philscomputerlab wrote:

Can you take a screenshot of the resources in device manager? […]
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Can you take a screenshot of the resources in device manager?

What is the SET BLASTER varible set?

Do you have Sound Blaster Emulation installed?

Have you tried running DOS games from within Windows first, rather than running MS-DOS mode?

I'll have to wait to get you the screenshot when I get home from work. As far as your other questions :

1) In short, I don't know. I must not have this installed. I got my Diamond Monster 2 drivers from Vogonsdrivers. It may be on the full disk ISO if it isn't part of the driver....or is this a specific 3rd party software I should find an download?

2) SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4

3) Yes, the games in question are Darker than Black (a later DOS game) and Street Rod 2(an earlier DOS game). I get nothing in the first, and PC speaker in the second with no option to choose a sound card, like in DOS 6.22.

Thanks for your help!

The Blaster variable seems fine.

In device manager, there should be a device named Sound Blaster emulation.

Try Doom shareware, easy to find. Run setup and configure music and sound for Sound Blaster. See if that works.

Straight from the makers 😉

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/doom/doom19s.zip

squareguy wrote:

Straight from the makers 😉

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/doom/doom19s.zip

I appreciate it guy!

I can't wait to get home now. I must redeem myself, otherwise my 16 year old self will continue to ridicule me.

philscomputerlab wrote:

The Blaster variable seems fine.

In device manager, there should be a device named Sound Blaster emulation.

Try Doom shareware, easy to find. Run setup and configure music and sound for Sound Blaster. See if that works.

SO...I got it working!!!

I had to use the AU8830 patched drivers and use the No-Bus-Check INF file. Everything installed but the SB Emulation had an IRQ conflict with my USB interface. Luckily I have a Shuttle AN35N Ultra motherboard which is one of the few that allows for manual IRQ reassignment. I cleared up the conflict and voila! I'm still having trouble getting Darker than Black and the Orion Conspiracy to work in Windows DOS mode and Real-DOS mode, but those may be peculiarities with those games. As it was 1am by the time I finished, I didn't get around to testing with Doom.

I have a new Pentium 4 Asrock motherboard coming which has both an AGP 8x and PCIe slot for graphics cards. I'll rebuild the system with that and a 3.4Ghz P4 to have the ultimate DOS Retro Gaming Machine!

Nice. 3.4 GHz for DOS? 🤣 What a beast.

oerk wrote:

Well, look what I found! […]
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Well, look what I found!

I'm going in...

So, finally got a replacement for the POS Packard Bell case... got a Micro ATX Fujitsu Siemens case that had been submerged in water, with the dirt of years of use baked on. Cleaned it up (sorry, didn't take a before picture) and voila:

Compared to the Packard Bell, that's a really nice - and nice looking - no-frills OEM case.

The only thing left to do is to make it quieter. The Intel stock cooler is loud even with fan control, and the fan on the FX5700 is annoying. On the upside, the Intel board is really nice and even has fan control for the case fans.

I try to have every computer in a mini tower / micro ATX case. My office is really small, and I frequently rotate computers in and out, so them being easy to move is a big plus.

Thanks again Phil for the idea!

Very nice! Thanks for sharing your build 😀

Thanks Phil! Without you, I never would've thought about using a Pentium 4 for this, but It's close to perfect - PLENTY of speed, and the Intel board has nice features and is nice to work with. Really fast boot combined with the SATA hard drive too.

Specs:
- Intel D865GLC mainboard
- Pentium 4 Prescott 3.06GHz, HT disabled
- 512MB DDR
- GeForce FX5700, IIRC MSI
- Yamaha YMF724
- WD 80GB SATA
- Floppy and PATA DVD drive (could've used a SATA drive, but preferred to have an analog audio connection to the sound card)

3.06 GHz! Wow, that is super fast for a Windows 98 machine 😀

I would still go for Radeon. (though it is only slightly better in terms of compatibility, not speed)
Still a matter of preferance's and choices. The FX gives speed advantage, the Radeon gives less ackes and run pre-2000/01 games better.
(The issues are still minor. Only a question of extreme perfection and minor detail's)
It's a nice build anyway, and should give some good times.

philscomputerlab wrote:

3.06 GHz! Wow, that is super fast for a Windows 98 machine 😀

Yeah, but why not? That way, it's fast enough for games up to around 2004, and I don't use it much for DOS if at all. It's actually running ME and I'm thinking about dual booting 2000 or XP.

brostenen wrote:

I would still go for Radeon. (though it is only slightly better in terms of compatibility, not speed) Still a matter of preferan […]
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I would still go for Radeon. (though it is only slightly better in terms of compatibility, not speed)
Still a matter of preferance's and choices. The FX gives speed advantage, the Radeon gives less ackes and run pre-2000/01 games better.
(The issues are still minor. Only a question of extreme perfection and minor detail's)
It's a nice build anyway, and should give some good times.

Thanks for the suggestion! Haven't encountered any problems with the GeForce so far, and I don't own a Radeon of that era. The FX stays for the time being.

I actually benchmarked a GeForce 4 Ti 4200, 4 Ti 4400, and the FX 5700 in it, and they were all very close in performance with the FX slightly in the lead.

oerk wrote:

I actually benchmarked a GeForce 4 Ti 4200, 4 Ti 4400, and the FX 5700 in it, and they were all very close in performance with the FX slightly in the lead.

Not saying you should get a 9800 XXL/Pro or faster, as I don't know how it will stack up against any FX5500 to FX5900 cards.
From my testing on a Sempron 3300+, the Radeon 9800-XXL just beats the GF4-Ti4200 (Both Medion cards)

Both on performance and compatibility... The GF4-ti4200 has some issues on certain games, without any AA.
The 9800-XXL has zero compatibility issues on UT99 (as an example) without any AA enabled, and things just gets better with AA.
Enough power in those 9800+/FX5500+ anyway, to be regarded as an issue at all. Looking at a broader persective. 😉

Radeons have 2 well known drivers bugs: the table fog (Test Drive 5 and Thief II: the Metal Age are d3d and ogl examples) and negative blending (Bloodrayne 2 and ePSXe OGL plugin). The first one was fixed but only in 2007 (Catalyst 7.11+). Unfortunately the last Win9x Catalyst is 6.2.
About features... No palettized textures (European Air War and Final Fantasy VII/VIII).
Radeon 9800 XXL? Err... MSI is so MSI.

My WinME/WinXp PC used Radeon X850 PE Agp. Unfortunately - leadless soldering have killed this card.

Gamecollector wrote:

Radeon 9800 XXL? Err... MSI is so MSI.

Yes... Radeon 9800-XXL. It's a Medion card.
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/b283/medion-9800-xxl.html

Incoming renders incorrectly with later Nvidia cards. E.g. works on TNT cards, but not GF2 I believe. dgVoodoo2 had to add a feature for this when I noticed it did the same thing 😀

ATI doesn't have this issue.

All I can say is that I was positively surprised how good ATI was on the P4. Now on a Socket 7 machine, I had very bad experiences. Likely to do with the AGP. I also like how ATI has proper V-sync controls directly in the driver.

I've never used ATi before the 9800pro.
But from that one to today's 290X, I've never had any problem. Well no more than the occasional hiccups in computer technologie.
The 8800 and GTX275 and GTX580 from nVidia that interrupted my ATi streak were no better.
The 580 was actually probably my worst card those last 10 years, especially after the GTX275, HD5870 and compared to the 7970 I had after.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Incoming renders incorrectly with later Nvidia cards.

The interface issue?
Well, the trouble is - both methods are correct. MS just forgot to create the DX standard for this (colorkeying scaled/filtered bitmaps). So - if the game vas developed with "NVidia way" - it looks worse on Ati cards (color (mostly blacks) borders around 2d elements).
Same trouble is color lines in many ogl games on 2d elements. Because GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE_EXT isn't the default method since ogl 1.2.

Fascinating stuff these incompatibilities. I've never seen the issue with the black lines. What game and cards would trigger this?

philscomputerlab wrote:

Fascinating stuff these incompatibilities. I've never seen the issue with the black lines. What game and cards would trigger this?

Almost all q3engine games (American McGee's Alice etc) in 800x600+ resolutions.

Grand Prix Legends - black lines on the sky.

Etc.
This trouble is present on all new videocards but IIRC NVidia had the fix in drivers ("Disable conformant texture clamp").

By the way, there is another example for an incompatibility. Pixel centering. Especially after the "alternative pixel center" checkbox was removed from AMD and NVidia drivers.