First post, by Hellistor
- Rank
- Member
Hello,
A few hours ago I made a post in Marvin about my Voodoo 3. In that post i mentioned something very nice coming after that one.
Here it is. My ultimate late '90s gaming rig.
I've been building this PC for the last 1&1/2 years now.
The specs are:
Motherboard: Supermicro P6DGU, Dual CPU, Intel 440GX Chipset
CPU: Two Intel Pentium III "Coppermine" 1GHz Slot 1, 100MHz FSB
RAM: Two 256MB sticks of PC133 SDRAM running at 100MHz
Primary Graphics: MSI Geforce2 Ti Pro-VT 64MB
Seconday Graphics: Two STB Blackmagic 3D 12MB (3dfx V2) in SLI
Primary Soundcard: Creative Soundblaster Live!
Secondary Soundcard: Creative Soundblaster 16
Networking: 3Com 10/100 PCI NIC
USB: Generic USB 2.0 Card
HDD: 120GB 7200rpm IDE HDD (not sure what brand right now)
Primary Disc Drive: NEC DVD Drive
Secondary Disc Drive: Jupiter CD-RW Drive
Primary Floppy Drive: 3,5' 1.44MB Floppy Drive
Secondary Floppy Drive: 3,5' 1.44MB Floppy Drive
Peripherals
Monitor: LG 99G
Keyboard: IBM Model M, German Layout, From 1991
USB Mouse: Logitech G402 (for modern precision)
PS/2 Mouse: Microsoft Intellimouse 1.2A
Mousepad: Logitech G440
Speakers: "Multi Media Speaker Systems"-Brand Stereo Speakers
Gamepad: Microsoft Sidewinder gamepad
Joystick: Quickshot QS 201 Super Warrior as well as a Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro (not pictured)
I ordered these two STB Blackmagic 3D off ebay not too long ago, they were the last addition to the machine. I made the SLI cable myself and found the passthrough cable at a fleamarket.
They are in fantastic condition and work perfectly.
Putting them into the machine gave me goosebumps.
Here's a full shot of the interiour. Since I took this picture I put a 12cm fan near the expansion slots instead of the 8cm one.
I have no idea what case this is. It came with my Integris Computers PC my father bought me in 2002. I love the minimalistic look of it though. It even has an intake fan and dust filter.
The I/O area is pretty crazy. Besides the Voodoo passthrough cable I also have a pretty interesting soundcard setup going on. I have a 3,5mm cable passing the Soundblaster 16 into the line-in of the Soundblaster Live! so I don't have to switch between them.
I got some nice input devices as well. A Sidewinder gamepad, a Quickshot QS 201 Super Warrior as well as a Sidewinder 3D Pro (not pictured)
I'm running a Microsoft Intellimouse 1.2A as well as a Logitech G402 with a G400 mousepad. I rarely use the Intellimouse, mostly for troubleshooting and safe mode. I use the G402 because I'm too used to modern mouse accuracy to go to something more befitting the era.
The machine is set up with three partitions. One Windows 98 SE partition, one Windows 2000 SP4 partition and one shared storage partition. I use Windows 2000 mainly to give myself an excuse for having two processors.
Finding all the correct drivers for this machine was a nightmare. I had some serious problems getting the Soundblaster live! to run. I must have reinstalled Windows 98 about 15 times all together to get all the correct drivers and settings together. Surprisingly the Voodoo2s were the easiest to install. Plop them in, install the FastVoodoo2 4.6 Driver and done, works. I feared it would be much worse.
I disabled the Direct3D drivers of the Voodoo2s so they don't conflict with my Geforce2 Ti. They only take over now when a Glide game is started.
Need for Speed II SE looks great on them
As does GLQuake, although it runs better on the Geforce.
And wow is the Geforce doing it's job. This is the Unreal castle flyby at over 70fps at 1024x768x32. The version I'm running is Unreal Gold with the Old Unreal Multimedia OpenGL patch.
Half Life is one of my favourite games and it runs beautifully on both the Voodoo2s and the Geforce2.
While the machine is mostly built for late 90s Windows gaming it's still able to play a lot of 90s DOS games as well. Doom for example runs perfectly. Duke3D, Hexen, Heretic, Jazz Jackrabbit and Descent 2 as well. It's overkill by quite a bit but I don't care. Overkill is the entire philosophy behind this build
So, that's it for now. I have several other builds I might show off in the future, but this is the most interesting one.
Also you probably recognize this if you browse the subreddit /r/retrobattlestations.
I posted a gallery there containing the same pictures a few days ago. Don't worry nobody is plagiarizing, I just wanted to share it here as well.
If you want to look at these pictures at higher resolution, you can check here.
I have one question for you guys though. Running some games on the Voodoo2s in SLI seems to give me "blurring". I can only describe it as the Voodoos not being quite in sync, so one is lagging slightly behind the other one. I can see the alternating scanlines ghosting if that makes sense to you. This is not happening in all games. I have seen it happen in Forsaken, Unreal Gold, Unreal Tournament, as well as the glide patch for Descent, where it literally makes the game unplayable. However, Half Life, Quake 1 and 2, Need for Speed II SE/IIIHP/IVHS are fine. If I turn on Vsync, it vanishes, however I hate using Vsync due to the input latency it causes. I can work around the problem by using the Voodoo 2 tweaker and having profiles for different games, however I'd still like to know what the cause of this is. You guys got any ideas?