I've been trying several attempts to restore that beloved retro rig to a working point but had no luck. The PC kept rebooting over and over. So I actually dismounted most of the hardware from it and plugged on another rig I had in my house. Right now, I'm running Voodoo 5 + Windows XP inside this configuration. Please note that within this config i'm able to dual boot between Windows VISTA and Windows XP. I pretend to run 3DFX Voodoo 5 on Xp and Radeon 4850 inside Vista.
MoBo ASUS P5Q
CPU Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (3 GHz)
3DFX Voodoo 5 PCI (disabled in Windows Vista, enabled in Windows XP)
ATI RADEON 4850 PCIexpress (disabled on XP, enabled on Windows Vista)
8 GB RAM
2X500mb SATA HDs
1x80 SATA HD
REALTEK AUDIO DRIVERS
What can I say: it seems working, almost flawlessly. Although it doesn't come no way near WINDOWS 98 games compatibility (talking about older directx games) it may represent a temporary solution.
Xp boots fine and most of the games run good. I've tried Star Wars Shadows of the Empire and it displays right, with the correct fog thing; it only plays a little bit fast but i've been able to slow it down using 3DFX tools FSAA + vsync + CPU Killer. Most of the dos games, as imagined, present issues; but since I plan to use dosbox for older dos games such as BLOOD, BIOFORGE, DUKE3D etc, it just feels ok.
Concerning drivers I've installed Amigamerlin 3.1 R11. My current Directx version is 8.1 and i do not intend to update it, for the moment. Do they provide good compatibility? Or you suggest to install other, different drivers, such as SFFT 1.9 (or else)? Please keep in mind that most of my interest goes to DX6-7-8 games. I'm talking of X-Wing 95, Dark Earth, Requiem Avenging Angels and else.
One last question: I've got another PATA 80gb hard disk to spare. Would it be nearly impossibile (or extremely diffucult) to install Windows 98 on this machine? And would it be worth the effort, or would it just be system errors, bugs, crashes and issues over and over?
Thanks everybody 😀