rick12373 wrote:

I have a PCI 3DFX Voodoo Rush, an ISA Diamond ET4000AX and a PCI Diamond Stealth 3D 2000. Which one would be best?

Since you plan to run high-res in pure DOS, then what you need is a good VESA compatibility.

Voodoo3 and Voodoo5 has pretty good VESA support for (relatively) new video cards, but I'm not sure with the Voodoo Rush.

I guess it'll be a toss-up between the ET4000 and the Diamond Stealth; I think your safest bet is the ET4000, but I can be wrong.

A Voodoo Rush? In that case I can't resist chiming in...

I'll have to go with what Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman said... the Rush is out unless you are planning on running it with actual Glide games. I'd say it's a toss up between the other two too. Some guys really like Tseng labs cards, but I haven't had a lot of experience with 'em.

System Shock is a great game. I've run it with a P2 400mhz Geforce 2 and a P2 233mhz with TNT2 (PCI). It ran at very high speeds on both machines with good rez. Can't remember the exact numbers (and I'm not in front of my emu machine), but I do remember being happy with it. If you have any access to anything by ATI or NVidia, I'd recommend that over the current selection.

Good luck with what you've got tho. Hope this info helps.

Riboflavin wrote:

A Voodoo Rush? In that case I can't resist chiming in...

I'll have to go with what Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman said... the Rush is out unless you are planning on running it with actual Glide games.

I should make a note that even with GLide games, Rush ain't really worth it; it performs less than Voodoo1, and not really compatbile with older GLide games. A Voodoo1 with a really fast 2D video card is really a better configuration.

Riboflavin wrote:

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman

OT: I know I probably have the longest screen name, but you can call me KAN to save all the typing. 😁

Riboflavin wrote:

Some guys really like Tseng labs cards, but I haven't had a lot of experience with 'em.

IMO, Tseng has the best VESA support for DOS games. Dawn Patrol is an example; it runs on exotic video modes that it just won't run on my Matrox Mystique --but it runs well on my (older) ET4000 card.

Well I tried the PCI Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 and System Shock works well at full resolutiion. The CPU is a P120 MMX I think. I might try the ISA Diamond ET4000AX as well to see what difference it makes. Thanks.

Well, it should run slower.

Isa banwidth is too low if you want to play with a cpu faster than 50Mhz.
Isa address space is only 16MB long, it's hard to use Vesa 2 linear frame buffer access.
Stay away from isa, if you want to use ET4000, get a pci one.

Rick12373 -

Question:

What refresh rates do you get playing system shock at the highest resolution with the Diamond Stealth 3d 2000? As far as I know this card is equipped with a S3-Virge "3d"- Chip. This chip is regarded to be very compatible in Dos-games, but image-quality in Windows (at "higher" resolutions i.e. 1024x768) was sometimes below average, and the "3D"-performance (in win) on all these cards was ridiculous. However it had one advantage, that the chip himself gave you higher refresh rates in SVGA-Dos-Games without using a tsr or something like that - or does it not?
I have a Diamond Stealth III 540 running, it produces the same "lucky" effect: 85hz at 640x480 in "Tie Fighter" (normally 60hz), and 73hz in System Shock without any additional tools.
The chip on the Stealth III is the S3 Savage 4, two or three generations after the Virge, but perhaps with the same "2D-Core"?

A Voodoo Rush? In that case I can't resist chiming in...

I had this card some years ago. It's really HUGE! and only 4mb RAM. It's awful card, but it supports glide 😀

Actually I ended up using a Matrox Millenium 2 PCI card thanks to my good friend Riboflavin. Not sure what refresh rates are but everything runs great now. Am running a PII, 128MB ram, DOS 7.1 and Wndows 98.

s3 trio64v+ 2mb + Voodoo2 12mb was a pretty ace combo.

The stealth 3d 2000 is probably the best choice for compatibility.

I haven't tried any 3dfx 2D cards, but I do know matrox cards have that annoying horizontal scrolling bug (demos mainly). I like the et6100 myself, just because it's rare and sexy (even though it does still have the aforementioned bug).

Just pick a card that UNIVBE supports. 😀 I don't think there is a card out there w/o quirks. Picking a S3 something is sorta safe, but most of their cards aren't even VESA VBE 2.0 so you need to dig up the S3 VBE TSR and S3SPDUP that's out there.

I actually found a PCI NVIDIA TNT to work fairly well. 3dfx cards have some quirks (no UNIVBE support, either). Matrox can have issues unless you use UNIVBE.