First post, by jheronimus
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi, all. I've finished a new build for the holidays and I'm pretty excited about it:
The platform
I needed something that would be quite fast but still provide enough ISA slots.
This is a Supermicro P6SBA motherboard. It's a pretty standard early 440BX board if not for on detail — it has AMIBIOS. Installed you can see a Pentium 3 500 MHz CPU. I do recommend updating its BIOS to the latest 3.1 version because without it the board has issues detecting ISA cards and managing resources.
I wonder whether this board supports Coppermines because I do hope to find a 1 GHz Pentium 3 one day. It doesn't allow setting the FSB to 133 MHz though, but I don't want that.
I've chosen InWin H500 as the case — it's my favourite. It's a desktop, but really big and really easy to work on. You can see it's almost too big for my case — I think only XT cases are bigger than this when it comes to desktop form factor.
Video
First, comes a couple of these — a V2-1000 with 12 MB by STB
I always wanted to try an SLI configuration even if it's kind of pointless since I also have both Voodoo 3 3000 and a Voodoo 5 5500. However, it just seems cool to me.
I did have in issue with the fact that I didn't have an SLI cable. I could never make one — the clips kept breaking on me. I tried ordering one from eBay, but that one turned out to be a faulty one. I got a refund and actually managed to make a working cable — even if it probably won't survive being pulled from the cards.
Next came the AGP card. Originally the system came with a 3DLabs Permedia 2. It seemed cool to me, because it's almost a workstation card for an almost workstation motherboard. The only issue is that it doesn't seem to support graphic mode that the BIOS uses. I don't know how the previous owner used it, but I just couldn't make it work.
For a while I used an NVIDIA Riva TNT2 which is not a bad choice (even fairly period-correct), but I wanted something more "interesting". My choice fell on Matrox Millenium G250:
I thought it's pretty cool that it came with a 144pin SGRAM module. The G250 is an overclocked G200, used mostly in HP computers. However, the module it came with turned out to be non-original and the card produced weird artifacts in Windows with that module:
There aren't any artifacts in games, but in Windows you can't even see the checkboxes, so it's pretty unusable. I've tried another module from my ATI Rage card, tried several drivers — nothing worked.
In the end I probably could pick a faster Matrox card like a G550, but this will do for now.
Sound
First, a Creative SoundBlaster 16, CT2230. Connected to it is a Roland SC-55. It's an almost bug-free card with a true OPL3, but there are some issues with games like Duke Nukem 3D (I get lags and missing MIDI notes due to bugs in MPU401).
Next, keropi's wonderful MusicQuest clone card, a standalone MPU controller. Pentium 3 might seem like an odd choice for MT-32, but I have some games I want to play that aren't speed sensitive. I've just recently learned about the Ultimate Talkie Editions of Monkey Island 1 and 2 — it's so awesome to me that somebody actually got through the trouble of patching the original DOS games. And you really want a newer machine for that, because the games would be quite big for a 386 or even a 486.
Another cool thing about this particular card is that it actually has two OUT ports, not IN and OUT. Which made me realise that I can simply get a MIDI cable and connect both MT-32 and SC-55 to the MPU card. No bugs, and I get to swap CT2230 for a nicer sounding CT2940 with OPL3:
Another nice lifehack is that I've used a simple headphone jack splitter so that I could plug the output of both MT-32 and SC-55 into my SB16's line in. No mixer needed!
After all is said and done, here is what my system looks like:
I've also added a 3COM NIC card as I usually do. Which leaves me with one free slot that can be used for either an ISA card (like my Gravis PnP Pro or Yamaha SW60XG) or a PCI card (like SB Live, MX300 or even a DVD decoder card).
I'm really happy with this build. It feels like a nice 1998/1999 transition system: it has a motherboard that combines really new features like AGP, USB and 100MHz FSB, but also great support for legacy hardware. It's what someone would have built back then if he had already heavily invested in DOS sound hardware.
Also, this machine is pretty similar to a Pentium II@233/Nvidia Vanta system I used to play back in the day, but it's better in almost every way.
The full specs are:
Pentium 3@500MHz
256 MB SDRAM
Supermicro P6SBA 440BX motherboard
Matrox Millenium G250
12MB Voodoo 2 SLI
3COM NIC
SoundBlaster 16 CT2230 + Roland SC-55
MusicQuest MPU controller + Roland MT-32
40GB Maxtor HDD
16 speed CD-ROM
You can see that for now I mostly play games that don't really need Glide or MIDI hardware, like Sanitarium, Blade Runner and LEGO Rock Raiders (it doesn't like Voodoo at all). Well, I will soon have the full holidays in front of me and I plan to play a bunch of Wing Commander Privateer, FreeSpace, Monkey Island, Forsaken and many other games.