First post, by Great Hierophant
- Rank
- l33t
I want an all-in-one PC, one that can play, one way or another, just about any game from the earliest DOS game to the latest Windows 9x game. Could such a system be built? With DOSBox I think it can. Let me detail the important specs of such a system:
Pentium III 1000GHz EB Slot 1
ASUS P3B-F
512MB PC133 SDRAM
Voodoo 5 5500 AGP
Aureal SQ2500
Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
Sound Blaster 16 non-PnP
That is the crucial hardware of the machine. Let me start with the processor an explain each choice in turn:
The processor uses a 7.5x multiplier. 1Ghz is too fast for many late DOS and earlier Win9x games, which must be run natively. The mulltiplier is locked, so, speed decreases must be done by lowering the FSB. At 100MHz FSB, the CPU runs at 750Mhz and at 66MHz FSB, the CPU is at 500MHz. But if you are running DOSBox, you need every MHz you can get. DOSBox should be sufficiently fast to run CGA and EGA games and early VGA games. It can probably do just fine with the majority of VGA games that does not stray beyond 320x240x256. Anything higher and you have to run it natively. If a slower processor is needed, why not use 100MHz FSB Pentium II at 350MHz, which can be slowed down to 233MHz at 66MHz FSB?
The motherboard is BX based, which is not only rock solidly stable and offers excellent performance, but easy to use and understand as well. Its support for the 133MHz FSB is unofficial but excellent. Beware, however, this system has certain limitations. Tulatin P3s will need a special adapter to work, if they work at all. The ATA spec only supports 28-bit LBA, so your hard drives cannot be larger than 120GB. The USB is 1.1 only, so high speed devices will not transfer very speedily. The AGP slot will be overclocked to 89MHz if you are using a 133MHz FSB and only supports 1x and 2x devices.
I picked this particular board for several reasons. First, it has four DIMM slots, which means it can support 512 or 1024MB of RAM. Second, it can have one to two ISA slots, and we will need them. Third, it allows you to set multipliers and FSB in the BIOS; no jumpers or dipswitches to fiddle around with. Fourth, ASUS is an outstanding brand name and the boards are easy to find. Fifth, the board comes with no resource hogging frills. Sixth, it supports processors from the Pentium II 233MHz to the Pentium III 1.13GHz natively.
The video board was a tough choice. I wanted a card that could natively handle Glide applications. I used to think a Voodoo 1 was the way to go because certain early 3dfx capable games did not work with the later Voodoos, but almost every single one can be coaxed to work as long as the hardware supports Glide. Many games were built with Glide and offer better performance than on Direct3D. At the same time I wanted a card with solid 2D performance. The Voodoo 5 has the excellent 2D core of the Voodoo3 and Banshee, and also offers assistance in mpeg2 decoding too. FSAA is also a nice benefit. I chose the AGP version over the PCI because it is more common and cheaper, but if the card refuses to run on the overclocked AGP bus, then I would use the PCI version. The main limitation is that this card does not support hardware T&L or pixel/vertrex shaders, but those games are probably looking for faster machines anyways and they are not the focus of this machine.
The sound was also a tough choice too. I stick by my selection of the SQ2500 because it supports A3D 1.0 and 2.0. It only supports 4 speakers and offers poor EAX support, which is why I included a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 card. The Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 will give EAX 1.0 and 2.0 support as well as soundfont support. The old-Sound Blaster emulation of both needs to be disabled.
Finally, I have included a Sound Blaster 16 for late DOS game support. Keeping in mind all I know of Creative products, I believe that an ISA, non-PnP 16 with a 4.05DSP is the best way to go. Some late games support 16-bit digital sound in DOS, the emulations above may not. In my system, this is doubling as a midi interface, and as it is the only interface the 4.05DSP is necessary to avoid the "hanging notes" bug. Also, as I value a true OPL3 chip highly, I have included it. If you use the version of DOSBox with the OPL passthrough, you can improve performance and obtain perfect FM synthesis quality.
Why DOSBox at all? The best advantage of DOSBox is that it offers real slowdown. All the software solutions in the world come up far short. Its also much more convenient if you find a game that does not like the Voodoo 5 or similar card.
