yeah i also wondered if 486 rigs can run any modern d3d and opengl games, but i doubt if nvidia's drivers would run on cpus without 586 instructions.

Works in a GA-486AM/S (ELSA Erazor II - RivaTNT , 16MB). Tested in DOS only (3dBench, PCPbench) though.

noshutdown wrote:

yeah i also wondered if 486 rigs can run any modern d3d and opengl games

Depends on what you mean by "modern"

The newest game i've ever gotten to work on a 486 is Metal Gear Solid, that one used Direct3D and the performance just dies if you look at two soldiers. Skeletal processing seems to be the killer, as if you look at no one while in first person view it's all smooth.

It's funny because a little more optimizing, probably keeping the original PSX integer processing for characters would've helped it go on 486 better. The sound mixing is entirely baked 8-bit sounds and is already fast!

Could you see if the Win98 TNT drivers work on a 486? When using a 486, I've found that some cards will work on DOS, but not in Windows. A good example is the Matrox G450 PCI card on a SiS.

leileilol wrote:

Depends on what you mean by "modern" […]
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noshutdown wrote:

yeah i also wondered if 486 rigs can run any modern d3d and opengl games

Depends on what you mean by "modern"

The newest game i've ever gotten to work on a 486 is Metal Gear Solid, that one used Direct3D and the performance just dies if you look at two soldiers. Skeletal processing seems to be the killer, as if you look at no one while in first person view it's all smooth.

It's funny because a little more optimizing, probably keeping the original PSX integer processing for characters would've helped it go on 486 better. The sound mixing is entirely baked 8-bit sounds and is already fast!

Have you tried swapping in a POD or a Cyrix 5x86 chip to see if that speeds things up? The stronger FPU's in those might help.

FGB wrote:

Works in a GA-486AM/S (ELSA Erazor II - RivaTNT , 16MB). Tested in DOS only (3dBench, PCPbench) though.

You dont happen to have a PCI geforce 2MX to test by any chance?

I'd really like to see confirmation of Windows 98SE driver installation to establish potential for use. I know the TNT2 does not work on the UMC boards, so I doubt anyting NVIDIA TNT2+ will work, that includes GeForce2MX. I'd like to determine if the RIVA TNT1 is the end of the road for UMC.

Ahhhhhhhhh, for some reason I always associated tnt with tnt2, I just re-read in your original post about the tnt2 not working my mistake, if the tnt works in the umc board I'll get one one myself

dirkmirk wrote:

Ahhhhhhhhh, for some reason I always associated tnt with tnt2, I just re-read in your original post about the tnt2 not working my mistake, if the tnt works in the umc board I'll get one one myself

There is no if (or did I overread something) - the tnt works. Tested in Gigabyte GA486AM/S and the infamous PC-Chips M919.

FGB wrote:

There is no if (or did I overread something) - the tnt works. Tested in Gigabyte GA486AM/S and the infamous PC-Chips M919.

You mentioned it worked in DOS, however you did not mention if it worked with the NVIDIA TNT driver in Windows 98. Sometimes you can find a graphics card which works in DOS on a 486, but the Windows drivers do not work well with the SiS chipset. Could you confirm this TNT1 works with the NVIDIA Windows drivers? Thanks!

Update.

Recently obtained a creative labs Riva TNT PCI 16mb CT6700 card to test in my UMC based socket 3 system.

The machine does post, work in dos, in windows 98se, however on driver installation (detonator) the machine constantly resets itself upon the loading screen, to clarify the drivers install but on reset the machine wont load into windows.

I was using a late driver version something like 71.xx, Im thinking the best chance would be to find an earlier drier package and perhaps try windows 95, any other ideas would be appreciated.

Try going backwards through the drivers until you come to the latest one that works. Sometimes the last driver to support a particular card was really written more for the newest cards that are supported rather than the oldest ones. When the drivers are written, they don't usually worry too much about people who might be using their video cards with very old motherboards and probably don't test more than a few years back to see that everything works properly. I seriously doubt when drivers were released during the P-III era, for example, they were ever tested on 486 PCI motherboards at all because there wouldn't have been many still in daily use then and those people would likely be using very old video cards in them and not something that was still under driver support.

I have begun testing a RIVA TNT on a SiS-based 486, however I cannot seem to find drivers older than 2001 on the NVIDIA site, ftp://download.nvidia.com/Windows/

Version 12.x and 20.x don't seem to work. I also tried the Creative 3D Blaster RIVA TNT drivers, which are dated sometime in 2003 using part of the NVIDIA driver 44.04.

Does anyone know where to find the original RIVA TNT Detonator drivers from Feb. 1999? What about the pre-Detonator drivers? I'm looking for drivers which are not expecting a Pentium.

From my experience with the Matrox G200 on a 486, drivers later about 1999 didn't work.

Please try these.

sprcorreia wrote:

Please try these.

Thanks for the drivers. Tried them, but I get a yellow exclamation mark under device manager - Device is either not present, not working, or does not have all the drivers installed (Code 24).

Perhaps Dec. 1999 is still too modern for 486 support. Ideally, something from mid-1998 may work. An original Creative 3D Blaster RIVA TNT (CT6700) installation CD-ROM may also work.

At least your drivers let Windows load with the yellow exlamation mark, the newer NVIDIA drivers, like 62.x don't even allow Windows to load.

feipoa wrote:

Perhaps Dec. 1999 is still too modern for 486 support. Ideally, something from mid-1998 may work. An original Creative 3D Blaster RIVA TNT (CT4500) installation CD-ROM may also work.

Might have older ones but i have to search some old drivers cds.

EDIT:

These are for the Creative. Please give them a go. They are a bit older than the other ones. I think the previous might be AGP only...

These drivers are for the PCI version. Feel free to try it too.

sprcorreia, thx for the drivers. It looks like you found some from mid-1998, so I'll them all out tomorrow. Please let me know if you also find some even older drivers, particularly from the original Creative 3D Blaster RIVA TNT disc.

EDIT: I made some time for this tonight and tested all driver options presented. Windows indicates that the Creative driver is from 21-10-1998 when installed. Unfortunately, I still receive the error code noted above. Unless someone has any older drivers, I'm going to assume that a RIVA TNT and a SiS 496/497 motherboard are not compatibale in Windows 98. I suppose it is still possible that the TNT might work on a UMC motherboard, or in NT4 or W2K. Until further testing, it looks like a Voodoo3 3000 is the most modern graphics card to work on a SiS 486 and a Matrox G200 on a UMC 486.

As soon as I can scrounge-up an AT keyboard this is the exact setup I plan on running. I should know in the coming weeks.

For what it's worth, I'll be testing with:
PC Chips M919 v1.5
128MB FPM EDO RAM (2x64MB)
AMD-5x86-P75 @ 133MHz
Diamond V550 RIVA TNT 32MB PCI