I would add only voodoo 3 as 3d card. As for sound card sound blaster live is good choice

tobiasrieper wrote on 2023-07-26, 15:04:

Hi folks I've recently had the urge to relive my childhood and build a Win98/DOS machine. I'm going for games like Raptor, lucas arts games, DOOM, Duke all the way up to Unreal and Half Life but before Deus Ex.

I have a coppermine 866 cpu with a soltek sl-65kv2 motherboard .

I've got Coppermine P3 866/133MHz @650MHz/100MHz with Voodoo3 and I've tested nearly all of those games you mentioned.

- Raptor: Call of the Shadows works great, just the installer is sensitive to CPU speed so if you happen to have the original game you need to decrease the CPU speed in a way or another to be able to install it. The game itself is not CPU sensitive so using a preinstalled copy will work straight away

- LucasArts games tend all to be sensitive to CPU speed but some of them have official patches that fix that. Sam & Max Hit the Road and Star Wars: Tie Fighter don't have patches for that so you need to decrease CPU speed for these to run properly. 866MHz is possibly too much for Sam & Max since running it @650MHz while using THROTTLE.exe (a CPU slow down utility) only the last possible step before disabling L1 cache makes the sound work correctly on my system. Disabling L1 cache tends to make games released later than 1992 bit too slow

- Doom 1&2 run great, Duke3D runs great (at 800x600 there are occasional slowdowns)

- Never tried Unreal, Half-Life runs ok but I personally prefer higher fps and resolution with it so I play it on more powerful system

Voodoo3 has pretty good DOS compatibility in my experience, only Crystal Caves seems to dislike it and just black screens after starting the game from main menu, but compatibility with DOS Glide games is spottier. Tomb Raider in Glide mode looks like crap for example, the game forces way too low gamma and there's nothing you can do about it with Voodoo3. Things like that can happen also with Windows games, Need For Speed II SE looks washed out in Glide. Generally Glide support is a bit hit & miss with Voodoo3, earlier Glide games may or may not work and with later Glide games V3 isn't super fast.

ciornyi wrote on 2023-07-26, 15:52:

As for sound card sound blaster live is good choice

For Windows sure but for DOS hell no. SB Live's SB emulation is better than nothing if you don't have an ISA slot but if you do have you absolutely should get an actual Sound Blaster card for DOS.

I found an S3 Savage4 Pro Card 8mb agp for a good price the voodoo 3 seems a but pricey. Would the s3 be good for DOS? For glide games i could just get a more powerful gpu and use a wrapper.

For DOS video card compatibility, I recommend looking at this list if you haven't already seen it: PCI and AGP video chips DOS compatibility

It lists certain games and compatibility with different PCI and AGP video cards.

For Sound Blaster cards, I recommend looking at this list: Sound Blaster: From best to worst

Generally for mid-to-late 90s DOS compatibility an SB16, AWE32 or AWE64 will suffice. But there are so many different versions of Sound Blasters and they all have different trade offs.

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-07-26, 16:39:

For DOS video card compatibility, I recommend looking at this list if you haven't already seen it: PCI and AGP video chips DOS c […]
Show full quote

For DOS video card compatibility, I recommend looking at this list if you haven't already seen it: PCI and AGP video chips DOS compatibility

It lists certain games and compatibility with different PCI and AGP video cards.

For Sound Blaster cards, I recommend looking at this list: Sound Blaster: From best to worst

Generally for mid-to-late 90s DOS compatibility an SB16, AWE32 or AWE64 will suffice. But there are so many different versions of Sound Blasters and they all have different trade offs.

Thank you for the recommendation. I've gone for the old S3 Savage 4 GT, i got it at a rather cheap price so I'll give it a whirl. It seems pretty compatible with dos across the board. As for the sound blaster I'm checking that list and looking for one that doesn't suck or break the bank.

the voodoo 3 sucks for directx and opengl games, ie maxpayne,rayman 2, serious sam,
for win9x8 is better to add a geforce 6600gt or a 6800 or so
those gfx cards are very cheap rught now and 10x faster than the voodoo 3, for glide games there are glide wrappers which work

Hi, thanks for your reply I have an old X700pro lying around of that works. I prefer max payne on consoles (I have the xbox version).
I got a sound card, an ESS audiodrive 1868F.
So in all I've spent around £77.83 including shipping.
Coppermine 866 PIII
Soltek sl-65kv2
ESS ES1868F
S3 Savage 4GT 16MB.
Just need to find some ram and hdd and an optical drive. I think I'll get the gotek floppy drive too.

I wouldn't spend money on a Gotek since there's not much practical use for it on a PC

Well I got a 256mb stick of 133 speed RAM for a fiver. Why not the gotek? Don't I need floppys for installing DOS? I remember having tons of them lying around.

Theres almost nothing that can't be installed to hard drive for Dos - there are very few games which only run (or boot) from their own floppy. It's not like the Amiga - almost without exception games can run from hd.

Gotek is really for when you are forced to use floppies but need the convenience of not using physical disks. The PC, once equipped with a hard drive, really doesn't need one. If you don't have a working FDD you might choose to get one for convenience of installing those games though, that would be my only reason.

Like megatron-uk already said, pretty much everyting runs from HD. I don't know about anything that requires a floppy. (Maybe copy protection? But I don't know if a Gotek can handle that.)
A real floppy drive costs nothing and if you have old disks you need one anyway. And personally I think a Gotek doesn't look good in a retro PC 😀

Awesome, thank you. I found a couple of old PATA HDDs and an optical drive to use.
Guess I can just burn stuff I need to CD and use those? I got all my big box versions of tomb raider, deus ex, half life etc. All my dos games, DOOM, wolf3d, Duke etc are all on steam. It's great I don't need floppys at all. Not even an IDE drive it seems. Old Phil from philscomputer lab uses flash cards and converters.

Is 256mb RAM adequate I presume? I'm not planning on playing any games after Deus Ex on this machine.