I had an STB Velocity 128 (Riva 128 4MB); it seemed to max out sharpness around 1024x768 with even a good CRT. 1280x960 & 1600x1200 were too blurry for my preference. Years later I've tested it's VESA performance on a DOS system using a standard 1680x1050 LCD and the BIOS all the way to the desktop were noticeably blurry compared to a Voodoo 3 or Geforce 2 MX for example. Other people with the Diamond Riva 128 didn't seem to have such blurry output, so it 's probably just the RAMDAC and VGA filtering quality of the individual board or model.

I'd say the Nvidia cards. Maybe the S3 cards too.

Don't know why people haven't mentioned the 320x200 bug with Voodoo 4/5. I'm not sure but it'd be nice to know if other voodoo cards are affected (voodoo 3, banshee, etc). In Warcraft it's easily noticeable (looks like some kinda shimmering or crawling or something).

This video seems to counter the idea that all Rendition cards are dog slow with DOOM and Pentiums :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxSRGvMe0iM

valnar wrote:

I'm beefing up an old PII machine to be a killer DOS gaming box. And thanks to the wonder of eBay, I believe any card made is i […]
Show full quote

I'm beefing up an old PII machine to be a killer DOS gaming box. And thanks to the wonder of eBay, I believe any card made is in my grasp - either now or eventually. Right now I have a Matrox G400. It's no slouch, but I'm sure there is something better. I do have an old S3 Virge available, but I'd prefer the Matrox over that.

It's an ASUS P2B motherboard - BX chipset with an AGP slot. I would be looking for an AGP card. Other than the Voodoo Banshee, which is at the top of my list, is there another nVidia or ATI card that would be better for a majority of DOS games? A "driverless" card would be best. ie. Something that has VBE 2.0 or 3.0 built-in. Compatibilty and drivers for Windows 3.1 and 98 is also a must.

Thanks,
Robert

HI valnar, you should consider getting a NVIDIA TNT2, they work beautifully in DOS, and has an excellent VESA 1/2/3 compatibility. It's the card I have in my system.

brunobox99 wrote:

HI valnar, you should consider getting a NVIDIA TNT2, they work beautifully in DOS, and has an excellent VESA 1/2/3 compatibility. It's the card I have in my system.

Does it work with Terminal Velocity? The TNT 1 has problems with it.

http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/
I thought the Matrox-Cards had Bios-Patches for the Dos-Screenmodes?

I'm currently building a pure msdos rig. It's a based on a Gigabyte 5AX rev 5.2 and an AMD K6-3+ 450 with 16mb ram. I have two Diamond Stealth III S540's for video cards. Both are 32mb, but one is pci, and the other is agp. I also have a Voodoo 1 for dos 3dfx games. I plan on covering games from the 386 on up to the end of the dos era. So the questions are:

1. Which primary video card should I use for best compatibility, agp or pci?

2. Would another card be more ideal than the stealth for such a range of games?

No DOS game is ever going to utilize the Savage4's potential or even AGP so you might as well be using a single PCI S3 Trio64, or if you really want to 'experience' first gen 3d "acceleration" (HEAVY EMPHASIS ON QUOTATION MARKS), S3 ViRGE. (Diamond Stealth3D 2000)

Also you're not going to get a lot of speed versatility with that CPU anyway, covering unthrottled games is a lost cause even for artificial slowdown programs. I mean good luck with Wing Commander

Should mention you would need a little more ram (32mb) if you really want to get towards the end of the DOS era.

but the single most important question is what ISA sound card you will use. Sound cards are the ultimate decider of dos game compatibility

I am using an AGP riva128ZX vga in my p1 DOS build , never encountered a problem because of AGP. DOS doesn't care about AGP/PCI.
Just go with what you like most. I would use the AGP card in case that in some benchmark somewhere the faster bus helps.
When I benched agp/pci riva128s I found no difference in DOS.

leileilol wrote:

No DOS game is ever going to utilize the Savage4's potential or even AGP so you might as well be using a single PCI S3 Trio64, o […]
Show full quote

No DOS game is ever going to utilize the Savage4's potential or even AGP so you might as well be using a single PCI S3 Trio64, or if you really want to 'experience' first gen 3d "acceleration" (HEAVY EMPHASIS ON QUOTATION MARKS), S3 ViRGE. (Diamond Stealth3D 2000)

Also you're not going to get a lot of speed versatility with that CPU anyway, covering unthrottled games is a lost cause even for artificial slowdown programs. I mean good luck with Wing Commander

Should mention you would need a little more ram (32mb) if you really want to get towards the end of the DOS era.

but the single most important question is what ISA sound card you will use. Sound cards are the ultimate decider of dos game compatibility

I swore I would never use a virge card again almost two decades ago and I have no intention of doing so now, 🤣. But if the 540 in agp is good enough then that's what I'll stick with.

If need bee I have tons of PC100 and PC133 sticks so more ram isn't an issue. I was sticking with 16mb to avoid problems with some older games, but I'll try a 64mb stick.

As for speed, I went with the 5AX and K6-3+ so I could disable cache and change multiplier via command line so I can cover a wide range of older games. Is there a better option? I also have a Win 98 rig based on a P2B-F, 1.4 GHz Tualatin, and 1GB ram. I cant stand dealing with the dos profile booting for dos games, so that's why I am building a pure DOS rig. But late era dos games (and those with Win 9X reworks) 'will be installed on both to take advantage of each rigs different hardware.

On the sound card front, I plan on a CT2230 for primary sound card. I also have a MusicQuest ISA MP401 MIDI interface for external sound modules. Gonna stick my FB-01, MT-32 old, and CM-32l on it. I have a STB clone of the Gravis Ultrasound PnP Pro, but think it would be better in the Win 98 rig. I was going to pair it with an AWE32 CT3980. Please toss out reasons why it may be a better option in the DOS box if you think so. I have a whole stack of sound cards for each rig, but the ones I've listed here are the ones I think should be primary type cards for the rigs I've described.

Thanks for the info Keropi. You helped me decide on AGP so I can free PCI slot. Not sure what I would put in there, but its one more open slot for me to think about. 😄

^ NIC! you gotta have a nic with mTCP to transfer files 😀

I have a 905c pci, but to be honest I really don't feel like dealing with networking on either rig. Going to use a compact flash card for HDD so I can always transfer via that, and both rigs will have Kenwood 52x truspeed CD-ROM drives. The dos box will also have a canon combo 3 1/2" and 5 1/4' drive. Those combo drives that share an interface seems to be the only way to get motherboards made after the mid 90's to see more than one floppy drive without needing a cad based floppy controller. I'm sitting on one of those USB floppy emulators as well, so that's an option too.

"SneakerNet" using floppies, CDs or Compact FLASH seems like punishment after having access to good networking software. Besides using FTP (server or client) to transfer files, having networking allows you to run an IRC client on the machine, to use Telnet BBS systems, to synchronize the time with Internet based SNTP servers, share a drive letter using SMB, etc.

Consider the network card - once you use one for a while floppies or other media will seem primitive.

nearly all my machines connect to the nas 😀

tested today: Matrox Mystique 220 (PCI)

Glitches:

MEGADEMO (EGA) Second Part hangs up with Himem, Qemm reports an error that can be terminated => third part runs ok. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3972
CRONOLOGIA Time Part has some artifacts, endscroller flickers. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3868

This card has a very good and sharp image quality.

Diamond Stealth Savage 4 does have excellent image quality at least. However it's a bit less compatible than a Trio64 or Virge, for example high-res mode doesn't work in Terminator Future Shock & Skynet.

Re file transfer I like using USB sticks under 98SE. Plenty fast enough and supports hotplug, unlike CompactFlash->IDE.

With a K6-3+ it doesn't seem possible to get below 386-40 speed, even with 2x multiplier and all caches disabled.
Wing Commander is a still bit too fast at this speed. I used MoSlo to play it, which actually worked quite well.

bjt wrote:

With a K6-3+ it doesn't seem possible to get below 386-40 speed, even with 2x multiplier and all caches disabled.
Wing Commander is a still bit too fast at this speed. I used MoSlo to play it, which actually worked quite well.

Really? That's surprising as the K6-2 is one of the slowest chips with caches disabled.

You don't want to have the MMX, now that is a FAST chip without Caches. And the Cyrix. The normal Pentium somewhere in the middle.

RAM timings help a little and motherboard. Some are slower than others. Ram type as well, I have SDRAM modules that aren't SDRAM but show up as EDO. 16 MB low capacity and they make the system behave a bit slower.

badmojo wrote:

I use a Mystique 220 now, which is pretty much just a Millennium 2 with some lame 3D capabilities I think

A big difference between the Mystique and the Millennium is the memory used. A Millennium has 'double ported' RAM, which means it can be read and written at the same time. This means less waitstates and as such higher effective bandwidth.

bjt wrote:

...

With a K6-3+ it doesn't seem possible to get below 386-40 speed, even with 2x multiplier and all caches disabled.
Wing Commander is a still bit too fast at this speed. I used MoSlo to play it, which actually worked quite well.

In my opinion a must have for a discard are existing win3x drivers.
matrox offers win3x drivers up to the g400-series.

please tell me how you got wc1 working:

AMD K6-III+
MULTI 2x ?
CPUCACHE disabled with "cpuchache.com" via Batch-File
CPUCACHE disabled via Bios-Settings
Other Caches disabled via Bios-Settings
MoSlo ? (which flags)

Thx
Doc

Disable l1&l2 via BIOS settings, I used gerwin's setmul to select 2x multiplier. And then a mild slowdown using the free version of moslo.