Hi all,
I am interested in building a retro gaming PC
However old Motherboards are hard to find.
Super socket 7 motherboards with an AGP slot are rare and expensive.
I find that BX440 motherboards with AGP slots are more available.
So what do you think. Is a Pentium-3 500mhz okay or do I need an AMD K6 3+ CPU ?
Will be using with 256 ram and Voodoo 3 AGP card.
Sound blaster AWE 64 or Live.
If you are not interested in early speed sensitive DOS games - Slot 1/Socket 370 system.
I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.
K6 II+ and K6 III+ can have their speed configured in software. You can get by just fine with a pentium MMX or similar CPU with a non super socket 7 board and it will work fine for lots of DOS games. You will have to disable caches and lower CPU multipliers and bus speeds in the bios to get down to 486 and 386 speeds for speed sensitive DOS games.
If you don't care about speed sensitive DOS games (most of the better DOS games don't have speed issues), then you can do just fine with p3 build. Just make sure to get a board with one or two ISA slots for sound card compatibility.
K6 II+ and K6 III+ can have their speed configured in software.
VIA C3.
I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.
wrote:If you are not interested in early speed sensitive DOS games - Slot 1/Socket 370 system.
This is a common misconception: the middle-ground Pentium 3s (450-800) can also be accurately slowed down using third-party software like Throttle, and are actually better-suited for games like Test Drive III (the timer in the upper-left corner is accurate) and unmodded Ultima 7 (just use 87.5% throttling and you're good) than AMD K6-II/III+. The clock skipping steps (12.5%, 25%, 37.5%, 50%, 62.5%, 75% and 87.5%) are essentially software multipliers for CPU.
Pentium 4s and C2Ds can also do this using a similar trick - check this thread for more info.
If your using a Voodoo3 and sound Blaster Live I would go with a P3 as it will be fast enough for Win9x Glide games that the Voodoo is better suited for.
And with that AWE64 in the isa slot you will still be able to drop back into pure dos and play majority of DOS games, and even then sometimes you can run slowdown utilities like mentioned above or issue I ran into was with turbo pascal games which need patching.
http://www.pcmicro.com/elebbs/faq/rte200.html
But yes I think a Slot 1 P3 is a great dos PC overall
