kolderman wrote on 2024-06-25, 01:54:

Also -- another good reason for that fast Win98 PC -- it will be the last build that supports outdated DirectX features (fog table, paletted textures) -- something a WinXP PC will not support.

Paletted textures will work on WinXP if both the GPU and the drivers support them. I emphasize the "both" because Nvidia removed paletted texture support from its drivers around version 80.xx or so, possibly slightly earlier. But if you use something like 45.23 drivers on a GeForce FX 5900 under WinXP, then paletted textures will work.

As for table fog, that was supported all the way until 355.98 drivers and GTX 980 Ti cards under WinXP. For comparison, Win7 (and maybe Vista?) don't support table fog natively (regardless of drivers used) and need wrappers/driver hacks to make it work.

IMO, the bigger issue with playing older games under WinXP is the lack of 16-bit dithering on newer cards. Nvidia dropped that with the GeForce 8000 series, and ATi did the same with its Radeon HD 2000 series. So any 3D game which only supports 16-bit colors (e.g. Thief 1&2) will look like crap on that hardware (and anything newer) unless you use fan-made fixes and/or wrappers.

But no-one is going to build a XP rig with a FX5900, it can't handle DX9. Most XP rigs will be PCIe based not AGP. That was my point. And I am not sure the supposed table fog support of newer cards actually work or render correctly. The FX series are widely regarded as the last series of cards with correct support for earlier DX standards, but even then there are a few games that don't render 100% correct.

kolderman wrote on 2024-06-25, 06:39:

And I am not sure the supposed table fog support of newer cards actually work or render correctly.

On the Nvidia side, table fog renders correctly in games that use 32-bit colors, even on newer cards (e.g. GTX 980) under WinXP. I think it's the same for Radeons, since they have perfect table fog emulation under WinXP from Catalyst 7.11 onward. However, for games that use 16-bit colors, you run into dithering issues on newer cards, as mentioned above. For example, here's how table fog looks in Thief 2 on a GTX 650 Ti, a card which lacks 16-bit dithering:

Notice the heavy color banding. The same scene would render perfectly on a GeForce 7800 GT or a Radeon X1900 XT, since those cards still support 16-bit color dithering.

In a way, I think Leileilol has a point when he remarked:

leileilol wrote on 2024-06-24, 09:48:

it's no loss to me if I can't use a noisy ol Sound Blaster in there (and probably a lot more stable for not)

So currently my thinking revolves a bit around that option. Unfortunately, the issue is not well known to me, as family and job replaced campus days in the late 90s. I went P166mmx to P3-500.
The following questions seem to matter:

• What are the most demanding 'pure DOS and only pure DOS games'? Will a Pentium mmx @266 be able to run them?
• Will the 865PE chipset allow the PCI ESS Solo-1 to work in pure DOS mode and work with those games? Edit: It will work in Dos with my 865PE board. Pretty close to original SBPro sound. Using DirectX7.
• Will the Audigy 2 ZE or the Live! 5.1 be able to work in pure DOS mode on 865PE and work with those games?
• Which DirectX version am I forced to use with those sound cards?

Depending on the outcome of that set of questions, the answer may be easy.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-06-24, 20:54:

If you go the P4 industrial motherboard route, that does open the doors to have ISA sound card support in DOS.

To tell you the truth: I like to keep things somewhat simple. The charm of the Win98@C2D to me is the lean simplicity of the hardware used: Fast, no adapters needed for SATA, enough PCI sockets, decent IO onboard, limited heat, great flexibility with peripherals, low price cause already here.

kolderman wrote on 2024-06-25, 01:43:

Are you looking to cover Win95/98 or just 98?

Well, I don't even have win95. Are there actually games that only run on Win95?

I have a similar 3 systems, as many users on the forums which covers a good spectrum of the DOS/Win9X/XP gaming landscape.

233mmx, Riva128 with a Orchid Voodoo 1, YMF719, SB32, SW60XG and PicoGUS for dos and early Win9x games
Pentium 4 3.06, Soyo ISA motherboard, Geforce FX5900, Audigy 2, Vortex 2 and some ISA sound cards for the more demanding Win9x stuff, DOS build games etc
i7 4770k, GTX 780ti, X-fi for the Win XP stuff.

took a while to get those 3 machines to the state they are in currently, but i think they are well specced for the games i play.

ux-3 wrote on 2024-06-25, 07:03:

What are the most demanding 'pure DOS and only pure DOS games'? Will a Pentium mmx @266 be able to run them?

Probably Quake and Tomb Raider while using software rendering at high resolutions (640x480 and above). But those can be played on a Voodoo 1 or Voodoo 2 using hardware acceleration instead. Duke3D running at 800x600 and higher can be quite demanding too.

Personally, I wouldn't even consider DOS compatibility for a "max power" Win9x machine. You're limiting your options by making unnecessary compromises. The Pentium 3 running at 1 GHz that you have is more than enough for the aforementioned DOS titles, unless you plan to run them at 1600x1200 using software rendering, or something crazy like that.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-06-25, 09:31:

Personally, I wouldn't even consider DOS compatibility for a "max power" Win9x machine. You're limiting your options by making unnecessary compromises. The Pentium 3 running at 1 GHz that you have is more than enough for the aforementioned DOS titles, unless you plan to run them at 1600x1200 using software rendering, or something crazy like that.

Just curious: Is there any DOS game offering really high resolution like 1600x1200? According to this thread, the vanilla DOS Quake offered up to 1280x1024; not sure how many graphic cards could run that resolution under DOS, though.

dormcat wrote on 2024-06-25, 09:41:

Just curious: Is there any DOS game offering really high resolution like 1600x1200?

Duke3D and other Build engine games. See here: What hardware could run Duke Nukem 3D at 1600x1200 on dos?

ux-3 wrote on 2024-06-25, 07:03:

• What are the most demanding 'pure DOS and only pure DOS games'? Will a Pentium mmx @266 be able to run them?

Quite some demanding games I can think of TNG: A Final Unity and Toonstruck.
These aren't 3D FPS games, but they do contain FMVs (full-motion videos) and support SVGA resolution at some point.
Especially Toonstruck is a game I never could get run smoothly with highest available video quality setting (FMVs).
Maybe it was because VBE graphics was unaccelerated and too CPU intensive for my PC, not sure.

ux-3 wrote on 2024-06-25, 07:03:

Well, I don't even have win95. Are there actually games that only run on Win95?

There surely are (not sure how many). Windows 95 and 98 have some subtle differences.
Windows 95 was made in pre-DirectX days and originally had non-DirectX drivers.

The location of files is also a bit different. Windows 95 was a lot like Windows 3.1x still and had used C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory a lot.
Windows 98 had moved on to use C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 folder for most of the sophisticated stuff instead.
Registry use had increased a lot in Windows 98. So there might be issues with applications that.

On a side note, there's also a generational difference. Windows 95 was part of the 16-Bit era, still.
Gamers had played with their SNES or Sega Genesis, still and enjoyed dialing into BBSes or services CompuServe, XBand etc..

In the Windows 95 days, Windows 3.1 drivers and Windows 3.1 software were still in wide use.
Windows 95 often was used to continue using the older technology as a backend.
DOS drivers, Windows 3.1 drivers (*.386, *.DRV) and older network technologies.

Windows 98/98SE was 32-Bit era.
BBSes and pioneering online services like CompuServe were nearly all dead.
ISDN technology no longer was cutting edge, it was soon to be superseded by DSL.

Windows 95 was looking dated and most hardware was using Windows 9x drivers (VXDs), with focus on WDM type.
Old 16-Bit Windows programs were on the decline, TCP/IP and RJ45 networks were the dominant technology.
Windows 3.1 was dying out. IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM drives and USB became the norm.

So yeah, Windows 95 and 98 are technological quite similar but the devil lies in the detail.
Just like Windows Me is still part of Windows 9x family in theory, but behaves very different in some ways.

Edit: Technologies such as WinG and WINDIB might be more compatible with Windows 95 (RTM, I mean).
DCI and DCI32 might be supported by Windows 95, still, with the appropriate graphics drivers;
Windows 3.1 or early Win 95 graphics drivers, respectively, I mean.

kolderman wrote on 2024-06-25, 06:39:

But no-one is going to build a XP rig with a FX5900, it can't handle DX9. Most XP rigs will be PCIe based not AGP. That was my point. And I am not sure the supposed table fog support of newer cards actually work or render correctly. The FX series are widely regarded as the last series of cards with correct support for earlier DX standards, but even then there are a few games that don't render 100% correct.

i have some XP computers that i use now and then and only 1 is PCIe, rest are AGP - and not great cards in any of them - yet they plays everything that i want, the newer games work fine on win 7. so, kinda true about later cards for later games and these being PCIe, just that the platforms themselves are then W7, for me at least.

interesting thread anyway, but i've never found a reason to have 98 on anything over 1ghz

chinny22 wrote on 2024-06-25, 01:07:

So I don't see the need for a fast Win98 PC with ISA, In fact I don't really see a need for a P4 based Win98 build without ISA apart from hardware which is cheaper.

Conversely what about a P4 with ISA slots? Is there any advantage to having a P3 versus a P4 in that scenario?

Of course if you want a fast Win98 build or have a build with different hardware, ie 1 EAX build and 1 A3D build then that's totally fine!

Slots permitting, both sound cards could be put into a single system.

Where multiple Win 9x builds becomes more necessary is multiple GPUs. I could see the argument to have a Voodoo 3/4/5 build versus an nVidia one. And then there are more esoteric GPUs like Savage4 Pro or PowerVR in the mix as well.

ux-3 wrote on 2024-06-25, 07:03:

To tell you the truth: I like to keep things somewhat simple. The charm of the Win98@C2D to me is the lean simplicity of the hardware used: Fast, no adapters needed for SATA, enough PCI sockets, decent IO onboard, limited heat, great flexibility with peripherals, low price cause already here.

Price and hardware availability aside, in my experience there isn't anything more complex about a P4/ISA build than a C2D build.

The biggest things that add complexity to a build are h/w compatibility and stability. For a Win98 build with an i865 based motherboard, those two aspects are already covered.

ux-3 wrote on 2024-06-25, 07:03:

Will the 865PE chipset allow the PCI ESS Solo-1 to work in pure DOS mode and work with those games?

I just set it up, installed Win98 and basic HW drivers. The nice news is:
The ESS SOLO-1 can be set to work as a SBPro card with FM and voice when booting into DOS98. Haven't tried wavetable yet. Card reports TDMA, whatever that means. Tried two games, they do voice and FM.

BUT... totally different issue comes up: Despite having 256MB of ram, I don't have enough memory. I can't get upper memory to work with just emm386.exe ram. I am not sure why, but this board or chipset seems to block me from accessing the upper ram. Mem reports 128 kB as reserved.
Anything I can do? I decided to yolo and force it with I=E000-EFFF. It gave me the ram and UMBs. Now waiting for the price...

ux-3 wrote on 2024-06-25, 15:30:

The ESS SOLO-1 can be set to work as a SBPro card with FM and voice when booting into DOS98. Haven't tried wavetable yet. Card reports TDMA, whatever that means. Tried two games, they do voice and FM.

Which games did you test? My experience with the Solo-1 is that compatibility can be variable. Depending on the board/chipset, some games might work with digital audio and some may not.

FM generally will work though.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-06-25, 15:44:

Which games did you test?

Warlord2 and Wing Commander Privateer. I know, they are old. But my goal was not to check the Solo's compatibility but if the card was going to work in DOS with this board. That isn't a given. And it does!
I don't think I'll get more authentic sounding SBpro than this without ISA in DOS.

Regarding the lack of memory, I decided to play fate and added I=E000-EFFF. Now I got myself those 64kB. Not feeling safe yet... Well, forget booting into Win98 later.

ux-3 wrote on 2024-06-25, 16:29:

Warlord2 and Wing Commander Privateer. I know, they are old. But my goal was not to check the Solo's compatibility but if the card was going to work in DOS with this board. That isn't a given. And it does!
I don't think I'll get more authentic sounding SBpro than this without ISA in DOS.

I'd recommend testing with a few more games. As I said, compatibility can be hit or miss.

For instance, I've attached some test results I've done using a Solo-1 and as Asrock 775Dual-VSTA motherboard. It works with a few games with digital audio, but not with most of them.

Don't get me wrong, I am just checking if the chipset cooperates with the card. My board has no ISA slots, so if the PCI solutions fail, it can't deal with DOS at all.

I have just gone through the torture of installing an audigy 2 ZS OEM with Joestars driver CD and instruction. With some added idea from another thread, I finally got it to work.
But in pure DOS, the Solo-1 runs circles around the audigy in SB16 mode. Wing Commander Privateer sounded just like it should. While the audigy has real trouble to provide speech.
Privateer is not the use case, it was just a quick test.

I wonder if I can install Solo and Audigy 2ZS together. Not sure how that works.

Simple answer, ISA is only needed for DOS gaming. ISA is pointless after 233Mhz.

supercordo wrote on 2024-06-25, 21:47:

Simple answer, ISA is only needed for DOS gaming. ISA is pointless after 233Mhz.

There are DOS games that benefit from >233 MHz systems. Not pointless at all.

ux-3 wrote on 2024-06-25, 20:57:

I wonder if I can install Solo and Audigy 2ZS together. Not sure how that works.

No reason you can't. It's just a matter of hardware resource assignments.

Depending on your bios, you might be able to manually assign resources to designated PCI slots.