Joseph, how did you know the motherboard has VT8237R Plus southbridge? The manual speaks only of VT8237R and so does the text on the chip, at least on the image I googled. Even the CPU-Z image you posted shows only VT8237.

It obviously does have the Plus version since you are rocking modern SSD's with it, but how the heck did you find out that it does?

Sombrero wrote on 2022-08-18, 02:07:

Joseph, how did you know the motherboard has VT8237R Plus southbridge? The manual speaks only of VT8237R and so does the text on the chip, at least on the image I googled. Even the CPU-Z image you posted shows only VT8237.

It obviously does have the Plus version since you are rocking modern SSD's with it, but how the heck did you find out that it does?

It’s probably a matter of revision. This one certainly has the “Plus” south bridge.

Sombrero wrote on 2022-08-18, 02:07:

Joseph, how did you know the motherboard has VT8237R Plus southbridge? The manual speaks only of VT8237R and so does the text on the chip, at least on the image I googled.

It's written on the chip. Here's a close up pic:

Even the CPU-Z image you posted shows only VT8237.

I don't think CPU-Z is precise enough to distinguish between the different revisions of that southbridge. At least not in the Win9x compatible "Vintage Edition" which I'm using. Heck, that version couldn't even measure the frequency at which my memory is operating (DDR400).

It obviously does have the Plus version since you are rocking modern SSD's with it, but how the heck did you find out that it does?

If you mean how I knew that the Plus version would support SATA II and SATA III drives, it was stated in one of VIA's public announcements:

CHIP FIRM VIA issued a note to its customers telling them of problems with chipset support for hard drives using the Serial ATA II standard. It said that VT8237 and VT8237R chipsets don't provide forward compatibility for S-ATA II, which is important as hard drive makers are beginning to manufacture this type of drive. But Via is readying the release of VT8237R Plus, which will solve the problem.

I can't access the original article (link no longer active?) but here's a post on the HDDGuru forums which references it.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-08-18, 04:52:

Sombrero wrote on 2022-08-18, 02:07:

Joseph, how did you know the motherboard has VT8237R Plus southbridge? The manual speaks only of VT8237R and so does the text on the chip, at least on the image I googled.

It's written on the chip. Here's a close up pic:

VT8237R_Plus.jpg

Alright so it is written on the chip, that explains it. I probably looked at a picture of an earlier revision like bloodem said.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-08-18, 04:52:

If you mean how I knew that the Plus version would support SATA II and SATA III drives, it was stated in one of VIA's public announcements:

No, I meant how you knew the motherboard had the plus version not knowing it was written on the chip, sorry if I was a bit unclear. I was just confused how you could tell it was VT8237R Plus and was wondering was there some other way to see it or did you x-ray the chip or something 😁

You can always use mechanical drive with correct jumper settings.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-08-17, 00:30:

stef80 wrote on 2022-08-16, 21:09:

And BTW, great thread 😀. s754/AGP is my favourite platform.
@Joseph_Joestar, are you using VIA southbridge SATA ports to run SSDs, or is there other controller ?

Cheers! And yeah, just the VIA southbridge, no other controllers

This works because my board uses the VT8237R Plus chip. That revision fixed an incompatibility with SATA3 drives which previous versions of this southbridge suffered from.

I wish that was the case with the K8V SE Deluxe I recently acquired, but I'm not so lucky. Sure, it has a Promise 20378 SATA/RAID controller as well, but it is significantly slower than the native Via controller when used with a PATA to SATA adapter. The board has four SATA ports on it, but the best read/write speed with an SSD is achieved by using one of the IDE ports and an adapter.

Yes, Promise TX2 SATA150 ... it's probably connected to (shared) PCI bus. But, better than nothing. At least you don't need TX2/TX4 PCI card.
I don't think you need adapter for Promise, if using SATA drives.

Got a new display for this build. It's a Samsung SyncMaster S24B420BW 24" LCD monitor with a native resolution of 1920x1200. This allows me to use the 1600x1200 resolution (with the 4:3 aspect ratio) in most Win9x games, and even some early WinXP titles as well. I do get black borders on the side of course, but the centered image is pixel perfect and looks excellent. As an example, here's Splinter Cell (slowly) running at 1600x1200 on this monitor:

DOS games like Doom which use the 320x200 resolution get upscaled to 1920x1200 (a clean 6x scale on each axis) and then set to the 4:3 aspect ratio. This ends up looking fairly nice as well. Not sure how well it will come across in photos, but here's a pic:

SVGA games from the DOS era running at 640x480 also seem to scale fine. Here's a photo of WarCraft 2 on this monitor:

Lastly, Win9x games which run at a fixed 800x600 resolution (e.g. Heroes of Might and Magic 3) also seem to scale very well on this monitor:

Again, I'm not sure how well this comes across in photos, but the end result looks quite nice to my eyes. Also, since I just got this monitor today, I haven't played around with all the image settings yet. It might be possible to get an even cleaner image with some additional tweaks.

Anything "native resolution" and "clean scaling" doesn't need good pictures for me to know it's the best way to watch it. Congrats on your 1920x1200 monitor 😀

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-01-14, 14:44:

Anything "native resolution" and "clean scaling" doesn't need good pictures for me to know it's the best way to watch it. Congrats on your 1920x1200 monitor 😀

Cheers! 😀

I'm very happy with the monitor, especially since it was a fairly cheap second-hand purchase. Didn't expect that it would perform this well to be honest. I currently have it hooked up to this system via VGA and to my WinXP/7 rig using DVI. Turns out, this one monitor can cover all of my games from the 90s DOS era, over Win9x, all the way up to WinXP titles from 2009. Good stuff.

Updated my benchmarks to include the 1600x1200 results, with and without Anisotropic Filtering. I like how using AF can even boost the visuals in older games which don't support it natively, if it's forced in the driver options. On the other hand, I don't feel like I need Anti Aliasing at 1600x1200, at least on this 24" monitor. Everything looks good enough without it. Speaking of games, I managed to get Thief Gold running at 1600x1200:

Normally, the retail CD version tops out at 1024x768, but you can edit the cam.cfg file to add higher resolutions manually, like so:

1game_screen_size 1600 1200

Not sure if this can be done with every other resolution, but I'm pleased that 1600x1200 works perfectly. The game looks and runs great!

A few samples from my physical game collection:

Not all of these will be played on this specific system (e.g. NFS3 will look better on my Voodoo 3 rig) but they are all from the Win9x era of gaming. I already have most of these in digital form (via GOG, Steam etc.) but it's still good to have physical copies as backup. On average, each of these games cost me about 5 EUR, some a bit more, some slightly less. They are all budget re-releases so this isn't much of a surprise. I had some of them for 15+ years (e.g. the Blizzard stuff) while others are fairly recent pickups. Anyhow, here's a short review of some of these:

Need for Speed III

This one comes with the Banshee patch on the disc (separate install) but not the Voodoo 3 patch. Of course, you can download the latter from the internet if needed, and get proper fog effects by combining the two as per these instructions.

Tomb Raider 1&2

The first game in this bundle is completely missing the CD audio tracks, which is unforgivable. Fortunately, you can patch them back in with a bit of effort, but it's still crazy that they shipped the disc in such a state. The second game is fine, and all the audio tracks are accounted for.

Thief II

This seems to be a later re-release, pressed on a single DVD instead of multiple CDs. It has a modernized installer which works without issues on WinXP and Win7, while still running fine under Win9x. This release is pre-patched to version 1.18.

Unreal Anthology

This box appears to have suffered some liquid damage at the hands of its previous owner. I gave it a thorough cleaning, but the paper insert was already ripped, so I taped it together as best I could. Despite mentioning Win7 and Vista on the box, this compilation can actually be installed on Win9x. The main autorun file won't work, spewing a kernel error, but if you simply run setup.exe from the Disk1 folder, you're good to go. I also like the inclusion of the soundtrack on a standard audio CD. Unreal's music remains superb to this day.

P.S.

I kinda stopped caring about physical games when Steam came around, but I regret that now, since you can no longer run it on WinXP. GOG is my preferred solution nowadays, since it's completely DRM-free, and because it allows you to back up the offline installers to local storage. That said, it does feel nice to have some physical copies at hand, even if they are budget releases. 😀

Hi, what a nice build you got!
I’d like to know if you are able to reproduce this fullscreen graphical corruption problem for a dos game:

• Windows ME + Security update CD.
• GF FX + ForceWare 45.23.
• R. Loew MEMPATCH without limiting the accessible 1gigabyte of RAM.
• Duke3D Atomic ed. 800x600.

It will give horizontal stripes of graphical garbage on screen. And pressing Alt+Enter twice doesn’t help like in some other cases.
Could you please post the result? Thanks.

Bruno128 wrote on 2023-04-04, 16:34:

Hi, what a nice build you got!
I’d like to know if you are able to reproduce this fullscreen graphical corruption problem for a dos game:

Seems to be working fine for me, no issues with the graphics in Duke3D. I'm using a VGA connection, in case that matters. Also, my game version is 1.5 because I applied the latest official patch to the Atomic Edition.

BTW, I think this is the first time I saw Duke3D run at 70+ FPS in that resolution. 😀 I don't usually play DOS games on this system.

Thanks for taking so many detailed notes and sharing with us! Very cool

Ya I found out hardway that there is somekinda incompatibility that can happen with FX5900 in 9x with a DVI connection, but theres no issues with VGA on mine.

Nice Rig btw, I got somthing similar and its killer. But GTA SA is basically the end of the road. Anything less than that runs great it's playable though. Vice City runs better dispite people always saying its more demanding its not.

You should try running 3 sound cards like I did. YMF744 and Vortex 2 in 9x and XFI in XP. I didn't think many of the games that would use the creative features wouldn't run on XP but i thought of a few games that would benifit from XG and Aureal cards in 9x that wouldn't run on XP so ya. I connected the Vortex 2 to the YMF744 though spdif. I just disable the 2 cards in XP and 9x has no idea what an XFI is so its not a problem. One uses IRQ 5 and the other uses 7. Threw a single voodoo 2 in mine too becasue why not.

ATi_Loyalist wrote on 2023-04-16, 00:42:

Thanks for taking so many detailed notes and sharing with us! Very cool

You're welcome! 😀

I'm glad if those notes can help anyone else with their retro journey.

Warlord wrote on 2023-04-16, 04:12:

Ya I found out hardway that there is somekinda incompatibility that can happen with FX5900 in 9x with a DVI connection, but theres no issues with VGA on mine.

Interesting. What issues are you experiencing exactly? I'm using a DVI connection most of the time, and I haven't had any problems so far. I do switch to VGA when I'm not playing games at the monitor's native resolution (1600x1200 at the 4:3 aspect ratio) since Nvidia's upscaling looks too blurry over DVI.

You should try running 3 sound cards like I did. YMF744 and Vortex 2 in 9x and XFI in XP. I didn't think many of the games that would use the creative features wouldn't run on XP but i thought of a few games that would benifit from XG and Aureal cards in 9x that wouldn't run on XP so ya. I connected the Vortex 2 to the YMF744 though spdif. I just disable the 2 cards in XP and 9x has no idea what an XFI is so it's not a problem. One uses IRQ 5 and the other uses 7. Threw a single voodoo 2 in mine too becasue why not.

Very cool setup! You pretty much covered all the bases with those cards, including Glide compatibility. I do have a Vortex 2 and a Voodoo 3 in another rig, so I don't need them here. And there's an X-Fi in my dedicated WinXP system as well.

As for the YMF744, I had briefly considered adding it here, but I have other systems where I play DOS games. That card does have XG music which is nice, and I do occasionally use it for Final Fantasy 7 and such, just not on this PC.

Welp the problem was whenever I launched the command prompt in 9x, the dosbox window would instantly disappeaer when connected to DVI. No such problem when connected to VGA.

I couldn't find much about this problem other than 2 thread on here with a similar problem, but wasn't exactly the same as mine. One comment theres some bug with the nvida drivers that accelerate the vesa bios when run through DVI, where the VGA port does not. Other thread Ruthan had some problem and some comment about VESA compatibility on DVI is worst.

It could of been a memroy address range conflict specific to the hardware on my system who knows but Either way changing it to VGA or using a DVI I to VGA passthrough adapter fix the problem.

Warlord wrote on 2023-04-18, 08:46:

Welp the problem was whenever I launched the command prompt in 9x, the dosbox window would instantly disappeaer when connected to DVI. No such problem when connected to VGA.

Can confirm, happens on my system as well with 45.23 drivers. I never noticed this because I rarely play DOS games on this rig, and I don't use DVI for non-native resolutions due to the extra blur that it introduces.

However, I then tried the 53.04 driver and the problem didn't occur. Maybe it's a bug that Nvidia fixed at some point?