I'd go with a Sound Blaster Live! personally. There are options that might sound better, but generally I didn't have much trouble with my SB Live! back in the days. Also, you might find better drivers for your Ensoniq AudioPCI on the Creative website (they purchased Ensoniq back in those days).

As for graphics cards, a Matrox Millennium G200 should be easy enough to find, and they can be had cheaply. Matrox still have drivers for all their legacy products on their website, and there should be drivers from everything from Win3.11 (well, perhaps Win95) up to Windows XP at least for the G200.

I had the same board in my Gateway with Ensoniq on board audio. Seems like Gateway have had a bit of a clean up lately as all the links are dead.
If you can find a page with the drivers for their "Tabor II" you may be in luck. or try all drivers available for either a Ensoniq Audio PCI, Creative Labs Audio PCI 64 or Ensoniq 137x which is all the same card.
If you do get it working it will emulate a SB Pro in real dos so not a bad card, not great either though.

An Audigy 4 or the almost identical Audigy 2 ZS are the last to support Win98 (not sure about 95) So are the most modern creative soundcards. Depending on which games you play they may not offer much benefit apart from lower noise level then a SBlive!

Graphics card, your right in the era when 3dfx were at their peak, Voodoo cards are a bit expensive but not unreasonable depending which way you want to go.
Otherwise a Geforce4 ti 4600 is about as high as you can go easily with that board, offers good backward compatibility (there are some issues) a P2 400 will never fully utilize that card but gives you an idea of the best you have on offer.

I really like the Vortex 2 cards.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I really like the Vortex 2 cards.

This. Find one with quad stereo if you can. I have a Turtle Beach Quadzilla and it's a huge difference between two speakers and four. You can pinpoint the sources of sounds easier with four.

Does anyone know of windows 95 compatible drivers for the Radeon 7000? I used catalyst 6.2 in 98 but it's saying it's missing dll files in 95.

http://driverscollection.com/?H=Radeon&By=ATI … SS=Windows%2095

I use a Geforce ti 4200 in my Windows 98 box. But my processor is a P3 600- that combination will take better advantage of the video capabilities of the 4200.

Good choice in boards... seems a shame to let a perfectly good ISA slot go empty. But if you don't plan on needing DOS support at all, I suppose you wouldn't be interested in a Sound Blaster Awe64 for sound?

Drivers for each of these the ti4200 and the SB Awe 64 are easily available for Win 9x.

I finally got an old 20 gb hard drive which I used to install windows 95 on. I'm using my Radeon 7000 and AudioPCI and all of my games work fine except Warcraft 1. I get music but not effects. I have an AWE64 and vortex 2 on the way and I also have a couple graphics cards on the way too. I've also got a pile of older games off eBay. I think when everything gets here I'm going to test all combinations of graphics and sound cards and make a post about the results. I suspect simply replacing the AudioPCI with the vortex 2 will solve my Warcraft issue though but the results of my tests may be helpful to others.

Sound card? SB Live or one of the M-Audio Delta cards (they still have a lot of old drivers up on their site too).

Graphics? You should have plenty of options - 3dfx, 3DLabs (all of their drivers are available on (what's left of) their site), Matrox, and early nVidia and ATi options (for ATi, I think the Rage series would be more period-accurate for Windows 95; could be off by a few years though).

xTamx420 wrote:

I ordered a smaller hard drive on eBay so I want to try windows 95 instead. I like 95 more.

If Windows 95 is giving you so many problems with drivers, why do you like it so much more than 98?

Windows 95 actually works better or equivalent for all the games I own now when compared to 98. Just had to get the right drivers. I don't know why I like 95 more I just do.

chinny22 wrote:

Otherwise a Geforce4 ti 4600 is about as high as you can go easily with that board, offers good backward compatibility (there are some issues)

Wich issues? Wich earlier Nvidia cards have no these issues?

Surprised your wanting to use 95, I have always hated it, found it finicky, fragile and just hard work. I either use plain MS-DOS 6.22 if I want dos games or Windows ME if I want old 9x games. Only machine I have with 95 is a Compaq Presario 2232 (Cyrix Media GX) machine, but that is because I consider it curiosity rather than a daily driver and it hates anything but 95.

Found it!
This link shows how well cards work with dos games that commonly have problems
http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

I've had great results with DOS games with Ark Logic ARK2000PV Octek PCI & STB Velocity 128 AGP Nvidia RIVA128 cards. Tseng labs ET6000 is also very fast, but does have issues with OLD awkward DOS games, it's brilliant in Windows however, fast and very clean images. If only image quality is concerned, you can do much worse than a Matrox Mystique 220, it's windows image is perfect, but again DOS has issues with old, more unusual modes.

chinny22 wrote:

This link shows how well cards work with dos games that commonly have problems

According to this link GF4600 has the only known serious problem with obscure shareware Mario and at least is not worse than other Nvidia cards, except exotic 1280x mode in Duke 3D.

Possible GFX cards:
- Matrox G400/G400-Max/G550.
- Geforce2 GTS or one of the faster GF2 editions.
- One of the S3 variants paired with Voodoo2-SLI (most likely the best config for you'r mobo+cpu)
- Some sort of Radeon-9XXX series.

Make notice of that I did not suggest any faster GFX cards, as you'r system would not deliver enough punch.
And i did not name any faster cards because of compatibility. Shure you can get faster cards.
They just tend to have some quirks, that need to be corrected in one or another way.
Example of this, is that some games need AA set to at least x2 in order for the games to be shown correctly.
That is mostly in nVidia land anyway, past GF3. Not a big issue. An issue none the less for me though.

Possible Soundcards:
- Some sort of Creative ISA card with an Dreamblaster S1 or external MIDI module.
- YMF-724 card.
- Vortex2.
- Creative AWE64 Gold.

You'r motherboard supports ISA, hence the naming of ISA cards. And the board has SB-Link header.

Tertz wrote:

chinny22 wrote:

This link shows how well cards work with dos games that commonly have problems

According to this link GF4600 has the only known serious problem with obscure shareware Mario and at least is not worse than other Nvidia cards, except exotic 1280x mode in Duke 3D.

Yeh wasn't as bad as remembered. It was actually because of Duke3d that I found this

brostenen wrote:

Example of this, is that some games need AA set to at least x2 in order for the games to be shown correctly. That is mostly in nVidia land anyway, past GF3. Not a big issue. An issue none the less for me though.

May you name games where GF4 needs special settings to show correctly, but where GF3 did not need them? For win9x games wich drivers were used there?