Over the last week I've been toying around with a P4 Northwood 2.4 on an intel 845 board using a GeForce 4 ti4200 128mb and a Vortex 2 with Dream Blaster X2 for sound. I want to limit myself to 2 dos/w9x machines, the other being a P3 550 / Voodoo 3 / AWE64 & Orpheus combo.
The idea of the P4 system is to run as many of the later era SVGA software (where possible) mode DOS games with high really nice framerates - things like the build engine games, descent 1/2, racing games like NFS:SE, etc - and has been ~fairly~ successful so far. I also want it to be my main win9x system because the CPU and graphics combo are blisteringly fast for any game at a decent resolution up to the launch of Windows XP (a beefier PC takes care of WinXP). Any glide capable game gets run on the P3 550 and Voodoo 3 combo.
There's been a few quirks, like a weird super-speed jittery quake (both pure DOS and the WinQuake versions) that doesn't seem to be fixed with any console command. To explain the behavior, all animations and movement runs without a limit, almost like watching a timedemo. It's okay though, I can just run GLquake with texture smoothing turned off. I just have never seen this problem and I cannot find anything online about it. It's very weird.
Descent 2's framerate is way too high and makes the mouse input very slow. I think it's just an engine problem - mouse polling combined with CPU speed that can't be fixed when framerates are too high, unless there's a way to hack the resolution up to like 1280x960 to make the framerate lower. I understand this is an issue for the glide versions of the games too. If it's fixable I'm all ears.
Not related to games, but, the PCI network card (intel) I'm using has a BIOS for bootstrapping/PXE booting and causes a memory problem with XMS/EMS - it gives me a warning saying that XMS won't run, then after a while it boots into DOS with XMS enabled??, yet most games still work with no issue. I think I need to add a switch to the XMS/EMS lines in the philscomputerlab pack to shift the starting address to somewhere else (i dont actually know what i'm doing so i havent bothered yet). If there's a tool to identify and get the memory address for me, rather than guessing, I'd like to know more.
In terms of audio, yes, the FM of the vortex 2 absolutely sucks but the wavetable is more than useful in, like, any game after 1994. Vortex 2's SB 2.0 compatibility is nice, but i can "feel" that the cpu is too fast for some games. For example in Doom under dos 7.1 some sound samples get cut off too early. I have a hunch that turning off a cache or 2 might help this.
Onto the positive results:
Any Directx game from 98 to 2001 is amazing (so far). I'm sure I'll run into a few games that have speed issues.
Doom / Doom 2 Windows 95 version doesn't any audio problem at full speed (and 640x480 is as smooth as butter!). The music plays just fine through the Dream Blaster X2.
I'm guessing it's the drivers GeForce drivers, but build engine games run better in Windows 98 than from rebooting into DOS?? Is it framebuffer related? Idk... but I'm ok with it.
Monkey Island CD version (Monkey Island Madness) runs from windows, without any caches being turned off. That's very cool.
I will be testing out the vanilla Lucas Arts games with speed problems in the next few days; I'll update once I find out how they go with caches turned off. Indiana Jones, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island 1 and 2 are on my list. I'll try out Jazz Jackrabbit too as I know that's got the 200mhz "bug". Maybe turning off the caches makes it too slow?
PS. One more thing - is there a way I can add 640x400 as a custom resolution to Nvidia's driver and lock it to 70hz? The reason is my LED display tells me "out of range" when trying to use 640x400. This is totally stupid because any 320x200 output gets doubled up to 640x400 anyway, running absolutely fine... go figure. BUT in Red Alert and Command and Conquer, it only works at 640x480 with black bars at the top and bottom. The heck??