@PcBytes, I don't believe so. My SB Live is working fine using this chipset. In both windows and dos emulation. The Via 693A was released in around 1999 and the SB Live around 98/99 I think so there shouldn't be any issues in that regards. I know Via actually acknowledged that there was an issue and so released an update in their 4in1 drivers. I attempted to install the relevant 4in1 drivers on this build but they caused me nothing but issues eg blue screens etc so I did a clean format and started from scratch again. After the new windows installation I reinstalled everything again, including all the windows 98 se hotfixes, and it's been running great ever since. So in saying that, I don't recommend installing the via 4in1 drivers. May work for some but in my case...

Nice build!

Not usually a fan of beige cases, but I like the look of that one.

@m1919, thanks mate 😀

I love beige cases when it comes to retro builds. Admittably though, compared to black cases, you're very limited in what you can do eg: case fans.

I'm surprised you have a working iOmega Zip Drive. I imagined those were right alongside the old Atari E.T. games.

@rodimus80, yeah it works fine. I think when it comes to Zip drives, people either love them or hate them. Personally I love them. Most of my builds have one. That way I can transfer data easily without burning discs. Why not use usb? Because a couple of my builds don't have USB ports.

borgie83 wrote:

@rodimus80, yeah it works fine. I think when it comes to Zip drives, people either love them or hate them. Personally I love them. Most of my builds have one. That way I can transfer data easily without burning discs. Why not use usb? Because a couple of my builds don't have USB ports.

I only use the internal ones if USB might be a problem (or if I think an internal unit is "cool" somehow), but I prefer to use external units for many of my transfers (otherwise I just use a flash drive, the ZIP drive is more "I use it because I can 😁 " ).

@Mau1wurf1977, I watched your video and it helped me out a lot. My sound volume issue in dos is now fixed!! The only issue I've got is that when I run diagnose.exe I get an error with the AWE synthesized music test. Says that the CTMIDI.DRV file cannot be found.

Here's a pic.

hi borgie83, very nice build. unfortunately i found this forum only after i bought my mismatched pci graphics card for my old pc. mine is also based on a via chipset and i have a nvidia gt520 pci card. though initial memory performance of the via chipset was relatively poor, a lot improved after wpcr tweaks and bios update. but still peformance is not comparable to similar systems even for classic games upto 2000.
by any chance, do you have a pci graphics card? if so, can you help me by finding out how much the pci card bottlenecks your system in comparison with your existing agp card? also will there be much difference between win 98 and win xp sp3. unfortunately i have only win me.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I completely agree with you about VIA chipsets. I run a 694X board myself, and the ability to use 1.5GB of RAM with XP is great. The memory performance of VIA chipsets can be just as good as i815, so long as you enable memory interleaving and use CL2 modules.

I run a SB X-Fi and Radeon 9800 Pro on mine. There are no issues at all with this setup. Very speedy and reliable, even though I'm forcing my PC133/CL3 DIMMs to run at 151MHz and CL2.

One weakness that I've found all VIA P3 (and many Athlon) chipsets have is their inability to play nicely with certain nvidia cards. I can totally understand how that would be a deal breaker for some (er...many) people.

hi standard def steve, can you please elaborate on "One weakness that I've found all VIA P3 (and many Athlon) chipsets have is their inability to play nicely with certain nvidia cards"? i have a similar setup. do you have any advice or suggestion for me?

gandhig wrote:

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I completely agree with you about VIA chipsets. I run a 694X board myself, and the ability to use 1.5GB of RAM with XP is great. The memory performance of VIA chipsets can be just as good as i815, so long as you enable memory interleaving and use CL2 modules.

I run a SB X-Fi and Radeon 9800 Pro on mine. There are no issues at all with this setup. Very speedy and reliable, even though I'm forcing my PC133/CL3 DIMMs to run at 151MHz and CL2.

One weakness that I've found all VIA P3 (and many Athlon) chipsets have is their inability to play nicely with certain nvidia cards. I can totally understand how that would be a deal breaker for some (er...many) people.

hi standard def steve, can you please elaborate on "One weakness that I've found all VIA P3 (and many Athlon) chipsets have is their inability to play nicely with certain nvidia cards"? i have a similar setup. do you have any advice or suggestion for me?

I'd like to know this as well. I'm planning to build a rig based on this chipset (It's in my mind atm) and such info might be handy to have beforehand 😀

@gandhig, thanks! The GT520 is definitely much too modern for a retro build and I'd recommend against it if you're ever planning to run Windows 98 as I highly doubt you'll find drivers available. Speaking of that, I'd recommend Windows 98 SE over Windows XP just because of its real mode dos. Windows XP would run absolutely fine though on any build running a cpu 1ghz and above + 512mb or more ram. In my experience, XP just isn't smooth enough on slower CPU's but that's just me I guess. Others may say otherwise.

I do own a Voodoo 3000 PCI card as well as a S3 Trio64V+ PCI card but the rest of my cards are all AGP. The Voodoo 3000 is a bottleneck given my CPU speed but I threw it in there for compatibility reasons. After reading what others have posted though, I'm much better off using an FX5950 AGP card connected to a Voodoo 2 or similar to retain the Voodoo compatibility. The nvidia FX series cards are much more suitable to a pentium 3 1.4ghz Tualatin. I'm glad to hear that they are on par with the Voodoo 3000 when it comes to VESA as well. Who knows, I may not even need a Voodoo card in there for windows based games as nglide seems to work great on my pentium 4 3.4ghz build running an ATI X800 Pro.

Regarding the issue of nvidia cards not mixing well with VIA chipset motherboards, the only nvidia cards I've used are in Intel chipset motherboards so I haven't been able to test this myself. I did find a link though that may be helpful in fixing this issue. Haven't tested this patch so I can't comment yet.

http://forums.epicgames.com/archive/index.php/t-208508.html

gandhig wrote:

hi standard def steve, can you please elaborate on "One weakness that I've found all VIA P3 (and many Athlon) chipsets have is their inability to play nicely with certain nvidia cards"? i have a similar setup. do you have any advice or suggestion for me?

The VIA+NVIDIA bug only rears its ugly head when you use an AGP card. If you are having issues with your PCI GT520, it's probably caused by something else. It wouldn't surprise me if newer NVIDIA drivers require (or perform much better with) a CPU that supports SSE2.

Tetrium wrote:

I'd like to know this as well. I'm planning to build a rig based on this chipset (It's in my mind atm) and such info might be handy to have beforehand 😀

When you run a GeForce FX or newer NVIDIA AGP card on most VIA based boards, 2D performance begins to deteriorate after a few minutes of use. It's a truly bizarre issue. When you first start Windows, 2D GUI performance is as fast as it should be, but after about 10 minutes of use it begins to slow down considerably. Eventually, 2D is so slow that it looks as if GDI acceleration is disabled. This happened with my FX5200, 6800GT, and 7800GS--and it not only occurred on a 694X PIII board, but also on a much newer PT880 Ultra (P4/Core 2) board. Even worse, D3D was completely unusable when the 6800 and 7800 cards were paired with any of the PIII boards (full of artifacts). Luckily, D3D was fine on the AXP and P4/Core 2 boards. Older NV cards, like the GF2MX and GF4-Ti4200 that I tested, didn't seem to have any of these problems.

You may find this thread interesting:
VIA AGP impact on GUI performance

Whether you choose NVIDIA or ATI, you'll most likely have to run in AGP 2X mode if you're going to be using it with a 694 or earlier PIII chipset. Fortunately, I didn't measure any drop in performance by capping my 9800 Pro to AGP 2X. The only VIA PIII chipset that could successfully run my cards in 4X mode all day was the rare (and extremely fast) Apollo Pro 266T. Most Athlon XP boards will have no problem running in 4x mode.

borgie83 and Standard Def Steve, thanks so much for making me aware of this problem, though I never personally experienced it (that or I simply didn't notice). I wonder if certain BIOS settings like the one describing to put AGP to 2x mode will also help (extra settings in addition to putting AGP to 2x I mean).

Very interesting! Thanks for getting it to my attention 😀

Edit: Which hotfixes did you use to get 98SE stable? Are these included in the unofficial service pack?

Edit2: Unfortunately the downloads in the epicgames.com link are missing. Is there anywhere where I can download this or something that can be seen as a successor to this patch?

@Tetrium, I use the unofficial service pack currently being maintained by problemchyld found on this webpage:

http://www.htasoft.com/u98sesp/

They're up to version 3.32 now I think but mine is a couple of months older than this version. There is another unofficial service pack available which is up to version 2.?? But that one is not regularly updated which is why I always use the one in the above link. Also note that you will be given a number of options on install regarding what you would like to install. I only choose the hotfixes, the tweak ui, the windows me/2000 theme, uninstall java and another thing I can't remember. I've noticed that installing the performance tweak option has given me blue screens on some installations so now I only install those options and it's always very stable. Oh and make sure you install all your driver updates for your graphics card, sound card etc before running the unofficial service pack. I've found this way give's me no issues at all as opposed to doing it afterwards.

With the link I provided having broken download links in it, dammit! Just typical of an older thread 🙁 I'll see if I can locate the files elsewhere and get back to you.

@Tetrium, ok try this:

http://downloads.viaarena.com/drivers/others/ … est_driver1.zip

Also even though the via 4in1 drivers downloaded directly from via gave me issues, they may fix your issue. I admit that I used the latest driver though but it appears that I should've used the 4.43 version. This version may be a lot more stable so I will most likely try this myself as well.

http://218.32.192.73/en/support/driversSelect.jsp

Try the via 4in1 driver first before the test patch as the patch is in beta stage even though it's been reported to fix the issue for several people.

Let me know how you go 😀

@Tetrium, (Borgie runs back to computer sweating similar to when his gf arrived home to realise he has used their kitchen table as a test bench for retro hardware due to already using all the space in their study for the same) ...Install the via 4in1 drivers before the unofficial service pack!

borgie83, thanks a lot for taking so much time to help me! 😀

I won't be starting that build very soon though (need to create an extra room for my slower systems first, will take some time), but it's better to have the files needed before they disappear from the internet forever. I think the new unofficial SP works only with the English version of 98SE. ALso I wonder if these fixes were also released for Windows ME. Now I once downloaded all available ME updates (for the Dutch ME) and I should have those somewhere stored away, but I have no idea what the hotfixes are called so no idea how to identify them.

And anyway, my planned build is focussing around a s370 VIA board (I think has the exact same chipset as yours) and a VIA CPU (the board is on the compatibility list on the VIA site) and because of it's crummy FPU, it's gonna have one of the slower 3DFX graphics cards in it's AGP slot (another way to prevent AGP-related trouble) and likely I'm gonna use an English 98SE with the latest unofficial service pack.

At any rate, this thread is going into my favorites 😁

Cheers! And I'll let you know how things go 😀

@Tetrium, No problems! That's what vogons is for 😀

I'm not sure but I think you're right about it only being for the English version. I never bothered to check any other languages. There might be an ME service pack available but as much as I do like ME I don't use it on any of my builds. Windows 98 SE, when setup correctly, works perfect. Especially once you install the ME/2000 theme pack from the unofficial service pack. Changes all the icons and overall look so you get the best of both worlds. Plus using unofficial USB 2.0 drivers (http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/win9 … age-drivers.php) gives you great USB support. All while still retaining real mode dos, something which ME/2000/XP obviously lacks.

Regarding your new build using the s370 via m/board, if you're unable to get your nvidia card working to your satisfaction, a Voodoo 3000/4500/5500 should be enough to keep you gaming smoothly into at least 2001. I'm sure you most likely have a newer build to use for any games made after then. At least from 2001 onwards, most games seem to run perfectly on windows 7 64 bit using whatever graphics/sound card you may have.

Look forward to seeing how you went 😀

borgie83 wrote:

@gandhig, thanks! The GT520 is definitely much too modern for a retro build and I'd recommend against it if you're ever planning […]
Show full quote

@gandhig, thanks! The GT520 is definitely much too modern for a retro build and I'd recommend against it if you're ever planning to run Windows 98 as I highly doubt you'll find drivers available. Speaking of that, I'd recommend Windows 98 SE over Windows XP just because of its real mode dos. Windows XP would run absolutely fine though on any build running a cpu 1ghz and above + 512mb or more ram. In my experience, XP just isn't smooth enough on slower CPU's but that's just me I guess. Others may say otherwise.

I do own a Voodoo 3000 PCI card as well as a S3 Trio64V+ PCI card but the rest of my cards are all AGP. The Voodoo 3000 is a bottleneck given my CPU speed but I threw it in there for compatibility reasons. After reading what others have posted though, I'm much better off using an FX5950 AGP card connected to a Voodoo 2 or similar to retain the Voodoo compatibility. The nvidia FX series cards are much more suitable to a pentium 3 1.4ghz Tualatin. I'm glad to hear that they are on par with the Voodoo 3000 when it comes to VESA as well. Who knows, I may not even need a Voodoo card in there for windows based games as nglide seems to work great on my pentium 4 3.4ghz build running an ATI X800 Pro.

Regarding the issue of nvidia cards not mixing well with VIA chipset motherboards, the only nvidia cards I've used are in Intel chipset motherboards so I haven't been able to test this myself. I did find a link though that may be helpful in fixing this issue. Haven't tested this patch so I can't comment yet.

http://forums.epicgames.com/archive/index.php/t-208508.html

@borgie83, thanks for the info. i will try that out.

@gandhig, no problems! Good luck 😀