nd22 wrote on 2023-01-27, 07:17:

64mb of RAM on a double sided stick that I was lucky to have - the board is very picky with the ram!

Very nice build! And yeah, many motherboards from that era seem to really picky when it comes to SDRAM. I had to hunt down a double sided 64 MB stick for my Soyo SY-5BT board as well.

matrox millenium 2 8mb wram with very good VGA output but limited to 1280*1024 max resolution

That's a great graphics card with superb image quality. I have one of those as well, albeit with only 4 MB, and the image it provides is super crisp, be it on a CRT or an LCD monitor.

creative live sb0060 because all I have are different revisions of Live cards and nothing else.

The SBLive is awesome for Win9x gaming, but its DOS capabilities are somewhat lacking. If you intend to play DOS games on that system, get a cheap ISA sound card like an ESS AudioDrive 1868F for improved compatibility and nicer FM synth music. You can use both cards at the same time, as long as each one is assigned different resources.

I have to mention that in 98SE USB ports are functional however in 95 despite having drivers installed there is no USB support!

Leonardo has an excellent guide for installing Windows 95, and it features detailed instructions for getting proper USB support. I haven't tried the eXtended USB Supplement myself, but others on this forum seem to be using it without any problems.

I have already read that guide! I am not interested in having USB support - It would be at USB 1.0/1.1 speeds anyway!
However I am interested in Windows 95 driver for Realtek 8139 network card - if anyone has the appropriate driver please post it here! Thank you.

nd22 wrote on 2023-01-27, 15:04:

I have already read that guide! I am not interested in having USB support - It would be at USB 1.0/1.1 speeds anyway!
However I am interested in Windows 95 driver for Realtek 8139 network card - if anyone has the appropriate driver please post it here! Thank you.

Something to consider is that USB 1 is damn handy to have for getting small files and patches/drivers on to the PC quick and dirty, its also nice to have the option of a USB mouse and Keyboard for when the need arises.

That is a good point but for transferring large files between my retro systems I use the intranet in my house. Up until Windows 95 every single system worked perfectly with Realtek adapters. The problem is the driver for Windows 95 and not the network card or the system itself: under 98SE everything works just fine!

nd22 wrote on 2023-01-27, 07:17:

I installed Windows 98SE from cd, chipset drivers from www.soggi.org

98se will recognize the 430tx chipset out of the box, there is no need to install any .inf updates.

as for the realtek drivers, there's several packages on vogonsdrivers that claim to support win95.

nd22 wrote on 2023-01-27, 15:04:

However I am interested in Windows 95 driver for Realtek 8139 network card - if anyone has the appropriate driver please post it here! Thank you.

Try these ones:

• Realtek 8139 Driver Package (Win3.11, 95, 98, NT, 2K): http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=834&menustate=0
• Realtek RTL8139 OEM Driver Disk v5.00 dated 7/30/2002: http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=1 … &menustate=34,0

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-01-27, 15:31:

Something to consider is that USB 1 is damn handy to have for getting small files and patches/drivers on to the PC quick and dirty, its also nice to have the option of a USB mouse and Keyboard for when the need arises.

It isn't worth it on older computers.

To transfer files (with the exception of the essential drivers, of course), it is much more preferable to use a NIC card which has higher transfer speeds. The option to use USB mouse and keyboard will restrict you to OSes that has HID support.

Thank you Sir, that did it! The old driver with support for Windows 3.11 was installed successfully. I had to do it manually twice in order for it to work!
Now the impressions: the machine is really fast in Windows 95 however in 98SE it is slow! I have never imagined such a large difference between 95 and 98SE; I was expecting to perform virtually identical! Pentium 133 seems to perform quite poorly: in Starcraft the system slows down tremendously in an 8 player game when reaching high number of units produced. 64mb seems to suit Windows 95 just fine. Matrox millenium II is very good at early 90's 2D games which is the goal of this system but it does not suit high resolution monitors - for example 1600*1200 is available only in 16 bit colors and you got "cursor lag"! 1280*1024 at 32 bits is available at 60hz which is fine for a LCD but poor for a CRT.
Should a Pentium 166mmx - found one on the cheap - provide a performance boost? Does MMX really matters? It is only a 33mhz jump, that why I ask.

nd22 wrote on 2023-01-30, 07:50:

Thank you Sir, that did it! The old driver with support for Windows 3.11 was installed successfully. I had to do it manually twice in order for it to work!

You're welcome! 😀

Now the impressions: the machine is really fast in Windows 95 however in 98SE it is slow! I have never imagined such a large difference between 95 and 98SE; I was expecting to perform virtually identical! Pentium 133 seems to perform quite poorly: in Starcraft the system slows down tremendously in an 8 player game when reaching high number of units produced.

Most of the slowness in Windows 98 resides in the integration of IE features in Windows Explorer. 98lite could help there by replacing the Windows Explorer with the one from Windows 95 at the cost of some compatibility with later applications.

Should a Pentium 166mmx - found one on the cheap - provide a performance boost? Does MMX really matters? It is only a 33mhz jump, that why I ask.

Yes, it has the double amount of L1 cache aside from the small MHz jump. The usefulness of MMX instructions on that CPU is around 1997-1998 programs, initially marketed as a poor-man's substitute for 3D hardware acceleration in games (such as Extreme Assault, POD and Rebel Moon Rising) and isn't that fast, but it is more useful for sound mixing routines (resonant filters in Impulse Tracker for example).

When playing Starcraft in Windows 95 the same problem appears: as the number of units increases the system slows down to such an extent that with 8 players active it is actually unplayable- that is related to the game and the CPU resources required and not to the Windows version. I did bought the Pentium 166mmx and will arrive in the following days, will report back. Now for the software part: I installed only the VXD drivers for the creative live sound card; should I install the whole software suite or it is just a bloated gimmick that will eat up precious resources?

nd22 wrote on 2023-01-31, 10:44:

Now for the software part: I installed only the VXD drivers for the creative live sound card; should I install the whole software suite or it is just a bloated gimmick that will eat up precious resources?

I like the creative mixer as it shows volume levels in % as a tool tip, I HATE sliders without values. Then there's the soundfont manager which you can use to get better MIDI in Windows as long you have the RAM for the soundfont you want to use. Though the 4MB soundfont that comes with the driver is an improvement already.

The rest are pretty much just unneeded bloat.

Pentium 166MMX arrived and installed. Performance gain is noticeable but still the system performs exceedingly slow! Starcraft continues to be unplayable with 8 players; AoE I the same; it is impossible to play Dark reign; the only Windows game tested that runs fine is Panzer general 2 even if it takes ages to load a map. In DOS games such as Warcraft 2 performance is excellent. Windows 95 runs really well until I install IE5, than everything goes to hell: 64mb of ram becomes insufficient; startup takes forever, the system becomes sluggish. I should note that Office 2000 automatically installs IE5.

Hi! I like this motherboard you used very much, looks like a great foundation for your system. The rest of the components are easier to upgrade with time. In my opinion the Live totally doesn't belong here, not only it is less compatible with the games this system could run than an ISA card but it can also attribute to the performance problems. I ran a 430VX system with MMX and 64MB RAM, performance was great. By the way I used its USB ok. I have a suspicion these performance problems have to do with a PCI sound card or a PCI network card or some IRQ steering.
See if you can benchmark two times: as-is and bare bones with sound, network and USB removed/disabled. Disabling legacy USB keyboard support in bios can in some cases improve the performance as well. See if there is any significant change. The 430TX has UDMA/33 support so hard drive shouldn't be the bottleneck but you may want to check if it isn't configured to PIO mode in bios.
Make sure you are running up-to-date bios.

Bruno128 wrote on 2023-02-09, 10:42:

The 430TX has UDMA/33 support so hard drive shouldn't be the bottleneck but you may want to check if it isn't configured to PIO mode in bios.
Make sure you are running up-to-date bios.

Yep, early motherboards with UDMA support have compatibility issues with HDD and if the manufacturer bothered to implement the fix officially (seems to be the case with ABIT), updating the BIOS solves it.

What version of the Live card are you using? Some OEM cards aren't fully hardware based.
If that card is relying on CPU cycles to do the heavy lifting it could really be killing your performance.

Jasin Natael wrote on 2023-02-09, 14:34:

What version of the Live card are you using? Some OEM cards aren't fully hardware based.
If that card is relying on CPU cycles to do the heavy lifting it could really be killing your performance.

The OP mentioned it already and it is the SB0060 which isn't the crippled one.

nd22 wrote on 2023-01-27, 07:17:

6. creative live sb0060 because all I have are different revisions of Live cards and nothing else.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-02-09, 14:47:

Jasin Natael wrote on 2023-02-09, 14:34:

What version of the Live card are you using? Some OEM cards aren't fully hardware based.
If that card is relying on CPU cycles to do the heavy lifting it could really be killing your performance.

The OP mentioned it already and it is the SB0060 which isn't the crippled one.

nd22 wrote on 2023-01-27, 07:17:

6. creative live sb0060 because all I have are different revisions of Live cards and nothing else.

Ah, thanks I missed that.

I am aware that Live came later and it is not period correct. An ISA based audio card would be a better choice here but there are none available in my country and on Ebay the prices are trough the rough for AWE32/64 and the likes.
The hard drive has been replaced with a 20gb Seagate manufactured in 1999.Now the transfer rates are finally over 10mb/sec and also I could now install more games. It seems that hard drives are a big bottleneck in socket 7/370/slot 1/A systems of the 90's. They were pursuing capacity first and foremost and not performance. Even in LGA775 system the original drive has below 10mb/sec sustained transfer rate! I now fully understand why people use CF cards in those systems!

The problem with Live is not the period-correctness but rather it can slowdown your PCI bus in some cases and also the W98 driver overhead is quite noticeable on such system.
Given you run a 166MMX the hard drive is definitely not a bottleneck.

I have done some rudimentary tests - superpi, atto, dos - I find it hard to believe today how fast the hardware was advancing 25 years ago. Just a year later you got Pentium II 450mhz that blows that poor 166MMX out of the water and I am sure it would do the same to the 233MMX. Office 97 installed to avoid IE5 and performance does not drop anymore; the system was formatted and everything installed from the beginning. USB support sucks hard in Windows 95. I still find the system to be perfect for those early DOS games such as Warcraft 2 but not for the late ones such as Screamer 2. Even without Live installed performance in Starcraft is abysmal!