tayyare wrote:

CPU: Of course depends on your MB choice, but my personal preference is almost always 133 FSB PIII 1000 coppermine. In my opinion anything above 450MHz and 100MHz FSB is ok as an enough overkill for w9x only games. People also look after (mostly modded) 1.4GHz tualetins but I'm not one of them.

Just found one of those for sale less than 60 km away from here, it's a SL52R P3 1ghz, and seller only asks for 5 euros. Should I pick it? And if so, which motherboards should I search for, it's a socket 370 coppermine.

P.S. Also found an Asus Tusl2-c for the same price, it doesn't have an ISA slot, but I find some positive posts about it here, so why not?

For 5EU, I think it does not worth even to ask. I would just go and buy it. By the way, for the last couple of months or so, I own' one of those Tualatin guys...🤣

I don't know about TUSL2-C, but I used in the past a CUSL2-C (BP edition) with happiness. It was my first PIII system.

I checked the TUSL2-C, and seen that its pretty much a CUSL2-C with Tualatin support, so it also seems good.

Even better, I found a whole working PC for 10 euros, with the same Tusl2-c motherboard, a 1ghz celeron, 512mb ram, 60gb maxtor hdd, nvidia geforce2 mx400, sound blaster 5.1 (no idea which exactly, he doesnt say), a cd-rom, and keyboard and mouse not shown in the pics. If I get that, I can just stick the pentium 3 in it, and a Turtle Beach Montego 2 thats up for sale for 8 euros, install Win 98SE, and be ready to start gaming. Only problem is, the guy who's selling that PC doesn't wish to send it over with a courier, he wants me to go pick it up myself... I should probably ask a friend that's living close to him to go pick it up and send it to me.

The one aspect that I wish to experience from retro gaming the most right now is Aureal A3D. It's probably the only thing that can't be experienced on a modern PC. There is ALchemy for EAX, there's nGlide for 3dfx Glide, there is DOSBox for the oldest games, but for A3D there is nothing remotely close to the real thing.

God Of Gaming wrote:

Even better, I found a whole working PC for 10 euros, with the same Tusl2-c motherboard, a 1ghz celeron, 512mb ram, 60gb maxtor hdd, nvidia geforce2 mx400, sound blaster 5.1 (no idea which exactly, he doesnt say), a cd-rom, and keyboard and mouse not shown in the pics. If I get that, I can just stick the pentium 3 in it, and a Turtle Beach Montego 2 thats up for sale for 8 euros, install Win 98SE, and be ready to start gaming. Only problem is, the guy who's selling that PC doesn't wish to send it over with a courier, he wants me to go pick it up myself... I should probably ask a friend that's living close to him to go pick it up and send it to me.

The one aspect that I wish to experience from retro gaming the most right now is Aureal A3D. It's probably the only thing that can't be experienced on a modern PC. There is ALchemy for EAX, there's nGlide for 3dfx Glide, there is DOSBox for the oldest games, but for A3D there is nothing remotely close to the real thing.

A3D is totally worth it. So far I've found Half-Life to be incredible for it. There may be other good examples.

Hello guys, I'm back 😀 A lot of stuff happened so I wasn't able to get anything last year, but now I finally did 😀 I managed to secure a few components and build a working Win 98SE retro PC.

Current components:
mobo: Asus CUSL2-C
cpu: Penium III 1000mhz (coppermine)
ram: 128mb PC133
graphics: ATi Radeon 9250 128mb
sound: Turtle Beach Montego (AU8820B2)
hdd: 40gb Maxtor
psu: 350w unknown brand

Most of these components are only temporary and I will be replacing them with better ones. With that said, it does work well with current components, I just tested playing some Half-Life 1.0.0.9 and it ran great. I have a good idea what better components to replace, but there's something I'm not too sure about, so I wanted to ask for help, which is what reminded me I was a member here 😀

Here's what, the graphics card, I want to replace it with an Nvidia card because of better DX3-5 and OpenGL compatibility, and it has to be one that supports DirectX 9, in other words either a FX5xxx or a 6xxx nvidia card. I won't actually play any DX9 games on this retro PC, it's just so that I can get nglide wrapper working, and that way avoiding having to find a 3dfx Voodoo5, and yes the nglide wrapper does work in Win 98SE. So this is what I'm asking, which would be better, an FX 5xxx, or a 6xxx? And what model exactly, the top models FX5950 Ultra / 6800 Ultra, or some of the lower models would be better (and why). Compatibility with older games and stability are more important than outright performance btw.

If compatibility with older games is the important factor, you might want to go with Geforce 4 or lower, and stay away from FX5000/6000 series. You may fulfill your glide requirements by adding a Voodoo 2 or two in your system, which will be rather fitting for a PIII class machine.

Even though I kinda adore Tualatin, people tend to forget how good s370 as a platform really was. Even the LX single-CPU-socket boards that only supported s370 Mendocino (no Celeron Coppermines) were fantastic platforms in their own right!

To me, Coppermine 1000 is just as magnificant as Tualatin-S 1400 (except that Tualatin will obviously be a bit faster).

It's one heck of a good platform, mostly limited by Intel's decision to limit max memory to 512MB (440BX could to 1GB, server variants could to even more).

I wish I had more i820 boards though, either s370 or Slot1, RAMBUS is quite cheap, especially since for Win9x, one won't need 512MB Rambus modules.

According to some research I did, FX5800 or Quadro FX2000 (both NV30) might be what I need here. Don't see any for sale, I'll stay with the radeon 9250 and wait for one to pop up. I can test ATi TruForm in the meantime 😀

Just ordered an Intel PRO/1000GT gigabit network card for this retro PC, should be here the day after tomorrow, this should help a lot with sharing files with the retro PC 😀

BTW, I hear I need some sort of audio cable connecting my CD drive and my sound card for games that read audio from the CD to work properly? I can see there's indeed such a connector on the back of my CD drive. What is the name of this cable exactly, or in other words, what search terms should I enter in the search bar to find one of those for sale 😀

edit. still no FX5800 or Quadro FX2000 for sale, but a good deal on FX5950 Ultra popped up, should I get it? I hear it doesn't have as good backwards support for older games as the FX5800 though?