Why have two virtually identical Win98 builds...both with Voodoo2s??
Nice you have an MMX for DOS so you can slow it down.
The SB Live will not work with a Via133A chipset most likely.

I would turn the second Win98 box into a high-end one with an Athlon XP, Pentium 4 Nortwood, and a Voodoo5 or GeforceFX series (and probably an Audigy2 sound card).

You also might want to get another ISA sound card for your first Win98 build if it supports it.

kolderman wrote on 2020-01-29, 01:47:

Why have two virtually identical Win98 builds...both with Voodoo2s??

Well, I bought the PIII 667 first, then bought a slot 1 mobo shortly after without realizing the Intel 440BX chipset only supports up to 100 MHz FSB, and the PIII I have is a 133 MHz FSB. Granted not a big deal to run the PIII with a 100 MHz FSB, but I may as well max out the potential of my hardware. Plus, gives me an excuse to build another system 😀 Also I have a soft spot for a PII 400 MHz system from back in the day, so that's most likely what I'll put in my 440BX board. I have 5 Voodoo 2 cards, so I'll either use them in my builds or keep the unused ones on the shelf for now. It doesn't bother me to have more than one Win98 system with slightly different hardware.

> to be the perfect age to have lived through the best time period in PC history. I was 19 when I bought my very first PC in 1996/1997.

Wait...so you missed out on doom, warcraft, c&c, xwing and tie fighter, and the entire era of the graphical adventure, and think you experienced the best of it? Granted coming on board for duke3d and quake and unreal is awesome....but I got my first PC in 1991, am a bit younger than you, and think that the early-mid 90s are as good as the late 90s.

are you trying to build them with to-the-year accuracy? or do you just want era compatible hardware thats suitable for games?

199x-1997 - i'd keep that MMX system the way it is, but possibly get a real OPL3 based ISA card for good and proper DOS FM music.

1997-1999 - I'd ditch the p2, moving the dual v2 sli hardware to the p3. geforce 3 ti as the primary card? 1998-2000 is a good time for A3D HRTF so look into an aureal vortex 2.

2000-2001 - I'd also move the voodoo 5 into a fast athlon/athlon xp setup to get the most out of it. a good time to use audigy 2, and there were still a lot of games supporting a3d.

kolderman wrote on 2020-01-29, 07:10:

> to be the perfect age to have lived through the best time period in PC history. I was 19 when I bought my very first PC in 1996/1997.

Wait...so you missed out on doom, warcraft, c&c, xwing and tie fighter, and the entire era of the graphical adventure, and think you experienced the best of it? Granted coming on board for duke3d and quake and unreal is awesome....but I got my first PC in 1991, am a bit younger than you, and think that the early-mid 90s are as good as the late 90s.

I agree, the true man of the golden era must have started with a 486DX2 66 or 2/3 years earlier with a fast 386. You probably missed the best part, where we were few to talk about hardware, before it became mainstream in the second half from the 90s. I am also a little younger than you.

kolderman wrote on 2020-01-29, 07:10:

Wait...so you missed out on doom, warcraft, c&c, xwing and tie fighter, and the entire era of the graphical adventure, and think you experienced the best of it? Granted coming on board for duke3d and quake and unreal is awesome....

Oh I didn't miss out on any of that. I played the crap out of Doom, Warcraft, C&C, Wolfenstein, and played some Police Quest, LSL, some old golf game, Corridor 7, etc. I realize the "golden era" of computer gaming is largely subjective, but in 96/97 when I got my first PC, the older stuff was still pretty fresh and very popular. I just didn't even think about getting into computers in general until I was a senior in HS. Just for me personally, my most fond memories are playing Quake online via Kali and HEAT (pretty sure that game still holds the record for how many hours I've spent of my life on any one game), Rocket Jockey, Total Annihilation, the original GTA multiplayer via serial cable, and when the Voodoo 2 cards emerged, going into Circuit City and watching the side-by-side demo of Unreal comparing software rendering to 3dfx. Blew my mind. I also bought the original SBLive! and a Voodoo Banshee not long after as they were newly released. Good times.

foil_fresh wrote on 2020-01-29, 07:52:

are you trying to build them with to-the-year accuracy? or do you just want era compatible hardware thats suitable for games? […]
Show full quote

are you trying to build them with to-the-year accuracy? or do you just want era compatible hardware thats suitable for games?

199x-1997 - i'd keep that MMX system the way it is, but possibly get a real OPL3 based ISA card for good and proper DOS FM music.

1997-1999 - I'd ditch the p2, moving the dual v2 sli hardware to the p3. geforce 3 ti as the primary card? 1998-2000 is a good time for A3D HRTF so look into an aureal vortex 2.

2000-2001 - I'd also move the voodoo 5 into a fast athlon/athlon xp setup to get the most out of it. a good time to use audigy 2, and there were still a lot of games supporting a3d.

I'm definitely not anal about exact year-to-year correctness, as back then I would upgrade components one by one anyway, so I always had franken-builds with components spanning several years. I'm just looking for the right components to have the best experience playing games from the first half of the 90s, the second half of the 90s, on and on for each subsequent era. I know there are multiple options primarily for video cards and sound cards depending on which game officially supports what, so that's mainly the info I'm looking for. Since I already have the S3 Virge video card, I don't know if it's worth also picking up a Matrox card for any reason, or an ATI Rage. Still putting the pieces together and this site is a wealth of info.

Makes sense regarding Voodoo2 SLI on the PIII, and the Viper V770 was released around the same time as the PIII so that's why I chose that one, and I already have most of the hardware, just need a motherboard and sound card for that system. I'll look into an Aureal Vortex, never owned one before. I've only had Creative cards.

In the early 2000s I built an AMD T-bird 1.2 GHz system on a VIA KA-266 chipset which was my primary gaming PC for years, maybe something like that would be a better home for my Voodoo 5500.