First post, by AaronAsh
Hi all - this is my first post on Vogons! I have been lurking here for years when running old games and also follow Phil's excellent retro hardware videos on YouTube.
So I recently decided to take the plunge and build a retro PC, initially to play mid-late 90s Glide games. My build is as follows:
Acorp 5ALI61 Rev. E motherboard
AMD-K6-III/400AHX CPU
2 x 128MB PC100 CL2 memory modules
Yamaha YMF719 ISA Sound Card
Samsung 500GB (formatted to 128GB) SATA drive via SATA to IDE converter
Gotek floppy emulator
400 watt generic PSU (came with case)
For graphics I have both an AGP S3 Trio3D/2X 8MB and three AGP Voodoo3 3000s (bought them together for cheap), and that's where the problem lies.
At first everything seemed to work - the system POSTed, and I was able to get the drive formatted correctly and Win98SE installed. I was using one of the Voodoo3s at this point, so installed the latest Voodoo3 drivers for 98SE, installed DX9 and ran 3D Mark 2000 to check it was all working, which it was. However I ran the benchmark again at higher resolution (1280x1024 vs 1024.768) and mid way through the screen froze with a bunch of polygonal graphical corruption, and I had to manually shut down.
Next time I booted the system nothing appeared on-screen, and I heard a slightly odd POST beep code - it sounds like one long beep, but it has a few tiny pauses in it that sound like it could be intended to be 1 long + 2/3 short beeps mushed together. It's an Award bios and looking that up indicated a VGA problem of some sort, so I thought perhaps that Voodoo3 had died and so I replaced it with a second Voodoo3 - however same result, no screen, same POST beeps. I tried the third Voodoo3 card and still the same (all three of these had at least been able to POST prior to my installing Windows). In desperation, thinking I'd somehow scuppered my motherboard, I tried the simpler S3 Trio AGP card I had - and POSTed and got into Windows just fine! Strangely the screen through the S3 is slightly washed out and has a very slight flicker to it, but it's a cheap old card so might just be like that.
I have tried resetting the CMOS (battery out, jumper to clear to 10 mins, then jumper back and new battery in), I have tried tweaking a variety of BIOS settings that seem relevant to the graphics system, and I've even reflashed the BIOS to the same revision (in case it was corrupt in some way), I've had absolutely every other component except RAM and CPU disconnected - no luck with any approach, every Voodoo3 I have still has the same non-POSTing issue. I've done a bit of reading, and it seems like Voodoo3s were known for guzzling a lot of power, and some motherboards struggled with it - but if that was the problem I don't see how I would have gotten into Windows at all the first time.
One other possibility is my RAM is a bit suspect - at some point during the build I was getting long, never ending POST beeps of RAM failure with no screen, but re-seating the RAM a few times and cleaning the contacts fixed it.
So yeah, quite fun so far, but I'd be grateful if anyone here has some experience with or could shed some light on what might be going on!