Welcome ! 😀

Your plan for a SS7 machine sounds good. socket 7 gear is much easier to find these days than 486 or older gear. My suggestion is to look in the 'Marvin' section as there is a lot of discussion about this sort of thing there. Forum user Mau1wurf1977 has a detailed topic on slowing down using faster machines to play older games, by disabling caches among other things. You can probably get away with only 1 CPU but its always good to have a spare.

You shouldn't need 2 fans, if you get a heatsink/fan that works for the K6 it should be fine for the Pentium if you are swapping CPU's around. however a lot of Socket 7 pentiums came with a cheap and nasty fan glued onto the CPU. You may need to remove this to fit another fan on.

As for soundcards, this is a bit of a contentious issue, it really depends on exactly what you want to do, again in the Marvin section there are a number of discussions about various soundcards for specific purposes.

If you want full compatibility you could opt for a K6+ (mobile version with extra L2 cache) as these are generally faster and generate less heat then the K6-2's but you'll probably need to flash your mobo. As the K6's don't support 1.5x multi you ''could'' opt to get -any- Pentium non-mmx (whatever you find cheapest) and underclock to 75Mhz. Just use 1 cooler though, anything that can keep a K6 @ 500Mhz cool will cool a P1-75 as well.
And as DonutKing mentioned, perhaps you won't even need a 2nd cpu. just enable-disable caches on a k6+ to get to speeds well below what a standard P1-75 could offer. Would save you from a lot of hassle also.

Ofcourse you could simply build 2 SS7 systems as the parts are relatively cheap to get.
I'd suggest you use a Voodoo3 in combination with a Voodoo1/2 for full compatibility with games as well as with the SS7 (SS7's seem to work best with 3DFX, even AGP versions).

As for soundcards, it depends on what type of games you'll want to play. Having 2 systems you could use system 1 with a PCI card and another with a couple ISA's (ISA slows down a system).

Also consider what OS you're going to be using. Generally a tweaked 98SE is used the most with 95b/c and ME trailing behind it. Consider making a DOS+Windows dualboot but again, it depends on what your target is.

May I suggest you also register on vintage-computing.com, it's a site targetted at older PC's and has a wealth of knowledge floating around about vintage hardware predating the Pentium era 😉

Thanks for the information! I wouldn't even have thought to disable caches in order to slow down the system, underclocking was the only thing that sprung to mind. Voodoo 3's are relatively easy to find, so I'll get one of those too.

The reason I was thinking of getting a VooDoo 1 card was I seem to remember some Glide patches for games such as carmageddon and Screamer 2 didn't work with a VooDoo 2 for me when I had a S7 system a few years ago.

I will register at Vintage as well, and scan Ebay again as soon as I get back from work.

Why not get both? You can put a V3 and V2/V1 in one machine 😉

Why would anyone want to build a K6-2 system? Maybe some of the non-VIA chipsets are decent, but the VIA Apollo ones were terrible (especially for AGP).

SS7 is very flexible and could run anything from 75Mhz to around 600Mhz.
Also it's a socket 7 hehe 😜
AGP can be worked around by going the 3DFX way, it's AGP is basically just PCI made to fit an AGP slot electronically anyway.

Yes, it's definately much easier going Slot 1 (especially BX) but that's soo easy, wheres the fun in that? ;D

Welcome aboard!

Do you have a rough idea what games you will be playing? Usually the games determine what hardware / software is suitable.

As a very rough overview we have DOS games, Windows 98 games and then XP games.

XP games you can just play on your modern desktop. Dual Boot with W7 if you have to.

DOS games actually run really well with DOSBox. If you are mostly about the games (and not so much about the hardware) I do recommend DOSBox for you. Any games that are speed sensitive like Wing Commander or Test Drive 3 or Sierra Games with timer bugs are so much easier to get going with DOSBox. Wing Commander runs at various speeds depending on what is going on. With DOSBox you can adjust speed on the fly, a very handy feature because Wing Commander is a very hard game!

That leaves us with W98 games which often don't work well / at all under XP. This is the machine I would look at building as emulation doesn't cut it and XP has issues with many games.

I have SS7 and Slot 1 hardware and I also recommend a Slot 1 system for you. Intel BX440 boards are awesome and you can use a wide range of processors from a slow Pentium 2 or Celeron to a fast P3 with up to 1.4 GHz.

In terms of performance, SS7 and Slot 1 CPUs overlap quite a bit (SS7 was AMDs answer to Slot 1 for a while), so personally I don't see the need for a SS7 system over a Slot 1 system.

One area where SS7 is better is for slowing down the machine, because SS7 boards come with mainboard cache, which Slot 1 boards haven't got anymore. This allows you to slow it down to a 386 /486 though all those games run fine on DOSBox and you mentioning money and space constraints might be the better option...

So yea... What games will you be playing?

Well, as you said DOSBOX runs games a lot better than it did a few years ago, and now I have a C2D in my main machine I can even run build engine games like Redneck Rampage and Blood pretty much flawlessly at max cycles. Obviously DOSBox is great at the earlier games (Doom, Dark Forces, Full Throttle).

I want to build a SS7 machine to play a range of games, from DOS to windows 95/98. You see, although Screamer 2 works in DOSBOX with CD-ROM emulation, it runs poorly in 16bit colour mode and is unplayable in SVGA. With a SS7 machine running a P200 with a voodoo, I can run it in DOS, under Glide. This is true of Carmageddon as well.

Plus you just can't beat the feel of running a game from that period on a decent Pentium 1 machine and not an emulator. With regards to a Slot 1 machine, I would be happy with a P2-233MMX and owned one for years during the golden era of gaming, but this is about as slow as one can go, and I want to be able to get down to P75 speeds if needs be.

My windows 95/98 requirements would be Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Diablo, Fire Fight, Forsaken etc. Early directdraw stuff and directx 7 stuff (motoracer, twisted metal 2). Also games like Hyperblade and Skynet, which even a P2-233MMX would run too fast as they had no frame limiter.
A P200 vanilla would be the main CPU I would use, and I'd buy some K6-2's mainly for benching and playing around with. The P200 was not a good CPU to match with a mighty VooDoo 2, for example.

I'm trying to build a PC which captures the era of 1994 to 1997. Top end DOS4GW games through to the early direct3d stuff. A Slot1 would be overkill for the early stuff. I think the cut off from my SS7 machine will be covered by the Athlon 1GHz Geforce 3 Ti windows 98se system I'm also building.

I just want to buy good parts for the pentium, as even though I upgraded my old pentium system back in the day (new CD-Rom, CPU, more ram, Matrox mystique and VooDoo 1, Aureal Vortex etc) I had no idea on chipsets and motherboards back then.

So yes, DOS is important - Tombraider is way better in DOS than in Windows 95, but having the ability to go as high as a 550-600MHz K6 will bridge the gap to my Athlon 1GHz. I need good compatability in graphics cards, one of which must be a VooDoo for the glide stuff. I can always use Scitech Display Doc if I hit VESA problems in DOS. I think a VooDoo 3 and a VooDoo 2 would be best. Will I get a confused PC though when running a Glide game with 2 3DFX cards installed?
Also, should I get a PCI soundcard or an ISA? I cant find any Aureal Vortexes on Ebay. I always dreamed of having an AWE32 back in the day... would that be a good idea? Soundblaster compatible all the way for me, never owned anything else.

PS must be a SS7 and not a S7 as I don't want to have to hunt down good condition AT keyboards etc... PS2 is the way forward(/backward).

Slowest my SS7 boards can go is a Pentium 100 (66 x 1.5). Regarding Sound Cards for DOS I recommend ISA cards for DOS and for W98 you can use PCI cards. I believe for W98 the drivers are quite important...

W98 is not my area of knowledge, more of a DOS guy 🤣. For late era DOS games I recommend an AWE64 GOLD for speech / digital effects and a Roland Sound Canvas for General Midi music. This will run any games you mentioned really well.

Just some thoughts:

>> I don't want to have to hunt down good condition AT keyboards etc... PS2 is the way forward

You can buy AT to PS/2 keyboard adapters. Eg: I use a modern keyboard with a 486. Therefore, an AT S7 mobo can be considered.

>> It has to be a super socket 7

Generally speaking, the last batch of SS7 mobos released (circa 98-99) are considered to be the best. Some boards to consider: Epox MVP3 series, Asus P5A, some of the DFI boards. I like the GA-5AX, but it's got a L2 cache bug. It's still good. Eg: I can overclock a lowly K6-2 300 to 420 and Windows 98 is stable. It goes up to 440 in DOS. Or, a P233 MMX is fine at 300. Still OK at 315 in DOS.

>> Also, should I get a PCI soundcard or an ISA? I cant find any Aureal Vortexes on Ebay

Do a "description search" for AU8830. 😀

>> I want to be able to get down to P75 speeds if needs be.

I think later era SS7 boards can go as low as 66 FSB, whereas older S7 boards can do 50 FSB. It's possible that on a SS7, your lowest speed will be about 90-100 MHz, whereas on a S7, you'll be able to do 75 MHz.

Now I have specific hardware to aim for! Thanks for that most informative reply. I will let you know of the progress as it happens.

Bought a Dremel Multitool today. Whats the fun in having a pimped out inner if the outer is just another plain case? ;D

Do a "description search" for AU8830.

There are a lot on eBay that won't be found with such a search, and they tend to go quite a bit cheaper. You might get lucky and find a good deal on a Diamond MX300, but for the best deals, search for "Turtle Beach PCI" to look for Montego IIs. They're quite good, but relatively unknown... and very common since they were used in Dells. (Just check the pictures and model numbers closely since there's also a Vortex1 version of the Montego that looks almost identical, but isn't as good.)

retro games 100 wrote:

Do a "description search" for AU8830. 😀

May I ask why these sound card is recommended? I don't know much about W98 and PCI hardware, but what about cards such a Audigy?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

retro games 100 wrote:

Do a "description search" for AU8830. 😀

May I ask why these sound card is recommended? I don't know much about W98 and PCI hardware, but what about cards such a Audigy?

There's lots of interesting commentary on Vogons about Vortex2. Random topic, many more available. 😀 You get pure DOS support, wavetable header, Windows A3D, good MIDI, good overall quality sound. Audigy series is more geared up for Windows. Audigy 1 has a DOS driver (SB16 emulation taken from SB Live! package I think), but wasn't well received in terms of overall sound quality. Audigy 2 dropped DOS support (I think), but was well received in terms of sound quality. I think DOS still works for Audigy 2, but only if you chose VxD driver, and only if you run a DOS game within Windows 98.

Creative PCI cards all use rebranded Ensoniq drivers for DOS support as far as I know. Avoid IMO.

Coolies! So it's a good "bridge" card for DOS and W98/SE whereas an Audigy 2 is a card you would use if you are building a pure W98SE machine

HunterZ wrote:

Creative PCI cards all use rebranded Ensoniq drivers for DOS support as far as I know. Avoid IMO.

How come? I had excellent results with later DOS Games (Doom and later)...

SB16 + GM worked very well. Older games often crashed though, but most late DOS Games I tried worked just fine. You also need to consider how cheap and easy they are to obtain. There are tons of AudioPCI cards on ebay...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Coolies! So it's a good "bridge" card for DOS and W98/SE whereas an Audigy 2 is a card you would use if you are building a pure W98SE machine

Yes, IMHO if you were going to pick just one card for both DOS and Windows 9x, then a Vortex 2 would be it. And an Audigy 2 ZS would be the highest quality (in terms of hi-fi) card for Win98, but you'll need a speedy machine for it to cope with its demands. I can't remember what the minimum requirement is, but I'd say it's something like an Athlon XP. Bottom line: Vortex 2 = good all rounder! 😀

Great I will keep an eye out for one...