First post, by Dan386DX
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi,
Please forgive me for starting a new thread with my first post, I know that's a n00b move 😀
I recently got an itch to put together a retro rig for playing 90s titles, and overall I'm very happy with it:
- Pentium 3 Coppermine, 866MHz
- Socket 370 motherboard, Biostar M6VLB
- Trident Blade 8GB onboard GPU (for now)
- ISA Soundblaster 16, just the peasant Vibra version
- Win 98 SE
Here's the thing, it's super for mid-to-late 90s titles - SWAT 3, even some Falcon 4.0, Quake.
DOS games are hit-or-miss, some of them didn't have frame limiters and seem to scale with CPU frequency, DOS Wing Comander 1 is unplayable. I'm kinda wishing I'd sought out a Socket 7 board and gone with a P133. But at this stage I'd rather not rebuild unless absolutely necessary. I'm aware that the sensible thing to do is to emulate with my modern PC, but, as many of you will appreciate it's never the same.
So anyway, I understand the FSB frequency of my motherboard is 66-133MHz, but my CPU's multiplier is locked. I saw in another thread that some of the VIA CPUs for this board are very flexible and can be limited to performance comparable even to 386 and 486 machines. I can't seem to find much on Google about those chips, can anybody confirm that they have unlocked multipliers? And if not, how are people able to gimp their performance so effectively?
Thanks in advance!
Dan
90s PC: IBM 6x86 MX PR 300. TNT2 M64.
Boring modern PC: i7-12700, RX 7800XT.
Fixer upper project: NEC Powermate 486SX/25