VOGONS


Hyped for my new 98/XP computer!

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First post, by dumpsterac1d

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Note: I will edit to include pics once I get home.

Hey folks! Detailing this system I built recently, pretty much everything is working as it should, and I have a few extraneous questions toward the end.

GOAL:
To get the widest breadth of playability from a desktop PC, from as far back to as far forward as possible. Have yet to test compatibility with a lot of older titles, more on that later.

Motherboard:
Supermicro P4SCA
This is the one component of this build I have been most excited about. This motherboard is an ATX PGA 478 socket motherboard with ISA, IDE, and SATA connections on-board. I spent far too much on this, but it allows me to do several things, like choose a classic ISA sound cards while booting from a SATA SSD. Downsides? Expensive, no AGP for graphics, and some compatibility issues with DMA and IRQ (I essentially had to disable the parallel port to enable the sound card I chose to work properly. Not a huge loss and I'm sure if I moved the card around to a different slot or re-routed some IRQs in settings it would have worked, but I want the sound card to be default for compatibility's sake.)

CPU:
Intel Pentium 4 HT 3.06Ghz 533FSB 512MB L2
This was a bit annoying. The mobo supports 800mhz FSB, but doesn't support Pentium 4 processors using .09 dye size, and I can't find a P4 that is .13 dye that goes to 800mhz FSB. Maybe I didn't look hard enough? Another interesting note, the motherboard was shipped with an incompatible processor partially installed 😉

RAM:
Kingston HyperX DDR400 512MB x2
Since I am dual-booting with XP and 98 I wanted to try installing 1GB of RAM. My last build had 512MB because I read in several places this was a) more than enough and b) the most you could install without 98SE experiencing issues... Both turned out to be false, as later games with Win98 installers chug pretty terribly, regardless of the amt of VRAM your graphics card has... And 98 is handling the new RAM swimmingly, it sees the full amount and I haven't experienced any lockups thus far.

GPU:
EVGA Geforce 6200 PCI
This is technically in flux. I have been experiencing the same issues as other Nvidia cards from that era, where many games will not "see" the card, and will resort to software rendering. If I do select higher resolutions in the game's menu, sometimes this results in a complete system lockup, which will reset win98's desktop size and screen refresh rate back to 800x600 @ 60hz. Coming to the realization that Nvidia cards are no good for Win95/98 games that need GPU support.

Due to this, I'm going to have to install 2 ATI graphics cards, one for 98 and another for XP. This way I'll have full compatibility with DX9 games in XP, and DX8 and lower games in Win98. I have an ATI Radeon 9250 PCI 256 that has performed extremely well in my other 98 machine, so I will grab another for this PC. I have just ordered a Radeon X1300 PCI that will be for XP. Hoping to get an auto-switcher for the VGA outs as well.

Audio:
Soundblaster CT4380 AWE64 Value
So this was a measured decision... The AWE64 Gold is a great card, but this card is essentially the good bits of 64 Gold minus soundfont RAM. I, for one, don't particularly geek out on soundfonts so spending 33 USD on a card Vs. 100+ was a good choice. XP already had drivers that worked great for the card, and 98 also found drivers that work decently well. I haven't found a need to update them, change settings, anything; it just works. And it sounds great. Still have to set up DOS to use it, but I feel the AWE64 line has enough modern features that make early 2000s games sound good while allowing older stuff to sound good as well. Added bonus, it has a PC speaker input header 😀

PSU:
SeaSonic M12II 520
I went with this supply mainly due to the fact that it's modular and the number of connectors it has available. it shipped with 2 cables which had molex connectors, unlike many other modular power supplies. It's super quiet.

Drives:
TEAC FD-55GFR 5.25 floppy drive with black front plate 😎 . This is one of the most reliable and robust 5.25 drives I've had the joy of installing. Very cool.
This abomination. I don't know why I did it. It's going to eat one of my disks. Why. It's loud. I hate it. I love it. I will probably replace it.
ATADA SU800 SSD 128gb x3. More than enough storage for 98SE, XP, and DOS, as well as an extra disk to share files between all of the systems.
Icy Dock Hot-Swap 5.25 drive bay. I like this thing. It allows me to keep OSes physically separate, while still allowing me to pick and choose which files are shared. I personally dislike multi-boot systems, so this lets me get a clean removal after every reboot. And it lets me move my system to a case that might not have external 3.5in bays and still have space for a floppy drive.
A 48x Samsung CD-ROM drive.

Case:
Thermaltake Soprano. I love this case. That's all.

Info and Questions:

This has been a fun project, but I know that I'm definitely going to need to regularly utilize MoSlo to roll the CPU back to 386/486 levels to play things. A few questions about Moslo-
I have my 98SE drive set to Bootgui=0 so that it loads to DOS 7 by default. I plan on adding a few .bat files to the c:\ drive that will allow me to set moslo to a few pre-defined settings, and keep it resident. One thing I've noticed is that the "official" parameters for emulating a 386/486 are far too slow to run my test program which is "Hostage" from 1989. Will I need to try numerous settings until I find the right one, or is there a reason anyone can think of that MoSlo would be configuring itself slower on a P4 machine? Also: after setting up a .bat file that will load moslo into resident memory, is there a way to unload it when I type "win", or will I need to program another windows loader script that unloads it?

Another Q regarding RAM... has anyone tried to load more than 1 GB of ram into a 98SE machine and just set the system to ignore the other GB? Does this work?

Something else I might attempt if I do experience issues, is installing a few different cards into the same motherboard, and disabling them somehow depending on the OS I am running. For example; if the Geforce 6200 won't run X-Wing OK, I might install another card alongside it, and connect the VGA outputs to an autoswitching VGA box. Anyone done this?

Thanks all, like I said, pics to come.

Last edited by dumpsterac1d on 2019-04-11, 14:22. Edited 2 times in total.

Reply 1 of 24, by winuser_pl

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Hi. This system is just an overkill for Windows 98 SE. I would rather prefer to have two separate machines (actually I have and it works nice).
#Machine 1: Pentium 3 Katmai or AMD K6. Total 512 MB SDRAM.
#Machine 2: Your Pentium 4 with HT. 2GB DDR-400.

Another Q regarding RAM... has anyone tried to load more than 1 GB of ram into a 98SE machine and just set the system to ignore the other GB? Does this work?

Yes, it will fully work.

PC1: Highscreen => FIC PA-2005, 64 MB EDO RAM, Pentium MMX 200, S3 Virge + Voodoo 2 8 MB
PC2: AOpen => GA-586SG, 512 MB SDRAM, AMD K6-2 400 MHz, Geforce 2 MX 400

Reply 2 of 24, by dumpsterac1d

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Oh, I know it's overkill for 98SE. Incompatible? Not thus far, 98SE runs well on it, quite fast, and works with everything I've thrown at it. So I don't think I've found a reason to *not* use 98 on this machine? I have a second PC which is running a P3 specifically for 98.

Reply 3 of 24, by winuser_pl

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Yeah, that's your decision. It will eventually work like I said.
My approach is to make the feelings as much real as it could be back in the time. That's why i prefer not overpowered builds. 😊

PC1: Highscreen => FIC PA-2005, 64 MB EDO RAM, Pentium MMX 200, S3 Virge + Voodoo 2 8 MB
PC2: AOpen => GA-586SG, 512 MB SDRAM, AMD K6-2 400 MHz, Geforce 2 MX 400

Reply 4 of 24, by dumpsterac1d

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winuser_pl wrote:

Yeah, that's your decision. It will eventually work like I said.
My approach is to make the feelings as much real as it could be back in the time. That's why i prefer not overpowered builds. 😊

Right on! This fulfills my desire to have an all-in-one solution with an emphasis on compatibility. And I've always wanted to do a "reverse sleeper build", but the case is about as bombastic as I can bear 🤣

Reply 5 of 24, by winuser_pl

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I'm also wondering: why GeForce 6200. And PCI ?! 😁 I had this card back in the day, it was horrible experience. 64 bit bus,slow as hell.
I would give a chance to GeForce 6600 or even 6800.

PC1: Highscreen => FIC PA-2005, 64 MB EDO RAM, Pentium MMX 200, S3 Virge + Voodoo 2 8 MB
PC2: AOpen => GA-586SG, 512 MB SDRAM, AMD K6-2 400 MHz, Geforce 2 MX 400

Reply 6 of 24, by dumpsterac1d

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Because this board doesn't have AGP 🙁 The price of a mobo with ISA/AGP/PCI/SATA/IDE/Socket478 was well over $500. So I went with this card. No complaints thus far.

Reply 7 of 24, by xjas

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Looks like it has AGP but it's occupied by an onboard ATI Rage XL. 😜 Sometimes I think they gimped server boards on purpose so that the gaming market couldn't 'discover' them. Cool board though!

I know this is kind of basic, but what IRQ did you put the sound card on? IIRC either IRQ5 or 7 was 'shared' with LPT1, and I can see a more modern board with a robust PnP implementation not letting you do that. You might be able to remap the parallel port if you don't want to change the sound card.

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 8 of 24, by dumpsterac1d

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xjas wrote:

Looks like it has AGP but it's occupied by an onboard ATI Rage XL. 😜 Sometimes I think they gimped server boards on purpose so that the gaming market couldn't 'discover' them. Cool board though!

I know this is kind of basic, but what IRQ did you put the sound card on? IIRC either IRQ5 or 7 was 'shared' with LPT1, and I can see a more modern board with a robust PnP implementation not letting you do that. You might be able to remap the parallel port if you don't want to change the sound card.

You're totally right, just looked at the manual:

Onboard Parallel Port:
This setting allows the user to set the address and the corresponding IRQ
for the onboard parallel port. The options are "Disabled", "378/IRQ7", "278/
IRQ5" and "3BC/IRQ7".

Parallel Port Mode:
This setting sets the mode for the onboard Parallel port. The options are
"SPP," "EPP", "ECP" "ECP+EPP" and "Normal".

EPP Mode Select:
This setting allows the user to select the EPP port type. The options are
"EPP 1.9" and "EPP 1.7".

ECP Mode Use DMA:
This setting allows the user to select the DMA channel for the ECP mode
(port) to use. The options are "1" and "3".

Thanks for reminding me. Not sure which is best, but it looks like this motherboard is over-prepared for swapping ports' IRQs.

Reply 9 of 24, by dumpsterac1d

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Edited to include some plans to swap video cards. I have had 0 luck with Nvidia cards as far as compatibility. Going to run 2 ATI cards in one machine, but at what point does this just become 2 computers... 🤣

Reply 10 of 24, by melbar

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Nice board !!! 3 ISA ports, but you don't use all of them right? 😊

What kind of cpu cooler do you want to use?
Can you upload also some pictures? 😉

#1 K6-2/500, #2 Athlon1200, #3 Celeron1000A, #4 A64-3700, #5 P4HT-3200, #6 P4-2800, #7 Am486DX2-66

Reply 11 of 24, by dumpsterac1d

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Will do tonight!

I have installed an NOS Intel CPU cooler/heatsink assembly. Boring, standard, and weird (I think the way these click on for socket 478 CPUs are strange and I still don't get it fully)

Reply 12 of 24, by chinny22

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Re the GPU for Win98 your still to modern!
the Geforce 4 Ti series is as late as you want to go, or for you the FX series as your stuck on PCI.
Check this out for DOS, ATI does worse then Nvidia in this regard.
https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS

Having 1 ATI and 1 Nvidia card in the same machine would be interesting if not work of the devil.

Holding the rest of my comments till after the pics, but I do love stupidly over spec PC's even if not piratical at all 😀

Reply 13 of 24, by dumpsterac1d

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chinny22 wrote:
Re the GPU for Win98 your still to modern! the Geforce 4 Ti series is as late as you want to go, or for you the FX series as you […]
Show full quote

Re the GPU for Win98 your still to modern!
the Geforce 4 Ti series is as late as you want to go, or for you the FX series as your stuck on PCI.
Check this out for DOS, ATI does worse then Nvidia in this regard.
https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS

Having 1 ATI and 1 Nvidia card in the same machine would be interesting if not work of the devil.

Holding the rest of my comments till after the pics, but I do love stupidly over spec PC's even if not piratical at all 😀

I so far have been loving this build.

Notes about GPUs: I have had a ton of success with the Radeon 9250 and Win98 vs a Geforce MX4000... Pretty much every Geforce I've tried has problems running the '95 X-wing series, the Bethesda Terminator FPSs, and Metal Gear Solid (seems like a weird combo of games, but it's my taste for now, and they're good testers for compatibility). Any time I'd activate hardware accel these games would crash or have game-breaking glitches and screen flashing. The Radeon on the other hand has been a dream, so I've decided to use it for 98, and games up to DX8.

For DOS, I'm actually going to be buying a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5436. Yes, a stupid monster PC with 3 GPUs. That way I can get compatibility with pretty much all of the tough-to-run DOS games, while having the ability to play games on XP with a Radeon x1300... gaming from around 1982 to ~ 2009 in one machine? bonus.

It's a stupid computer, what else can I say?

Reply 14 of 24, by BinaryDemon

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I would just drop XP from your plans, not much outside the Win98 era would run well on even the fastest PCI GPU’s (gt430/520/610) and even the you have the headaches of separate cards for each OS.

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!

Reply 15 of 24, by dumpsterac1d

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BinaryDemon wrote:

I would just drop XP from your plans, not much outside the Win98 era would run well on even the fastest PCI GPU’s (gt430/520/610) and even the you have the headaches of separate cards for each OS.

Multiple cards already installed, having a grand time with XP. I can technically run Bioshock and other things from that era. Not sure how well they'll run, but the PC is well within spec of things like Quake 4, Doom 3, etc etc.

Reply 16 of 24, by PARUS

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Hi dumpsterac1d! I can answer any or almost any question about setting up 98/XP systems. But first I have to say if you want to get ISA please don't drop AGP. Try to find not too much expensive board with AGP+PCI+ISA bus. It may be on 845/865/875 chipset. Otherwise without AGP slot your "XP" part isn't worth it, believe me. Or you can refuse ISA and go with PCI sound only, in this case you can choose of hundred variants.

And don't listen about "overkill" for W98. They just can't cook it 😀 Really! First decide please which mobo you want to use. If you want keep this no-agp board it's your decision unfortunately. And then ask what you want to know for building "frankensteining" system.

😀 by the way, I don't know any BIOS which lets you switch PCI videos. Except one modded BIOS for one board. It was especially modded to get this option. Power on and power off video cards is not the best and safe way. It's better just choose a card which will work in DOS and W98. Yes, one for both DOS7/98. Second AGP adapter is for XP.

Reply 17 of 24, by PARUS

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http://m.ebay.com/itm/1pc-used-Advantech-Indu … 2206?nav=SEARCH

OR

https://m.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=aimb-865+v … mb-865+v1.0s1.2

Second is the best but you need modded BIOS (exactly this BIOS can switch primary adapter in different PCI slots). Without this modded BIOS you can forget about correct work this board. Probably this BIOS is not freeware.

Reply 18 of 24, by canthearu

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PARUS wrote:

Prices on those motherboards are just insane! Seeing $200-$300 here on these links.

Can build multiple windows 98 or XP systems for that price.

Reply 19 of 24, by PARUS

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canthearu, yes, of course! It's because they are rare and on huckster's hands. They know that these boards are best solutions for retro gaming in case if you want sublimate max eras in one machine. If you don't want it you must be mad to buy such board for such price. I understand that those boards should be more expensive than "usual" "regular" boards but nowadays prices I don't understand too - $200+ and some of them even $1000+
https://www.ebay.com/itm/MB-INDUSTRIAL-SKT-47 … nYAAOSwu7xbvNJ5 😳
https://www.ebay.com/itm/For-iBASE-MB800H-845 … OkAAOSwRfJcpXC0 😳
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-MB865-R-Socket … &frcectupt=true 😳

A few years ago I was lucky and got two DFI G7S620-N boards about $180 for each. And now I have i865+C2D+AGP+PCI+ISA system. It covers for me 1983-2006 close to 100%, and ~2006~2010 more or less.

I recommend: https://www.ebay.com/itm/1PC-used-MSI-MS-6571 … CMAAOSwsqdb8Tw2 --- real AGP !!! cheap !!! FSB400/533, DDR200/266 up to 2GB, AGP4X - good enough for 98/XP.
dumpsterac1d, believe if you'll get i845+AGP it will give much more performance than i875-AGP. I'll tell you how to tune it in DOS to eliminate error 200. ( THROTTLE.EXE-only isn't optimal, you need something more 😉 )
DirectX8 and PCI video for DOS/W98 --- Voodoo3/4/5, GeForceFX5500, Radeon9250, GeForceMX440 --- as you wish
DirectX9.0c and AGP video for XP --- 7800/7900GS, HD4650/4670/3850, X1300 --- as you wish
2GB RAM for XP and BURNMEM.SYS for 98 --- a) 64MB limitation for DOS7 boot section; b) 512MB limitation for GUI boot section;
c) MaxPhysPage/MaxFileCache parameters in SYSTEM.CB file for 98 Safe Mode - I think about 64-128MB limitation will be good

Why BURNMEM exactly? It is the only limitator which isn't memory manager, i.e. limitator only! 😀 You can use a standard HIMEM.SYS, understand? Some DOS games won't work with HIMEMX, LIMEM etc.
Ask any what you want to know about multiboot.

Last edited by PARUS on 2019-04-23, 21:23. Edited 4 times in total.