The perfect Unreal/ HL1 box? Very subjective... both games play well on more modern hardware so if "perfect" means full settings everything than I'd say a machine as modern as can be would be the perfect machine.

But if in perfect you mean from the timeframe both these games came from, i.e. 1998, then that's a total different ballgame...

Well - I like my AWE64 gold cards - that means a board with an ISA slot, which narrows it down quite a bit.

ncmark wrote:

Well - I like my AWE64 gold cards - that means a board with an ISA slot, which narrows it down quite a bit.

Slot 1 and Socket 370 would be your best bet.

P3 1.4 is the fastest option AFAIK and that will give you plenty of grunt.

But to be honest, if you are using W98, then the AWE64 isn't a good choice. You really want a PCI card, like a Live! or Aureal.

These games might even have surround sound...

I would have to disagree with you there - I have used PCI soundcards and I do not like them. If you want throw away running any DOS games, maybe. But a PCI sound card has to do an emulation for DOS mode. Nothing but trouble in my opinion.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Slot 1 and Socket 370 would be your best bet. […]
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ncmark wrote:

Well - I like my AWE64 gold cards - that means a board with an ISA slot, which narrows it down quite a bit.

Slot 1 and Socket 370 would be your best bet.

P3 1.4 is the fastest option AFAIK and that will give you plenty of grunt.

But to be honest, if you are using W98, then the AWE64 isn't a good choice. You really want a PCI card, like a Live! or Aureal.

These games might even have surround sound...

This is very true.

I have an awesome PIII 1ghz coppermine rig (never had luck with powerleap slotkets) with twin voodoo2's in it and an Awe64 gold. I keep missing EAX for the titles which support it. I still stand by the decision though as it keeps me at only two boxes, rather than three. I might have to break down and go for a third at some point though.

The gap between early 3d accelerated titles and Dos games is a difficult one to bridge. You always end up either giving something up, or running a ton of rigs. Games that have EAX support though often run fine on newer boxes.

I never never really liked the slot-1 processors (much more limited range of cpu coolers, and much more difficult to swap). K6-2 is really underpowered. All of which was why I was calling this board a "perfect" solution - for me anyway. 😀

ncmark wrote:

I never never really liked the slot-1 processors (much more limited range of cpu coolers, and much more difficult to swap)

There were actually some pretty big Slot 1 passive heatsinks made. Slap on a large fan and 😁

Tetrium wrote:

There were actually some pretty big Slot 1 passive heatsinks made.

I liked the one I saw that looked like a freakin' crown

ncmark wrote:

I would have to disagree with you there - I have used PCI soundcards and I do not like them. If you want throw away running any DOS games, maybe. But a PCI sound card has to do an emulation for DOS mode. Nothing but trouble in my opinion.

ISA sound cards suck up CPU time because of the lack of good DMA and busmastering. They also don't do hardware mixing of audio channels because ISA is too slow to handle the transfers. This means even more CPU usage for audio.

You can always have a AWE64 in there alongside a Live or Vortex card.

I've always used headphones with my computer so I've never missed multichannel audio 😀

ncmark wrote:

I've always used headphones with my computer so I've never missed multichannel audio 😀

That's not what I'm referring to. Games will play various sound samples at once. Music, effects, etc. Live and Vortex have DSPs that mix these sounds in hardware instead of having Windows do it. This is faster and it makes a difference on the old CPUs of the time. And also as I said ISA doesn't support busmastering / DMA nearly as well as PCI. This adds significant CPU time.

ISA sound cards are great for DOS but in Windows with late '90s games they become a major bottleneck. A Live/Vortex 2 can mix 32 sounds at once and use about 10% CPU time. An AWE64 would probably use around 50% because Windows would be doing all of the mixing on the CPU.

I see what you are saying. I have used AWE64 and AWE64 gold cards almost exclusively and never really noticed a problem.

Well you asked how to build the perfect Unreal and Half Life box. That tends to remove ISA sound cards from the picture.

The only problem you'll notice is a loss in frame rate. Which you won't notice unless you compare.

Interesting - are ISA sound cards really going to slow you down that much?

For W98, PCI is the way to go. It's as simple as that.

I also believe that you can have an ISA and PCI sound card in the same machine. So if you want DOS legacy sound support, that's not an issue.

Not 100% sure though, so can someone confirm this?

My only experience with PCI was a sound blasted 16 PCI. I didn't like it because it chewed up two interrupts - one for windows and one for the dos emulation. I had a real hard time getting DOS games to work and finally said **** this.

PCI: Windows
ISA: DOS

Having a single card of either type is always a compromise.

When you reboot into DOS the PCI card isn't "visible"...

And the ISA card can be disabled / uninstalled in Windows.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

PCI: Windows ISA: DOS […]
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PCI: Windows
ISA: DOS

Having a single card of either type is always a compromise.

When you reboot into DOS the PCI card isn't "visible"...

And the ISA card can be disabled / uninstalled in Windows.

Ah, but you can't reboot into DOS using soundfonts with an Emu8000 based card 🙁.

I guess a logical question would be can one just drop in a PCI card alongside it and configure it to use interrupts that don't conflict with the ones for "DOS." I should investigate that.

There is always a way 🤣

Some members here have 3 or 4 sound cards in a single machine...