First post, by Nottah
So finally got my build finished, sort of.
I ended up using the D7336A motherboard with a Intel 440ZX/100 chipset. Just took it out of the cramped pavilion tower and swapped the processor to a PII 450 from the 400 stock.
I basically cannibalized my other systems to build this one. Mainly I did it because the Athlon 900mhz did not play well with my sidewinder 3d pro game port version. I did search the forums/web for possible fixes including the patches available, Just couldn't get it to work.
This mobo only accepts 256 megs of ram max, so that may hinder later win98 games? I only had two modules to get it 191 megs of ram usable. I noticed by default it looks like the bios shadows a few things and I don't see a way of disabling it yet.
I ended up using the Santa Cruz sound card and the win98 dosmode box works well with it. Auto detection with most of my games works well, however the real dos using the tbcdos.exe doesn't seem to work properly with any of my games. So I promptly went to ebay and bought a Awe64 ct4520 for $11.24 with free shipping! Hope its decent for dos games.
I also picked up a used gravis gamepad for only $6.24 and thats with shipping 😀.
MY issues currently are:
My voodoo5 5500 maybe too much for the type gaming I am doing, would I be better off with another card and use the voodoo2 i have with a pass through?
I tried my MK Trilogy CD and it crapped out with the univbe message (I think) and i couldn't get is working in pure dos. I think its because of the voodoo5 and its supported modes. dunno.
Is it possible to use a pci graphics card with an AGP card? I have a s3 virge/dx by aopen .
I also have in the agp variety , a MX420 nvidia with vga and svideo (think its the oem version) ms-8878 ver:130
and a geforce 7600 gt, but not to sure about compatabilty with dos and win98se. (just realized its pci express, duh)
I think the only truly demanding games on windows will be starsiege (my big box baby) and mechwarrior 3. Maybe some quake 3 and a bit of diablo 1, don't know if I can run diablo 2.
My potential bottleneck being the max ram being 256 megs.
I was looking through my library of games, of which I may have bought most of them from vogons member on ebay , and realize that I am probably doing more dos play (eob, elderscrolls, mainly the rpg variety) and probably need a graphics card setup thats gear towards that. I think the sound is taken care of with the awe64 even if its not the gold version.
I may have to find another slot 1 motherboard that supports more ram and maybe more than one isa slot.
So I guess my main questions are, graphics setup for the type games I will be playing.
Is it possible to use two video cards (1 agp and 1 pci)?
Would I be better off using the geforce mx420 with the voodoo2.