I remember Splinter Cell having real issues on newer hardware. I think it was a combination of drivers and hardware that you needed to have to get all the shadows working correctly.

I found it easier to just play it on the Xbox 😀

The way I understand it, new drivers no longer have to pass old directx tests, so while things should(tm) work, they will start breaking down, and have, already.

Some old hacks are removed from the drivers that certain old games depended on, requiring wrapper dll hacks to run, hardware features may be dropped that old games used (like dithering), etc..

The situation is more or less bearable today, but things are just going to get worse.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

A Geforce 4 Ti would be a great DX7 and 8 card I believe. The 4200 was very popular and shouldn't be hard to find. The FX series should also be fine.

This one gets my vote.

I really need to make a "Senrew's Catch-All Questions thread" so I can stop making a new one for every stupid little thing I ask.

I picked up a Viper V330, and I'll be pairing that alongside the v1. I'm also looking for a PCI Mystique of some kind, but the only ones really available on ebay are 2MB versions. My question is, is that really enough, or should I look into getting one with at least 4MB. I know it's primarily for higher desktop resolutions, but does the extra memory help the 3D performance at all? If so, how hard are the memory add-on modules to source?

I'd say it's important if you want to do 3D in 640x480. With 16bpp, double buffering and z-buffer you need roughly 1.8MB for frame buffer leaving only roughly 200kB for textures.

senrew wrote:

My question is, is that really enough, or should I look into getting one with at least 4MB. I know it's primarily for higher desktop resolutions, but does the extra memory help the 3D performance at all? If so, how hard are the memory add-on modules to source?

As far as I know some of the MSI games require 4MB to run in 640x480. My experience is that the addon module is more rare than the 4MB card. Just keep looking for the 4MB version, it should come up very soon 😀

Does this sound crazy? My virge gx/2, a mystique, my v1, and a pcx2 card all in the same system with a vga switch box to swap between outputs? Or possibly the Riva 128 I just picked up as the base card and a PCI virge in place of the agp? How badly would Win95 shit all over itself with so many drivers? With the Riva handling GUI duties, would the others take over when their respective APIs activated them? I'm not even sure how the motherboard would handle multiple PCI video cards on top of the bios selected AGP for primary video.

Crazy? I've once had a S3 Savage4 + Voodoo2 + PCX2 build. It was a multi API monster, covering every supported driver in Unreal Tournament.

senrew wrote:

Does this sound crazy? My virge gx/2, a mystique, my v1, and a pcx2 card all in the same system with a vga switch box to swap between outputs? Or possibly the Riva 128 I just picked up as the base card and a PCI virge in place of the agp? How badly would Win95 shit all over itself with so many drivers? With the Riva handling GUI duties, would the others take over when their respective APIs activated them? I'm not even sure how the motherboard would handle multiple PCI video cards on top of the bios selected AGP for primary video.

The V1 and the PCX2 are not considered normal video cards.
You should probably switch between ViRGE and Mystique with the Boot from AGP/PCI BIOS setting, I'm not sure if 3D acceleration works for secondary display even with proprietary APIs (could only work in Windows 9x, definitely not in DOS). And I remember something about S3 cards (at least Trio-series) only working as primary video cards.

Senrew: No clue if that would actually work. The V1 and PCX2 will ofc work in that scenario. I am more worried about how the system will handle the Virge and Mystique. As far as I know the most stable configuration which gives the most APIs are the following:

Creative 3D Blaster PCI (Speedy3D, Creative Graphics Library and RRedline)
Voodoo 1 or 2 (Glide, Direct3D)
PCX 1 or 2 (PowerSGL)

pretty sure you'd be into different windows configurations, which becomes a pain with different graphics cards.

what might work is having different windows installations,and selecting both the graphics card [agp/pci] as well as the boot disk:

option 1: select pci graphics card in bios, boot hard disk 1, disable agp in windows
option 2: select agp graphics card in bios, boot hard disk 2, disable pci graphics card in windows

as soon as you forget to make one setting or the other at boot, expect annoying problems.

and it may not work anyway if you get those unreported resource conflicts.

might need to mess about with a boot manager too, to make sure the right disk is set active.

In my main retro system I have a radeon 9600 pro agp primary, a PCX2, an S3 Virge 325, and an Obsidian2 SBi. I just switch between the Virge and the Radeon in the BIOS. Idspispopd may be on to track with the older S3's wanting to be primary. The Virge only works when it's selected as primary. When it's the secondary, I get the yellow alert in Win98SE that it does not support multiple displays. Other than that, I can run just about anything on it without issue. If I really wanted to get crazy, I could put my Diamond Stealth III S540 S3 savage4 card in it instead of the Radeon like leilleilol mentioned.

Nobody likes the Matrox G400 max for Directx 6?

G400 is terrible for OpenGL 1.1, and some of us don't like that compromise 😀

leileilol wrote:

G400 is terrible for OpenGL 1.1, and some of us don't like that compromise 😀

Does that still apply even with the most recent drivers? I thought the G400's OpenGL issues were eventually resolved in later driver releases.

G400 can play Quake-based games just fine. I don't think I ever played any other OpenGL games on mine. First there was TurboGL, their Quake-oriented miniGL for G400, and then in 2000 they finally got their OpenGL ICD out for both G400 and G200.

There's just no special reason to choose G400, aside from curiousity's sake of course.

The G400 max was nice for the bump mapping in some games and decent picture. Just nice to use something other then Nvidia/3dfx once in a while.

I know that this thread has kinda moved on but just get a G4 Ti or a cheap 5900 if one turns up and use modified drivers from http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ if you are running xp. I wouldn't bother with Vista/7 due to all the usual reasons.

The card will be replacing the 9700 pro in the machine in my sig. Win98SE.

I went ahead and bought one of the 4600s that Old Thrashbarg linked. Should cover what I need nicely. I also picked up a Monster 3D II 8mb to go along with it. As soon as I find a second, I'll have a nice SLI setup as well.

I'd say Geforce2 Ultra. End of the road for DirectX 7.

I built my old gamer with a dual boot on a PIII system. DOS 6.22 / Window98SE. Along with some retro hardware video and sound cards (3dfx / S3 Virge / A3D / Live!), I included a Geforce2 Ultra for the AGP slot. It's the best card I know of to support DirectX 7 before moving into DirectX 8.

I looked at it like this. From what I understand: (feel free to correct me)
DirectX 7 is compatible with anything 7.0 and older. So from a Windows 98 perspective, this covers everything going back to the beginning of Windows 95 gaming.

DirectX 8 is compatible back only to 6.0.
DirectX 9 is compatible back to only 7.0

Another thought, is that DirectX 7 seems to be the point where gaming for Windows 98 is no longer exclusive, and support for XP starts to take off. So the need to stay retro starts to come to an end here. Id say build an XP or newer system beyond this point. The performance with newer Northbridges and CPU's will fit. Based on OS compatibility with hardware and games now working in XP, this idea seemed to fit.