retrofool wrote:

What does the VOGONS crowd think of my choices?

I'm not so sure I would want to choose a girlfriend to live in my house now 🤣

Sounds good, just bear in mind that most DirectX games won't be accelerated on a secondary display in Win98. Card specific APIs may work on secondary display (Glide does).

The alternative to using a secondary display is to switch primary card in the BIOS between AGP & PCI. Not sure how seamlessly this is handled in Win98.

Good choices, you can actually be more aggressive on box one and slow it down to 386 level if you need.

Bjt, I do in fact switch the primary card from AGP to PCI and vice versa in the BIOS depending on which one I want to use and win98 handles it without any trouble. Of course since I only use one monitor, I have to change the monitor plug from one to the other though. And Carlostex, I also had that contingency in mind just in case I do decide to try out some even older games than DOOM. I laughed out loud at Tetrium's comment, quite amusing 😉 Thanks for the input!

On box 2, I decided to try to run all the Mechwarrior games I have from Mech2 PVR all the way to Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries. I only like to use my ancient Microsoft Sidewinder Pro 3D with these games so I attempted to use it on this system. I have the unofficial sidewinder fix files which have served me well on other boxes (such as box 1 here) so I did the usual install routine and no way would it work. I finally ended up enabling the on board AC97 and then disabling all the sound stuff in the BIOS but leaving the game port enabled to use the on board game port. Then I disabled the Aureal card's game port in windows and did the install with the Sidewinder on the on board game port and it worked. So at least I can use my Sidewinder now although it's kind of a kludge. Has anyone else had problems trying to use the Aureal game port with a Sidewinder? If so, did you manage to get it to work?

Nice choices, very similar to what I boiled mine down to. What were the 7 you put into storage?

Without going into too much wall-of-text detail:

A socket A athlon 1700+ system that I stole the Obsidian 2 SBi out of and one of the M3D's and the S3 ViRGE. It still has it's Radeon 9600 pro, awe64 and drives.

A socket 478 1.5 northwood SDRAM system with a Radeon 9600 standard, SB live and IDE drives.

A slot 1 P3 550 Katmai system that I stole the 2 Voodoo 2's, Rage Pro AGP and the awe64 out of. It had SCSI drives and I stuck an SB16 and a Kyro2 in it.

A dual slot 1 with 2 P3 450 Katmai's in it, a Geforce 2 MX, full SCSI drives and SB live.

A dual PPRO 200 sytem that has a TNT2, Voodoo 2, SB16, and SCSI drives.

A Cyrix 5x86-120 VESA system with ATI MACH 32 video, SB16, SCSI CDROM, IDE drives.

An NEC V20 8 MHz system with 640K, VGA, 10MB MFM drive, 1.44 floppy, Protac sound card. (started out as my first computer in 1988).

Plus a massive load of parts and cases that I could probably build another 7 sytems with, 🤣.

I don't think I could store a 5x_- and a dual ppro 🙁

Tetrium wrote:

retrofool wrote:

What does the VOGONS crowd think of my choices?

I'm not so sure I would want to choose a girlfriend to live in my house now 🤣

As long as she doesn't hear you refer to her as a "retro box". 🤣

Hatta wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

retrofool wrote:

What does the VOGONS crowd think of my choices?

I'm not so sure I would want to choose a girlfriend to live in my house now 🤣

As long as she doesn't hear you refer to her as a "retro box". 🤣

Well actually, a "box" (especially a cardboard one) is also a "name" for a certain female bodypart, so that would be very awkward indeed 🤣

Thanks Hatta, I just spit chocolate milk on my keyboard, LMFAO!!

Ok, most of box 2 had to be replaced, it was just far too unstable. I replaced most of it with this:

Asus P4B motherboard with a P4 northwood 2.8/512/400 and 512Mb PC133 SDRAM. It originally had a P4 1.5/256/400 in it but I salvaged the 2.8 out of a dead RAMBUS system, I had tried the 2.8 in the P4B awhile ago but it didn't boot, so I never looked at it again until now. Turns out it just needed the latest BIOS to run.

ATI RADEON 9600 pro because the savage 4 was not fast enough and would lock up using S3 metal in Rune and Unreal anyway.

Neither the Aureal vortex 2 card nor the SB live! platinum I had would install properly in any PCI slot (I tried them all). The Aureal complained that it was on a "secondary" PCI controller and refused to install any of the dos, mpu401 or game port stuff. The Live! didn't complain but refused to install the same stuff as the Aureal. The only card that worked was my SB Vibra 128 PCI (Ensoniq) card, so that's what it has in it (the game port actually works perfectly as well).

The Obsidian 2 SBi hates the RADEON for some reason (all sorts of weird artifacts and I couldn't open the display properties) so it didn't get installed. Instead it has a Techworks Voodoo 1 for games that exclusively need it (like Special Ops, Rangers on Patrol).

The Matrox M3d powerVR stayed in as it works fine.

I never really liked P4's because of their crappy long pipeline architecture and heat generation, but in Win98SE this thing is surprisingly fast, even bottlenecked with SDRAM.

Maybe if Vetz reads this he can tell me why Mechwarrior 2 3dfx won't run on this machine (it throws a memory exception when I try to launch) yet every other non-P4 machine I've used it in it works fine. It works fine with any other game I use it on such as Tombraider 3dfx, Special Ops, even Quake 2.