Ok, new issue. Hooked up my Gravis Gamepad Pro to the sound card port and I see NOTHING. Windows 98 doesn't see shit and the Gravis installer hangs indefinitely during the "updating your devices" stage. Although, I'm happier about the Voodoo2 SLI working than I am about my gamepad working. I guess I could find a gamepad that's USB compatible for Windows. That would drastically simplify things for games that use it like Final Fantasy VII, which is working great with full FMVs too. And I think Quake feels a bit faster and smoother than with the single card.

FFXIhealer wrote:

http://i1121.photobucket.com/albums/l516/FFXIhealer/DSC00611_zpssiyhv3zl.jpg http://i1121.photobucket.com/albums/l516/FFXIhealer […]
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keenmaster486 wrote:

Can you post the full specs of your machine with pictures? We'd all love to see that 😀

What's the maker of this white ATX case, I had one and is very decent quality. I threw that ATX case along with recapped dimension 8300, big mistake. 🙁

Cheers, pentiumplay

pentiumplay wrote:

What's the maker of this white ATX case, I had one and is very decent quality. I threw that ATX case along with recapped dimension 8300, big mistake. 🙁

Cheers, pentiumplay

I honestly don't know. That case is now back where it belongs, with my original Windows XP computer with the AMD Athlon XP 1800+ processor.

Be careful with FF7. I also thought that it was running at normal speed on my 1998 rig until I reached the motorbike part. It was still playable but very very hard ... A game running too fast on hardware that was already out back then ... (very expensive, but out) what a poor programming they did here ...

There are a few fully 3D mini games, but on the Voodoo2 card, they were VERY smooth. I remember having a little bit of issues with my old Intel i740 card (Diamond Stealth II G460), but either the TNT2 or the Voodoo2 cards I have are both so powerful that those games are like butter.

Yeah, they are smooth, but at least on my pentium 400 (overclocked to 448), they are running too fast wich is a problem 😒

Ok, so I downloaded the Gravis CD and burned it to a disk. I used this to install the original 1998 drivers for the GamePad Pro and now the gamepad works properly (except for Up-Left, but we'll get to that later).

Guess what? Now my Voodoo2 SLI stopped working. Period. I've restarted half-a-dozen times and NOTHING. The Display app crashes every time I try to go to the Voodoo2 tab.

It used to always crash on the first Windows startup, then I'd do a restart and it'd work fine. Now...nothing. The Gameport has an I/O interrupt of 200-208 and the Voodoo2 cards occupy memory address spaces DF000000-DFFFFFFF and E0000000-E0FFFFFF for the first and second card. I'd be willing to bet if I pulled the SLI bridge out, the system would be able to run with just the first Voodoo2 card alone.

Why in the hell would the Gamepad on my Sound Blaster AWE64 ISA card cause this? I'm dumbfounded.

I really doubt its related.
You said that windows used to crash on the 1st startup anyway, I'm betting whatever was causing that is what's at fault.
I would remove everything and start again, adding 1 device at a time and not move on to the next device till windows is running ok

No, I did not say that Windows used to crash. I said IT used to crash - IT being a reference to the aformentioned DISPLAY app in the Control Panel. And what I mean by that is the Display app opens just fine and all tabs EXCEPT THE VOODOO2 tab work just like they're supposed to. But if you click on the VOODOO2 tab....you don't see anything happen for 3-4 seconds, then the display blanks out to black and comes back with the last tab still up that you had seen before clicking the Voodoo2 tab. That holds for another 3-5 seconds, then the display blanks black again and comes back, still on the last tab, but now you get Windows saying the Display app has crashed or stopped working or whatever. You click OK and that message and the Display app both close and you're back at the desktop.

When the SLI was working properly (after the 1st reboot), you could click the tab, wait 3-4 seconds, watch as the screen blacks out, then when it comes back up, you see the Voodoo2 tab contents and can interact with it. The 3dfx logo plays on the little screen and you can click System Info and see "SLI: DETECTED!!" and all the numbers.

Since I installed the Gravis software/drivers, I can't get that tab to work anymore. And I already know from past experience that if that tab doesn't work, no games will work using the Voodoo card. Windows will hang and then, if I'm lucky, stop the program and shut it down bringing me back to the desktop.

The nVidia Riva TNT2 32MB AGP card works perfectly fine no matter what, but I got the Voodoo2 cards in order to play GLIDE games and I use it in Final Fantasy VII, Quake 1/2, Unreal, etc.

And it was doing this behavior right from the start after a FRESH Windows 98 install, so it has to be some kind of hardware conflict or something. A resource mis-set, whatever. I don't know. I don't THINK the board needs a cap job done, but it IS from 1999 (so about ~17 years old). Maybe it does.

Maybe I also need to look into getting a Windows 98 SE update somehow. I'm running Windows 98 FIRST EDITION - which I have a completely legal copy of bought back in 1999 before SE had been released.

Ahh ok so basically you could open windows display properties like the image below

And any of the other tabs, say settings, background, etc were fine, just the voodoo tab crashed?

Casue this isn't a app, this IS the driver. You could try the fast voodoo drivers from here as an alternate.
http://www.3dfxzone.it/dir/3dfx/index.php

But crashing in that tab sint a good sign

I remember that this crashed when my SLI cable was broken.

Try each card separately ?

I have tried each card separately. They work perfectly fine as far as I can tell. But put the SLI cable in and BAM. But before the Gravis gamepad, when it worked it worked and it was solid the whole time the PC was on. So if there was an SLI cable problem, wouldn't that have prevented it from working AT ALL?

And right now I'm using the drivers that came on the CD-ROM with the cards themselves. They are STB 12MB Voodoo2 cards. The CD is a big red one that says pretty much the same thing yours does in the picture: V2-1000.

Maybe I should try to install the Fast Voodoo drivers and see what happens. Like I said, though, if I pull out the SLI cable, the first Voodoo2 card comes up properly every boot.

When I get home tonight, I'll boot up the system and see if I can even take a screenshot in Windows 98 for you guys with all the driver numbers listed like you have. I'll probably need to pull the SLI bridge to do that, though...

NIce Build, FFXIhealer! Keep experimenting with the SLI, i'm sure you'll find the problem.

I did my 1998 gaming pc too!

Specs :
Qdi Legend Motherboard (bx chipset)
pentium 2 400
256 mb ram
Creative Voodoo Banshee 16 mb agp
Lan card pci
SB Live! ( i was tempted to put an awe 64, but i did find my old '98 pcb' SB Live (bought in '99)
8 gb sdcard
8 gb hard disk
CD rom and CD writer, 3.5" floppy drive

I had to place a fan on top the small stock voodoo banshee heatsink (too small IMO), it gets too hot during operation.
Had to replace some swollen capacitors on the motherboard, they were near the cpu power regulators and the agp slot. Still working fine. Latest Bios flashed.

Here i'm messing with audio and video options. I really love listening to old .mid files with SbLive midi soundfonts!

And i really love playing opengl games! Wohoo! Quake 2 works !

So those are the drivers. I unplugged the SLI cable before powering on the system and FIRST TIME, this shit works. Until I can figure out WTF is wrong with the SLI, I'll leave it as a single card for now. Quake, Quake II, and FF7 will play fine with only one card and I'm playing them all in 640x480 resolution anyway.

I manually updated/changed the driver for each card in Device Manager to the FastVoodoo 4.6 drivers, then restarted. Noticed that the V2 tab worked fine. Shut down the system and reinstalled the SLI cable. Powered the system back on and crossed my fingers and the tab worked!

I also checked and my gamepad is working properly too (except for up-left). I was able to configure FF7 for the cards and Quake plays just fine. I'll monitor it over the coming weeks as I continue to play through Quake 1 (I'm on Episode 4) to see if it's stable, but this is promising.

But I did notice.... on the last working SLI tab, it used to say 8MB Frame Memory and 16MB Texture Memory...that's an aggregate total of both 12MB video cards together. Now admittedly this is misleading because the two cards are operating in parallel in order to speed up total framerates or to have increased screen resolution and are NOT acting like a 24MB graphics card. So I'm hoping this was INTENTIONAL on the FastVoodoo's part in order to reduce confusion. It does say SLI Detected.

Just booted today and it came up SLI and working, first boot, first time. Very promising.

FFXIhealer wrote:

Voodoo_2.jpg

But I did notice.... on the last working SLI tab, it used to say 8MB Frame Memory and 16MB Texture Memory...that's an aggregate total of both 12MB video cards together. Now admittedly this is misleading because the two cards are operating in parallel in order to speed up total framerates or to have increased screen resolution and are NOT acting like a 24MB graphics card. So I'm hoping this was INTENTIONAL on the FastVoodoo's part in order to reduce confusion. It does say SLI Detected.

Well, I remember that I some point it said for me that I had 16MB, but now it does just like you : "8MB" of memory. Also at some point the driver may say that the SLI isn't detected, but when you launch a game, it works. To conclude, I don't really trust this tab. The only thing that I trust is "does it work or not ?"

There's just something about getting your retro system fully stable and fully working that puts a warm, fuzzy feeling in your belly. Now all I have left to do is find desk space for this thing, because sitting on the floor cross-legged and playing Quake with the keyboard on my lap and the mouse on my right thigh is getting old REALLY fast.

Turned on the PC last night and didn't even bother opening up Display Properties to check if the V2 was working. I just jumped right into Quake and bam! Retro gaming nirvana!

So....what games should I look to pick up? The ones I have that will run on this system:

Quake
Quake II
Unreal Gold
Star Wars: X-Wing CD-ROM (with Tie Fighter and X-Wing Academy)
Half-Life
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VIII
Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear
A whole mess of Carmen Sandiego games that would play well on a 486

And for recommendations, keep in mind that yes I have a 32MB TNT2 card on AGP...but I primarily wanted to get those awesome Voodoo/V2 games that everyone lusted after in the late 90s/early 2000s. I have The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, but I'd have to upgrade the processor to that 600MHz Pentium III for it to work right. It calls for a 500MHz. I'll probably just stick that one on the older XP machine.

I also need to dig up I can get this old DOOM/DOOM2/FinalDOOM folders will copy directly over. They play in DOXbox on my laptop and PC, but should work natively on Windows 98. Also Wolfenstein 3D...although I'd really rather put them on an older system like that 200MHz Pentium with ~30MB of RAM. God, I have stuff that I just keep thinking about what if this, what if that, and I'm also like "don't spend any money because you just spent $1,000 buying brakes and rotors for your car and your bike and those things can kill you if you don't fix them up..."

Damn you, Vogons!!!

I recommend Jedi Knight Dark Forces II. Great single player.

Only copy of the Dark Forces and Jedi Knight series is on STEAM...which doesn't usually trace well to Windows 98.

I do remember playing Jedi Outcast way back in the day, but it wasn't with a Voodoo card. I think it was still on that 8MB Intel i740 card.

Some other games you can consider that I enjoyed in the late 90s:

- The first 3 (or 4) Need for Speed games (if you like racing games)
- X-Wing Alliance
- Rogue Squadron
- Tomb Raider 1-5 (should be really smooth on a V2 SLI)
- Thief: The Dark Project
- Baldur's Gate
- Heretic II
- Interstate '76

Those were great times to be a gamer 😀