significantly faster than an Intel Pentium 3@1.4 Ghz.

Abit KT7A or KT7A-RAID with modified BIOS to support Barton CPUs and the socket pin mod to be able to set the higher multipliers.

Hello ISA supporting system with a 2.4Ghz Athlon XP 😈

havli wrote:

Some KT133A boards can run Tbred and Barton AXP easily at 2+ GHz. The question is - do we really need that kind of CPU power for ISA-equipped PC?

Yes, that's a good question. I can imagine the following scenario: I got myself a Voodoo 5, and I want a machine that won't limit it and will still have good DOS compatibility — sort of an "ultimate" Glide/DOS gaming rig.

At the same time I can't name any game that would really need this kind of setup. AFAIK, Glide stopped being the de-facto standard somewhere around Voodoo 3 — after that you're better served with a GeForce/Radeon of some sort. So, yeah, no real practical reason for this build.

jheronimus wrote:

havli wrote:

Some KT133A boards can run Tbred and Barton AXP easily at 2+ GHz. The question is - do we really need that kind of CPU power for ISA-equipped PC?

Yes, that's a good question. I can imagine the following scenario: I got myself a Voodoo 5, and I want a machine that won't limit it and will still have good DOS compatibility — sort of an "ultimate" Glide/DOS gaming rig.

At the same time I can't name any game that would really need this kind of setup. AFAIK, Glide stopped being the de-facto standard somewhere around Voodoo 3 — after that you're better served with a GeForce/Radeon of some sort. So, yeah, no real practical reason for this build.

Who said anything about practical? MWAHAHAHAHA 😈

That being said, some of the old Sim City games can use all the CPU power they can get once the cities get to a certain population. Transport Tycoon/Deluxe is the same way.

I think there is also something between retro/vintage and modern. Basically those computers that are not powerful enough to be called modern like those dual/quad core cpus from over 10 years ago. I can't call them retro and I can't call them modern either.

jheronimus wrote:

I don't know the distinction between "retro" and "vintage", but I don't collect anything post Pentium 3 — my systems really need to have a proper ISA slot. Retro builds with Pentium 4 and later kind of confuse me — I don't really see the point.

It's obviously going to be a generational thing. *If* a Pentium 4 system is built for a purpose today, there's already a pretty good chance it's for retro gaming and the experience of 2000-2008 period hardware. That type of build might not look or sound distinctly "retro" to most people in the hobby, but is objectively retro.

I don't see how even a Pentium III based small scale file server or industrial equipment would be "retro" though, if it's still performing an up to date function. 486's on the other hand are true vintage hardware, and always hard to see as anything but retro regardless of their purpose now.

Excuse my rambling fascination with semantics.

firage wrote:

It's obviously going to be a generational thing. *If* a Pentium 4 system is built for a purpose today, there's already a pretty good chance it's for retro gaming and the experience of 2000-2008 period hardware. That type of build might not look or sound distinctly "retro" to most people in the hobby, but is objectively retro.

Pentium 4 2.4Ghz/GeForce Ti4200 was my first "own" PC (I was 12 years in 2002, only played on my relatives' and friends' PCs before that), so that system means a lot to me. But I really can't see why I would need a dedicated machine to play games from WinXP era. And I would also struggle to name anything unique about the experience that computer offered. I'm guessing there are some software issues that require Windows XP for certain games, and you can't use XP on modern hardware due to lack of drivers, but is that it?

I'm not being elitist, I'm just genuinely curious, because I often see P4/C2D "retro" builds here and on Reddit and I don't understand them 😀

jheronimus wrote:

firage wrote:

It's obviously going to be a generational thing. *If* a Pentium 4 system is built for a purpose today, there's already a pretty good chance it's for retro gaming and the experience of 2000-2008 period hardware. That type of build might not look or sound distinctly "retro" to most people in the hobby, but is objectively retro.

Pentium 4 2.4Ghz/GeForce Ti4200 was my first "own" PC (I was 12 years in 2002, only played on my relatives' and friends' PCs before that), so that system means a lot to me. But I really can't see why I would need a dedicated machine to play games from WinXP era. And I would also struggle to name anything unique about the experience that computer offered. I'm guessing there are some software issues that require Windows XP for certain games, and you can't use XP on modern hardware due to lack of drivers, but is that it?

I'm not being elitist, I'm just genuinely curious, because I often see P4/C2D "retro" builds here and on Reddit and I don't understand them 😀

I have a C2D Win98SE/XP with an Nvidia 7900GTX build. Just because I can.

I also have an AMD FX 8370e XP/Win10 with dual AMD HD6870 video cards build just because I can. Really would like to upgrade that system to dual HD7970 cards at some point.

It is fun to have systems where you are using pretty much the fastest hardware that will actually work properly on the OS being used, even if a bit of hackery is involved to make it work.

havli wrote:

Some KT133A boards can run Tbred and Barton AXP easily at 2+ GHz. The question is - do we really need that kind of CPU power for ISA-equipped PC?

There are some DOS titles which benefit from high CPU clocks in extreme circumstances, like very high resolutions. Examples include:
Janes USNF
Janes ATF
Battlespire
Extreme Assault
Armored Fist 2
some Build based titles

Some of these are examples of diminishing returns, but a monster DOS PC will deliver returns nonetheless. ISA isn't necessarily required, though, as they often have wider sound card support making PCI more viable.

I'm not one to get caught up much in these sorta semantics, but I tend to consider "retro" to be more along the lines of modern products designed after older ones, while "vintage" would refer to the original old products in question.

For instance, I saw some retro-looking cheap audio equipment in the local Target, styled after radios of decades past, but I'm pretty sure the construction would be plastic with modern solid-state ICs all over the place.

By contrast, there's this Yamaha CR-1020 I scored at the local Goodwill not that long ago. Wooden cabinet with metal vents, faceplate and smooth, perfectly-damped knobs, and almost no ICs to speak of under the hood; unquestionably 70s vintage in terms of its build quality and sound of a time when the home stereo wars were in full swing, before the great "black plastic crap" malaise of the 1980s and later.

As for where I draw the line with computers, I tend to group it by periods of OS support and compatibility, and they don't always line up cleanly depending on which computers we're talking about. I tend to focus a bit more on software/OS, as the hardware is ultimately nothing without that.

IBM-compatible: The biggest divider to me is the Win9x and 2000/XP divide, since going to NT-derived versions like the latter break so many 9x-era games it's ridiculous.

I built a computer specifically to straddle the line here, running a Pentium 4 EE 3.2 GHz, 2 GB of DDR-400 and a GeForce 6800 Ultra to power through XP-era games up through 2005 or so, but also capable of running most Win9x games with little fuss (sometimes requiring CPU underclocking here and there) and also packing one fully-functional ISA slot for sound card use, courtesy of its industrial motherboard. It might just be powerful enough to use as a basic computer if my more modern machines go down, though I certainly wouldn't want to.

Macintosh: Classic Mac OS/Mac OS X, obviously. Again, I have a MDD Power Mac G4 1.42 GHz specifically to straddle the line here, as it can manhandle anything under OS 9 while running OS X Leopard semi-decently. However, there's the occasional old game that requires me to use a Mac version of the Thrustmaster FCS to get the best control out of it, so I need something with native ADB, like my Power Mac 6500. (Ideally, it'd be a 9600 or B&W G3, but that'll have to wait for another time.)

PowerPC systems are all but useless for modern computing these days, though. OS X PowerPC-compatible software is too difficult to find; OS 9 and prior is ironically much easier due to certain sites. TenFourFox can get you on the modern Web, but YouTube is a slideshow on 1.42 GHz G4s. I pretty much just keep mine around for Mac-exclusive games.

Amiga: 68k/PowerPC, since any given AmigaOS version tends to only run on one or the other. Also, I don't really consider AmigaOnes and the other ones produced afterward to be "true" Amigas, as they lack the custom chipset inherent to the 68k ones and rely entirely on emulation.

With all that said, one thing I have noticed post-Core 2 is that even ten-year-old computers like my Q6600 build (albeit spruced up with 8 GB of DDR2-800 and a GTX 760 compared to its initial 2 GB and 8800 GT) are still viable today, given how my little bro still enjoys PC gaming on it and it still holds its own for a lot of recent games. My 4770K/32 GB DDR3-2400/GTX 980 build runs circles around it, obviously, but that doesn't make the old system unusably slow for anything but the most demanding of games.

That would not have happened at all pre-Core 2, as hardware was advancing too fast and games were too eager to take advantage of the increases in power to the point where you'd have to build a whole new computer in the very next year or two just to keep up because of the required new motherboards to back up those new CPUs. Maybe there will come a time that "vintage" isn't effectively useless for everyday use - well, at least if we don't run into any more Meltdown/Spectre wake-up calls that require new hardware to fix.

Very interesting topic, I've read all posts and everyone has good points. I collect hardware since 2003, for me right now there are four periods.

1. Pre-Pentium era, I can't give a specific time period, but probably before 1995. For me that's the really vintage period, but also I'm not interested in components from this period (exception - some sound cards). I have acquired some components from "then", but mainly for trading. I was too young back then and I don't feel anything when I see a 386, a 486, some ISA video cards, etc.

2. 1996-2000 - for me this is the golden age. I was a teenager then, and I consider myself lucky, I was able to witness the spectacular evolution of hardware (especially of the video cards). 3dfx Voodoo cards were indeed magic. I love almost anything from this period and I've acquired a lot of components from back then.

3. 2001-2004 - although I still like this period, it's not that good as the previous one. I like it, hardware was still evolving nice, but it wasn't that jaw dropping as the difference from software rendering in 320x200 to hardware accelerated in 640x480. Also I wasn't a teenager anymore and I didn't spent so much time in front of the computer...

4. After 2004 - I feel nothing about this period, I consider it's not retro or vintage. Of course this might change in the future, but for now I feel no desire to collect anything that's newer than 2004.

gdjacobs wrote:

There are some DOS titles which benefit from high CPU clocks in extreme circumstances, like very high resolutions. Examples include:

...Some of these are examples of diminishing returns, but a monster DOS PC will deliver returns nonetheless. ISA isn't necessarily required, though, as they often have wider sound card support making PCI more viable.

I'm just into this area again. I'm experimenting with 3 paths, one of them is the aforementioned Abit KT7A with an 1600+ Palomino to match the fastest Tualatin's clock and because Palominos are recognized by a bog standard KT7A BIOS. My purpose is to find the strongest possible setup for the latest DOS games/demos and because of demos ISA is an absolute necessity because many of them need GUS for sound.

The other two systems is an MSI 694T Pro and P3S-1400, the third is not decided. I have two industrial S478 boards, one of them is a Robo 845 backplane + CPU card combo, the other is a Soyo P4I845PEISA. The former is limited by not having an AGP port (PCI bus limits 1600x1200x8-bit to ~60fps with 100% CPU usage, at 30 fps you have half of the CPU for rendering and sound and game mechanics), the latter has an AGP port but I'm yet to find the perfect VGA that it behaves well with. Its 1.5V AGP doesn't support my favorite DOS VGA though, the Riva 128.

The saddest truth I could learn from these experiments that results don't even follow the rule of diminishing returns because at high resolutions the results become limited by the video card's bus transfer rate which is a complete gamble. Boards and video cards make good or bad combos. I use two utilities to accelerate video transfer, they're mtrrlfbe and fastvid. Sometimes one works, sometimes the other. Sometimes neither. Sometimes the linear frame buffer is accelerated (this is the best case), sometimes the paged A000 area (nolfb might help but not quake), sometimes both or neither. Nvidia cards seem to behave better in general than Radeons.

This video misery completely overshadows these otherwise powerful systems and renders CPU power almost moot. But I can say that I could at least make Blood playable in 1600x1200 on the PCI P4 and the Athlon XP system, at ~30-40fps. The P3S-1400 can only make it borderline playable (that ~20-30fps it's quite playable by those days' standards, though). I'm not sure what I can achieve with the AGP P4 system, though.

At 320x200 there's no more question, every system runs everything great, even dysfunctional write combining can't really hinder them. When your frame buffer is a mere 64kB it isn't too painful to access it anymore. But I could say that any one of these is an overkill for such a low resolution and a good old reliable slot 1 BX system can handle like anything you throw at it.

alvaro84 wrote:

This video misery completely overshadows these otherwise powerful systems and renders CPU power almost moot. But I can say that I could at least make Blood playable in 1600x1200 on the PCI P4 and the Athlon XP system, at ~30-40fps.

That sounds off the hook! Any pattern in GPU/GART/MTTR compatibility?

gdjacobs wrote:

That sounds off the hook! Any pattern in GPU/GART/MTTR compatibility?

Huh. I tried to make sense of this stuff again. I spent part of my afternoon benchmarking my Abit KT7A and Soyo P4I845PEISA (my 694T is waiting for its turn).

All I can say now is that the i845 board behaves strange with mtrrlfb (it can slow it down ridiculously - sometimes one can even use this effect 😀 ) and shows problems with PS/2 mouse. I thought this behavior was limited to my Robo 845 but it seems it isn't 😢

Actually I tried to find good board+VGA pairings. KT7A (+1600+ Palomino @ 1500MHz) performed the best with GeForce 4600Ti and the good old Riva 128 cards and the AGP flavor was better for high resolution. On the other hand it didn't really like the Radeons. Mtrrlfb was fine on this board.

The Soyo 845 + P4-3066 Northwood could easily beat it combined with a Radeon 4650. Blood was very playable on this combo, hovering between 30 and 40 fps (30 at the start point before jumping out of the grave). Without sound it could even exceed 40 fps at times. Unfortunately I couldn't try AGP Riva128 because i845 has 1.5V AGP.

The reason I mention sound it GUS and Quake. Something's fishy with the relationship of the i845 chipset and GUS streaming. Quake lost 30-40% of its speed when I ran it with GUS sound. I know from earlier that a.) SB16 or GUS PnP/Max codec has much less impact on the performance and b.) this problem isn't limited to the i845 chipset, I could measure big performance loss on an Asus P5A-B (ALI chipset, Super Socket 7).

As for the 694T board, it seems to work similarly to the KT7A in terms of VGA performance: it seemed to like nVidia cards better than Radeons.

Unfortunately I couldn't benchmark 1600x1200 Blood (this is the insane resolution Holy Grail for me now) on many cards because 1600x1200 is not always supported by their BIOS.

P4-3066 was vastly faster than Palomino@1500 in both Blood and Quake. P4-2266 is much closer. 694T with P3S-1400@1500 lags behind, at least it does in Blood. (On the other hand it draws much less power than the others.) I'll have to do one more benchmarking session and copy the results together to bring more details.