Any reason why you are preferring WinQuake to GLQuake? The later runs much better...

I too have a PIII with Windows 98... I will give it a try to see how it runs and report back. What GPU are you using?

UPDATE: I clocked down my PIII to 533 and ran Half-Life at 800x600 with EAX and A3D enabled without any problem. I tried with both OpenGL and DirectX and it was fairly smooth...

I prefer how WinQuake looks, and it's been a long while since I fist played Quake on this machine but I know I was having issues running at least the DOS version I think, and I wouldn't be surprised if GLQuake gave me issues as well, though at the time I would have had a different graphics card in the machine.

I currently have a VooDoo 3 card installed, though I was trying to play Half-Life in software mode, since I recently watched a video that showed off how water is rendered differently in software, and I actually kinda prefer how the game looks in software mode. That being said, when I was experiencing the performance problems I did try to go back to GL and DirectX, but they both still gave me issues. In fact, I think it was with OpenGL that after loading the game and going back to the menus, the animation that plays when you go between menus would go at a snail's pace, which again is odd because I know I played Half-Life with the VooDoo 3 card without game-breaking problems before. If I recall correctly, DirectX did not have that problem but did have some sort of graphical anomolies, and if I recall correctly they both still suffered from the performance problem, albeit a bit less than with software rendering.

Edit: Oh, and I tried the different modes at various different resolutions. Something interesting is that changing the resolution in software mode didn't feel like it made a huge difference, but I ended up playing at I think the second to the lowest resolution it gives as an option just to try and smooth out the stutters as much as I could. Also I wondered if it could be somehow due to my HDD, but the HDD indicator light did not go off during the stutters I experienced.

ocdmonkey wrote on 2023-10-02, 04:59:

I prefer how WinQuake looks, and it's been a long while since I fist played Quake on this machine but I know I was having issues running at least the DOS version I think, and I wouldn't be surprised if GLQuake gave me issues as well, though at the time I would have had a different graphics card in the machine.

I currently have a VooDoo 3 card installed, though I was trying to play Half-Life in software mode, since I recently watched a video that showed off how water is rendered differently in software, and I actually kinda prefer how the game looks in software mode.

Software rendering is much more demanding than using Glide/OpenGL/Direct3D. Performance in software mode is almost entirely based on CPU speed and memory throughput, and drops off significantly at higher resolutions.

For comparison, on my Athlon64 3400+ the Quake 2 timedemo runs at 106 FPS in 640x480 using software rendering. At that same resolution, using OpenGL, the game runs at 750 FPS.

Half Life...

Back in the day we used to play it in the office on dreadful i810 Celeron 466 systems with integrated VGA (so software rendering only) under WinNT 4.0. Settings needed to be low and it wasn't fast, but it was perfectly playable. Your P3 with discrete VGA (not eating half the systems memory bandwidth) should run rings around that.

If the speed doesn't seem resolution-dependent, the issue isn't the softare rendering, but basic CPU utilization - which it shouldnt be with a system like this. Could there be software running in the background while you're playing?

I thought of background applications too, and I think performance improved slightly when I turned off my audio card's tray utility, but aside from that I think the only thing that's running that isn't just a normal Win98 thing is the VooDoo 3 tray utility. I do sometimes get an error on login that I think is related to the nvidia driver that was for the graphics card I used to have in it, but I've been having that issue for a long time, including back when I remember it running better.

I will say, when I started the computer to play Half-Life a few weeks ago, it ran scandisk on startup, and then when I booted into Win98 it wouldn't run Half-Life. Like, no error or anything, I'd try to start it and just nothing. Quake would start, but even after re-installing Half-Life it wouldn't run. Eventually I restarted the computer and it suddenly would run, so I have no clue what was going on there, but I thought I would mention it in case that odd behavior might have some connection.

I should also point out that my optical drive has been giving me problems. The one I had installed at the start has apparently developed some problem with the bearings, so it's slow to spin up and makes a really loud rattling noise as it does, and then I replaced it with a spare that has intermittent reading problems, which has been known to hang the system for an inordinate amount of time when it's trying to read the disc. I plan to replace it with another, hopefully good optical drive soon, but since the performance problems do not coincide with CD access (aside from the usual hang when starting a new CD audio track), I don't see that as being a likely culprit of this particular problem.

I'm honestly wondering if maybe I should just reinstall Win98, but I remember it being a bit of a pain getting all the drivers working properly, so I want to leave that as a last resort

ocdmonkey wrote on 2023-10-02, 18:00:

I thought of background applications too, and I think performance improved slightly when I turned off my audio card's tray utility, but aside from that I think the only thing that's running that isn't just a normal Win98 thing is the VooDoo 3 tray utility. I do sometimes get an error on login that I think is related to the nvidia driver that was for the graphics card I used to have in it, but I've been having that issue for a long time, including back when I remember it running better.
(...)
I'm honestly wondering if maybe I should just reinstall Win98, but I remember it being a bit of a pain getting all the drivers working properly, so I want to leave that as a last resort

What drivers were giving you problems installing?

I love Win98/Win98SE but it definitely should warrant a more suspicious attitude in general, people tend to overlook that as opposed to other OSes. As a retro OS nowadays it retained a big chunk of its issues even today, comparing to others that had their issues solved in many ways as time went by. And I'm saying this with it being my favorite OS of all time. It's a peculiar tricky beast that does need some taming, but once you stabilise it it's fine.

Having highly configurated builds myself I know how much of a pain it can be to reformat and reinstall, but it really sounds like it would be for the better if you get the chance. A clean slate is very important in Win9x, much more than other OSes in my experience. Even if you reinstall at first do some trial and error with the drivers, and once you find the known good and stable drivers for you, reformat and reinstall it again and make a true clean slate. After that it's all smooth sailing. Win98 is the only OS where I don't like even switching GPUs or Soundcards within the same install, it just feels better as a clean slate. Not that you can't or else, but it just feels better, to the lack of a better explanation.

Have a look at this .pdf file if you like, I always do some tweaks in it that help with performance right after reinstalling Win98, while also enabling DMA on the drives, etc., credit to weeklygeek.com. At least for me it helps. In case you don't know, install nusb only up until Nusb33e, afterwards it will show Windows as WinME in the system information, as it uses some stuff from it. An example of an OS that had a bad reputation and nowadays it's absolutely rock solid compared to Win98. Hindsight and matured drivers go a long way I suppose

Linoleum wrote on 2023-10-02, 01:43:

Any reason why you are preferring WinQuake to GLQuake? The later runs much better...

While GLQuake provides better performance, it looks inferior compared to the software renderer with the sky being distorted, buggy water warping and lacking overbright lighting.

The PII-450 should provide decent performance in 640x400 with write-combining enabled in software rendering in general.

ocdmonkey wrote on 2023-10-02, 18:00:

I thought of background applications too, and I think performance improved slightly when I turned off my audio card's tray utility, but aside from that I think the only thing that's running that isn't just a normal Win98 thing is the VooDoo 3 tray utility. I do sometimes get an error on login that I think is related to the nvidia driver that was for the graphics card I used to have in it, but I've been having that issue for a long time, including back when I remember it running better.

Which sound card are you using? That matters too besides the video card driver and haven't seen anyone asking this yet.

It also seems that the nVidia drivers weren't properly uninstalled, which in this case it has to be done thru "Add or Remove Programs" prior switching video cards. The README file that comes with most nVidia drivers even say this.

The sound card I'm using is, I believe, a Turtle Beach Montego A3D, and I don't remember it ever giving me problems before. Half-Life, at least in software mode, will sometimes have this "skipping" behavior when playing voice lines, but I'm guessing that's due to the performance issues rather than a problem with the sound card.

I thought I had figured it out as I remembered that I had put in an ISA modem a while ago, but I still have some performance issues after removing it (though perhaps less?) I also switched out the optical drive and aside from a few specific problems the old one was causing I haven't seen any improvement due to that, either.

Anyway, yeah, I don't know why but I apparently did not uninstall the Nvidia drivers before switching to the Voodoo 3, and it's one of those fun drivers that requires you to have the card installed in order to run the uninstaller. Andre_6's attachment gave the suggestion of deleting old entries in device manager, and I think that might have given me measurably more performance, but since I don't have an empirical way to measure it I'm not sure. I may be leaning towards a reinstall of Win98 at this point, even though I really don't want to. To answer andre_6's question, I don't remember what drivers I had a problem with, but I'm really hoping that the difficulty I'm remembering was with finding the correct drivers and that it won't be so much of a problem this time around.

ocdmonkey wrote on 2023-10-03, 21:35:

Anyway, yeah, I don't know why but I apparently did not uninstall the Nvidia drivers before switching to the Voodoo 3, and it's one of those fun drivers that requires you to have the card installed in order to run the uninstaller. Andre_6's attachment gave the suggestion of deleting old entries in device manager, and I think that might have given me measurably more performance, but since I don't have an empirical way to measure it I'm not sure. I may be leaning towards a reinstall of Win98 at this point, even though I really don't want to. To answer andre_6's question, I don't remember what drivers I had a problem with, but I'm really hoping that the difficulty I'm remembering was with finding the correct drivers and that it won't be so much of a problem this time around.

If that particular build is "closed", meaning that every hardware component is already fully chosen by you without any updates in sight at any point (bar something failing), then all you really need is to gather stable sound and graphic drivers that play nice with each other, and the right chipset drivers. The latter isn't exactly mandatory here as Windows install its own if I'm not mistaken, but installing the official ones helps keeping the Device Manager more robust and clean of ambiguities. The rest doesn't tend to cause trouble in Win98 from what I've seen ever if something needs to be uninstalled/reinstalled, except maybe for those soundcard/network card combos.

Having those three particular drivers (and probably nusb33e) working properly from the get go with a clean install, I don't see any clear reason at this point not to see an improvement over your current performance. You probably already have the correct drivers for each, most likely you just need a clean slate. And if any one of them is proving troublesome, test some more different versions until you find the right one, and reinstall the OS again before going to town installing all your software. It's a bit tedious but once you get the template correct for your particular hardware combo then it's a breeze, even if you need to reformat again in the future.

Win98SE is by far my most reinstalled OS over the few years that I've been at this, for hardware or software reasons, and it's not even close. But from a certain point forward the template was made and it became much easier, I can confidently say that I never had a single BSOD on the OS since I first started with my first retro build years ago. Keep in mind the Virtual Memory tweak and the swap file usage entry from the .pdf., it may even end up being more of a performance factor for you.

Edit: if like me you still like having HDDs, an IDE Seagate Barracuda will last longer. From what I've seen, I had many Western Digital HDDs dying on me, and one Seagate drive, from the older series that had that weird rubber sleeve to prevent vibrations. Get that and a modern PSU, and there's a good base to have the best chance possible of avoiding formatting for longer

ocdmonkey wrote on 2023-10-03, 21:35:

The sound card I'm using is, I believe, a Turtle Beach Montego A3D, and I don't remember it ever giving me problems before. Half-Life, at least in software mode, will sometimes have this "skipping" behavior when playing voice lines, but I'm guessing that's due to the performance issues rather than a problem with the sound card.

I thought I had figured it out as I remembered that I had put in an ISA modem a while ago, but I still have some performance issues after removing it (though perhaps less?) I also switched out the optical drive and aside from a few specific problems the old one was causing I haven't seen any improvement due to that, either.

Anyway, yeah, I don't know why but I apparently did not uninstall the Nvidia drivers before switching to the Voodoo 3, and it's one of those fun drivers that requires you to have the card installed in order to run the uninstaller. Andre_6's attachment gave the suggestion of deleting old entries in device manager, and I think that might have given me measurably more performance, but since I don't have an empirical way to measure it I'm not sure. I may be leaning towards a reinstall of Win98 at this point, even though I really don't want to. To answer andre_6's question, I don't remember what drivers I had a problem with, but I'm really hoping that the difficulty I'm remembering was with finding the correct drivers and that it won't be so much of a problem this time around.

driver cleaner pro 1.5 is a good app to remove GPU driver remnants

i feel it's useful to keep a log of various games and how well they run, via timedemo, and what driver versions, since it can vary immensely even on the same hardware.

....just my general observation, something else is awry... there's too long a literary of different things not working properly, and for mine (apart from win98) the only thing they have in common is PSU ~ have you checked the voltage rails are on spec?

The other thing I have to say, is that I'm ... errm .. 'amused' at this talk of reinstalling windows ~ life is too short =) What I do...

....on the retro hardware, install windows (whatever release, my choice is win95 OSR2), and go through the countless reboots necessary to get all the hardware drivers you need installed, and a clean bill of health in the device mangler. I just did this recently with the target HDD being the noisy platter motor whined Seagate ST32132A IDE drive (2.1Gb iirc) ~ V66M mobo, Matrox G200 AGP, 3com NIC, SBLive!, Voodoo2 ...once all this is peachy keen, shutdown windows ... remove IDE (PATA) harddrive... this is the source drive now...

....grab a pair of 8Gb or bigger USB drives ~ make one of them bootable by flashing the Clonezilla image to it (balenaEtcher or rufus) -- the other flashdrive is for saving the image to...

....for sake of speed, it's handy to have a more modern mainboard that still has IDE/Floppy ports (I use a N68-S3)....plug the IDE source drive onto the PATA port, plug the 2 USB flashdrives into mobo ports, turn on a grab boot selector to boot from the Clonezilla drive..two beeps, and you can load into ram at 800x600 and follow the prompts, mounting the blank USB drive as /home/partimg, select a disk-to-image operation, select the IDE source disk, don't check it (if windows shutdown cleanly that's enough), and create the drive image...be a dummy, use all the default choices, and do it --- you will end up with an image of the HDD on the once blank USB drive....

..what you do with that image, may vary... so I'll just describe my mad-house... I use CF for boot(+system)/storage 'drives'. The sound of the ST32132A spinning-up and win95 doing it's best to thrash the heads to death, is a thing to behold, 'aural history' if you like, thus I tend to 'retire' them while they're still operational ....so in this case I'm imaging that drive, to replace it with a CF 'clone' (same geometry/mbr/partition mapping) ~ for this, remove IDE cable from header socket, plugin CF<->IDE adapter with 4Gb CF card inserted, boot & run Clonezilla again, this time a restore disk image operation, choosing the CF card as the target drive, don't change any geometry/params, and good to go...operation completes in <5mins....pull CF card out of adapter, walk to other end of house and plug CF card into slot of rear I/O mounted CF/IDE adapter, power up retro hardware. boots win95 in next to no time, all good ~ this confirms Clonezilla's backup/restore path has a greenflag finish.

So now if ninetyfivebee ever really gets it's nickers in a knot, I can return to this staging (restore) point, of good to go, ready for software. One might choose to do this, after installing a particular set of games/software, to return to that staging point instead.... but regardless, this is much, much cleaner and simple, than having to reinstall windows...again ; instead you redeploy the image. I could've used a different (quieter) spinning drive, but CF is no slouch. Wrt the elephant in the room....2.1Gb HDD imaged to 4Gb CF equals ~1.9Gb of unused space.... I very much don't care ~ at best, it gives the wear-leveling algo in the controller a vast unused field of cells to flip out, and at worst it keeps the restore process time to a minimum. Odd thing is, I've had zer0 problems with CF boot/system drives, and no need to blow away a mess and restore ... yet ...

The other thing this process gives you, is a bit perfect map of the hardware that imaged software was running on....ie; if you restore this image on the same hardware makeup and discover it's still not running as it should ; it's the hardware, not windows =)

giantclam wrote on 2023-10-04, 06:31:

....just my general observation, something else is awry... there's too long a literary of different things not working properly, […]
Show full quote

....just my general observation, something else is awry... there's too long a literary of different things not working properly, and for mine (apart from win98) the only thing they have in common is PSU ~ have you checked the voltage rails are on spec?

The other thing I have to say, is that I'm ... errm .. 'amused' at this talk of reinstalling windows ~ life is too short =) What I do...

....on the retro hardware, install windows (whatever release, my choice is win95 OSR2), and go through the countless reboots necessary to get all the hardware drivers you need installed, and a clean bill of health in the device mangler. I just did this recently with the target HDD being the noisy platter motor whined Seagate ST32132A IDE drive (2.1Gb iirc) ~ V66M mobo, Matrox G200 AGP, 3com NIC, SBLive!, Voodoo2 ...once all this is peachy keen, shutdown windows ... remove IDE (PATA) harddrive... this is the source drive now...

....grab a pair of 8Gb or bigger USB drives ~ make one of them bootable by flashing the Clonezilla image to it (balenaEtcher or rufus) -- the other flashdrive is for saving the image to...

....for sake of speed, it's handy to have a more modern mainboard that still has IDE/Floppy ports (I use a N68-S3)....plug the IDE source drive onto the PATA port, plug the 2 USB flashdrives into mobo ports, turn on a grab boot selector to boot from the Clonezilla drive..two beeps, and you can load into ram at 800x600 and follow the prompts, mounting the blank USB drive as /home/partimg, select a disk-to-image operation, select the IDE source disk, don't check it (if windows shutdown cleanly that's enough), and create the drive image...be a dummy, use all the default choices, and do it --- you will end up with an image of the HDD on the once blank USB drive....

..what you do with that image, may vary... so I'll just describe my mad-house... I use CF for boot(+system)/storage 'drives'. The sound of the ST32132A spinning-up and win95 doing it's best to thrash the heads to death, is a thing to behold, 'aural history' if you like, thus I tend to 'retire' them while they're still operational ....so in this case I'm imaging that drive, to replace it with a CF 'clone' (same geometry/mbr/partition mapping) ~ for this, remove IDE cable from header socket, plugin CF<->IDE adapter with 4Gb CF card inserted, boot & run Clonezilla again, this time a restore disk image operation, choosing the CF card as the target drive, don't change any geometry/params, and good to go...operation completes in <5mins....pull CF card out of adapter, walk to other end of house and plug CF card into slot of rear I/O mounted CF/IDE adapter, power up retro hardware. boots win95 in next to no time, all good ~ this confirms Clonezilla's backup/restore path has a greenflag finish.

So now if ninetyfivebee ever really gets it's nickers in a knot, I can return to this staging (restore) point, of good to go, ready for software. One might choose to do this, after installing a particular set of games/software, to return to that staging point instead.... but regardless, this is much, much cleaner and simple, than having to reinstall windows...again ; instead you redeploy the image. I could've used a different (quieter) spinning drive, but CF is no slouch. Wrt the elephant in the room....2.1Gb HDD imaged to 4Gb CF equals ~1.9Gb of unused space.... I very much don't care ~ at best, it gives the wear-leveling algo in the controller a vast unused field of cells to flip out, and at worst it keeps the restore process time to a minimum. Odd thing is, I've had zer0 problems with CF boot/system drives, and no need to blow away a mess and restore ... yet ...

The other thing this process gives you, is a bit perfect map of the hardware that imaged software was running on....ie; if you restore this image on the same hardware makeup and discover it's still not running as it should ; it's the hardware, not windows =)

I agree, making an image of a 'good working install' is very helpful. This is why I prefer SD cards, they're dirt cheap and I can just throw it into the reader on my win10 machine, fire up Macrium, and dump or reimage the card. I've also set up a ghost server inside of an XP VM, used a ghost boot floppy with network support, and image directly over the network. More useful if you don't want to take a machine apart.

Thank you to everyone for all the information. I ended up reinstalling Windows (and applying the virtual memory modifications listed in andre_6's PDF), and now Quake (winquake) and Half-Life run much more like how I remember them running (and would expect). I haven't tested the Voodoo 3 card's 3D acceleration yet (I tried Half-Life again in just software mode), but I suspect that's working just fine still, too.

I also did try to test the voltage rails but I'm not super well versed on how to do that or what to look for. I just turned the computer on and stuck the multimeter probes into an unused molex connector and the voltages for the 12 and 5 volt rails were a bit high, but I know such things have a valid range and it wasn't insanely high, so I'm guessing that's ok.

ocdmonkey wrote on 2023-10-15, 00:53:

Thank you to everyone for all the information. I ended up reinstalling Windows (and applying the virtual memory modifications listed in andre_6's PDF), and now Quake (winquake) and Half-Life run much more like how I remember them running (and would expect). I haven't tested the Voodoo 3 card's 3D acceleration yet (I tried Half-Life again in just software mode), but I suspect that's working just fine still, too.

I also did try to test the voltage rails but I'm not super well versed on how to do that or what to look for. I just turned the computer on and stuck the multimeter probes into an unused molex connector and the voltages for the 12 and 5 volt rails were a bit high, but I know such things have a valid range and it wasn't insanely high, so I'm guessing that's ok.

Happy to see it, don't forget also to add the "ConservativeFileSwapUsage=1" entry, it's also explained in the .pdf. I always do those tweaks, but it was the clean install that did the work for sure.

One day it will be inevitable to use SD and CF cards, and they sure are convenient, but to me they always gave me a feeling of emulation, it just doesn't feel right. Nothing replaces a good floppy seek and HDD noises and flashing LED for me. Like I said if like me you still enjoy the "spinning rust" an IDE Seagate Barracuda is your best bet for a shot at bigger longevity. But a modern PSU is a must in my opinion. Best of luck!

andre_6 wrote on 2023-10-15, 23:49:

One day it will be inevitable to use SD and CF cards, and they sure are convenient, but to me they always gave me a feeling of emulation, it just doesn't feel right. Nothing replaces a good floppy seek and HDD noises and flashing LED for me. Like I said if like me you still enjoy the "spinning rust" an IDE Seagate Barracuda is your best bet for a shot at bigger longevity. But a modern PSU is a must in my opinion. Best of luck!

Well, seeing as you mention it .... with amiga emulators the floppy drive sounds are simulated, and likewise the FDD/HDD activity lights. A more recent example of 'sound foley' would be those combustion engine sound simulators that can be fitted to EV bikes/cars. It'd be a niche product for sure, but you could do the same sort of thing for old PCs to emulate disc lights/sounds when they're actually using solid state drives...ie; some esp32 construct.

edit: as I suspected, already a thing... google the string 'harddrive+sound+emulator' =)

giantclam wrote on 2023-10-16, 00:11:

andre_6 wrote on 2023-10-15, 23:49:

One day it will be inevitable to use SD and CF cards, and they sure are convenient, but to me they always gave me a feeling of emulation, it just doesn't feel right. Nothing replaces a good floppy seek and HDD noises and flashing LED for me. Like I said if like me you still enjoy the "spinning rust" an IDE Seagate Barracuda is your best bet for a shot at bigger longevity. But a modern PSU is a must in my opinion. Best of luck!

Well, seeing as you mention it .... with amiga emulators the floppy drive sounds are simulated, and likewise the FDD/HDD activity lights. A more recent example of 'sound foley' would be those combustion engine sound simulators that can be fitted to EV bikes/cars. It'd be a niche product for sure, but you could do the same sort of thing for old PCs to emulate disc lights/sounds when they're actually using solid state drives...ie; some esp32 construct.

edit: as I suspected, already a thing... google the string 'harddrive+sound+emulator' =)

Yes a few users around here have already used it in their builds I think, and that's fine, I just like to see new stuff like that being created to complement the old hardware that we love, keeps it alive and shows the possibilities that the hardware still has after 20/30 years.

As for me I'll probably ride the HDD wave to the end until one day I have absolutely no choice but to resort to SD and CF cards. Or who knows, maybe I've already scratched the retro computing itch in full by that point and just keep the little hardware that I have as a memory of those days and move on to other things. I have enjoyed the hobby immensely since getting into it a few years back, but I naturally tend to distribute my interests around, keeps it all fresh for me and avoids the material consequences of solely focusing on one hobby for a long time