Fellow vogons/vogoners,

I recently got a Highscreen Alpha 5000 machine gifted:

It was advertised in the July 1997 brochure of the german company VOBIS:

It seems to have been acquired in the original non-SCSI configuration and had a SUSE Linux installed.
I have updated the hardware to this configuration now:

Alpha 21164 at 500 MHz with 128 MB ECC PS/2 RAM
Soundblaster AWE32 (previously Highscreen Sound Boostar 3D)
Adaptec 2940UW SCSI Controller
ELSA Winner 2000 AVI 3D with S3 Virge/VX
3Com Fast Etherlink TX (3C905B)
36 GB IBM SCSI drive, Plextor SCSI CD-ROM.

I installed Windows NT4 for Alpha with SP6a and FX!32 1.5

I had to take out the Sound Boostar as it's NT4 driver took over the graphics cards IRQ, forcing NT4 back to VGA only.

Now some questions came up:

Generally, what is the latest/recommended hardware that is supported for NT4 Alpha?
Any good NT4 Alpha software sources available? (I could find WinAmp 2.09 and Quake 2 already)

The SB AWE32 runs on the default Soundblaster driver from NT4. The NT4 driver list shows the AWE Synth driver as option but it seems there is no sbawe32.drv for alpha?!?

The Fast Etherlink runs at 10 MBit/s speed. Is that a driver limitation or can I configure this somewhere? (network driver has no property panel)

How much would I gain if I replace the ELSA Winner 2000 with the Diamond Fire GL 1000, mainly regarding e.g. Quake 2 / OpenGL.

Someone ported a Voodoo2 driver for Alpha NT?

Using FX!32 I can install, start and run Diablo I, however if I let FX!32 optimize the code then Diablo can not find it's mpq data file any more.
Someone has hints for running x86 software through FX!32. I know that games were not exactly the focus, though some more should work?

Diablo I runs through the unoptimized FX!32 emulation like on a ~486DX-40 to 486DX2-66.
Native Quake 2 benches in software mode at 640x480 demo1 at 13.3 fps with sound high quality.