What about GLQuake, does that run? 😀

SpectriaForce wrote:

What about GLQuake, does that run? 😀

It changes the screen resolution down to 640x480, while remaining on a zoomed in upper left hand corner of the desktop, and gets into a loop of making 15-bit inverse pallets, over and over, and once that loop ends, it will just sit with the top upper left-hand corner of the screen zoomed in on. It never renders any 3D environments, nor does it even attempt to go to the menu. This was with both the ATi Rage 128 and my current S3 card. Every time I launch it, I have to use ctrl+alt+del and manually kill GLQuake, at which point the desktop will return to normal (on the S3) or will remain glitched out and zoomed in (on the ATi).

I've pretty much given up with any 3D accelerated rendering methods on this machine other than maybe a PCI Voodoo card at some point, because any 3D acceleration through the AGP port fails catastrophically. Everything software rendered with this system seems to work great, so I'm likely going to stick with that. I just need a video card that has more than 1MB of VRAM and doesn't look god-awful in Windows, and the S3 card performs in both of these facets reasonably well. It just happens to be AGP.

This is also with using AGP drivers I found on an .iso of a legit PCChips M570 driver disc that used to come with it.

Besides, I have a 440BX system, that, while technically still in the works, could absolutely smash any OpenGL/Direct3D games made before 2000- so I have no problem with allowing this machine to lack that capability at the moment.

486's are cool and all but this is a much nicer dos SVGA build 😀

That's an interesting board — I thought all Super Socket 7 boards with SIS chipsets came with integrated video and didn't have an AGP slot. Can it run FSB at 100 MHz?

Also, the Turbo LED is connected to an actual turbo led header on the motherboard. There's no turbo button header on the motherboard, and no physical turbo button on the case, and I'm unaware of any keyboard combinations this motherboard might use to enable turbo, or why a Super Socket 7 board would even need turbo functionality, so I'm not sure what's up with that. It is on all the time, like a power indicator. Once I put it back together after cleaning it, I just plugged it in, and bam, I have a second power LED, to really make sure that the system is on.

I have several SS7 builds mosts with AMD K6 CPU's ( AMD K63+ 450 ).

And the SS7 motherboards I am using have no Turbo switch option either. I Don't think turbo option was available on SS7 motherboards.
What you can do to slow down the CPU is to enter the bios and disable "L1 cache" and to further slow down the CPU you can use a program called "setmul.exe" ( Set Multiplier ).

athlon-power wrote:

SpectriaForce wrote:

What about GLQuake, does that run? 😀

It changes the screen resolution down to 640x480, while remaining on a zoomed in upper left hand corner of the desktop, and gets into a loop of making 15-bit inverse pallets, over and over, and once that loop ends, it will just sit with the top upper left-hand corner of the screen zoomed in on. It never renders any 3D environments, nor does it even attempt to go to the menu. This was with both the ATi Rage 128 and my current S3 card. Every time I launch it, I have to use ctrl+alt+del and manually kill GLQuake, at which point the desktop will return to normal (on the S3) or will remain glitched out and zoomed in (on the ATi).

At what resolution and color depth do you use Windows?

chinny22 wrote:

486's are cool and all but this is a much nicer dos SVGA build 😀

It took a while to get it to do anything at all, including getting the ESS sound card to synthesize MIDI, but once I got it all working, all the DOS games I play that use MIDI sound great. This is important because the MIDI on my SB Live! is garbage, and I still want a machine to play DOS games.

While I did enjoy the 486 a lot while I used it, the sluggishness of Heretic and Doom when not in low detail mode was enough to put me off a little. The P200 has no problem with DOS games, even those such as Quake, and the 32MB of RAM is more than enough for every DOS game ever made, I'd imagine. Even Quake only requires 16MB of RAM to run under Windows, and I have twice that.

jheronimus wrote:

That's an interesting board — I thought all Super Socket 7 boards with SIS chipsets came with integrated video and didn't have an AGP slot. Can it run FSB at 100 MHz?

Unfortunately, it can't- the maximum supported FSB on this is 83MHz, with higher speeds having been achieved unofficially, but never 100MHz. If it could, I'd probably grab a 400-500MHz K6-2 and throw it in there, and get a good 3D card in there (PCI, I've had enough problems with AGP at this point), and have a quite fast 3D accelerated rig. There are ways to achieve higher clockspeeds with K6-2's by raising the FSB, and mucking around until I find a good sweet spot, but I'm too tired to remember the exact ways to do it and it seems to be more of a pain than I'm willing to deal with concerning this rig right now. I've already backed myself into a corner with unbearably thin margins regarding my 440BX build that I'm re-working, and I don't want to fool with similar things regarding this rig as well.

SpectriaForce wrote:

At what resolution and color depth do you use Windows?

I generally use it at 800x600x32 on this monitor (a 15" Gateway EV500), but on my larger one I run it at 1024x768x32. When messing with GLQuake, I have lowered my resolution to 800x600x16, which causes the same results. I haven't tried running the desktop at 640x480x16 when launching it, but I doubt it'd help. On my 440BX machine, it can go from 1024x768x32 to 640x480x16 flawlessly, though I can run GLQuake smoothly at 1024x768x32 on that machine anyways, so it doesn't matter in that case. 🤣

An update on the build:

Not much has changed except that fact that I took it apart, cleaned it, and replaced the old noisy front panel fan with a new, slightly quieter one. I also "improved," cable management- I had to stress the IDE cables, but if I don't, with the way the case is designed (no ventilation for the PSU to draw from other than one hole down into the main part of the case which also happens to be the only way to get IDE/power cables into the case) the PSU would choke and overheat.

I replaced the old, noisy Socket 7 molex based CPU cooler with a new , quieter socket 370 cooler that uses a 3-pin fan header to reduce the amount of power cables I had to deal with. I ended up taking out the parallel port and replacing that with an AT parallel port blank because I wasn't using it and it was taking up space with the cable that connected to the parallel port header on the motherboard. I kept COM1 though, I might have use for serial someday, but it's unlikely I'll use a parallel port in the near future, especially on that build.

Other than that, specs are the same, and instead of using ugly masking tape I am now using some velcro things I got from Amazon.

I am also using Windows 95A instead of Windows 98 FE. The system is more responsive, and it was far easier to install drivers and configure everything than it was with Windows 98. DOS games actually run better under Windows 95, and boot times have been improved by 5-10 seconds.

All of the drivers I have work with 95, including the motherboard IDE drivers, ESS drivers, S3 drivers, etc. I did not have to download anything new for the system and it works fine, knock on wood. This rebuild was heavily based on optimization and switching to Windows 95 from 98 was part of that optimization process.