Windows XP runs well emulated / virtualized too. We just need the 3D acceleration to get better there. Maybe a group will come along and write a "virtual Voodoo driver" at some point. DOSBOX has emulated Voodoo in the works.

I have recapped my Abit BF6 and my ASUS TUSL2-C. The BF6 is my old board from 1999 so I value its survival. It had burst caps all over it. The TUSL2-C had a damaged cap by the socket and a bunch of surely-defective "OST" caps too. I don't mind recapping boards. It's a nice afternoon project 🤣

Actually, I can get my hands on plenty of Tusl2-C boards. Anything special about them? They support Tualatin. Anything else that goes for them? ISA is gone.

gerwin wrote:

Windows XP runs 100% fine and functional on a Sandy Bridge CPU system. And I expect it to run just as well when I would upgrade that Z68 mainboard with an Ivy bridge later. So no need to worry about that yet.

Thats right but todays games run fine on Win7 too. The machine would be for the XP-only games. That group doesn't grow any more and neither do the hardware requirements for them. Later hardware will eventually diminish or drop driver support. Copy protection may not run on SATA drives and so on. From my pov, the hardware for such an XP Retro is up to the task already, and at the very moment my main machine goes Win7, I'd start using that retro machine. In fact, I have already build one. Much easier to choose though, because only a few factors really matter.

ux-3 wrote:

Actually, I can get my hands on plenty of Tusl2-C boards. Anything special about them? They support Tualatin. Anything else that goes for them? ISA is gone.

It's just a quality 815 board. If the KT133A is working well you probably have the better solution because you have ISA.

I suppose Tualatin is more Voodoo 1&2 friendly than the Athlon is. I tried running the Voodoo 1 in Dos, but the card freaks out at the 500 MHz clock. Cache off actually runs the game in 3dfx (so in theory it works), but it is a slide show that way. I wasn't going to put in the card anyway since my heart knows of no game that I can't play but desperately want to. Archimedian Dynasty actually looks quite nice in DOS too, so I accept that.

I didn't know of Voodoo1/2 + Athlon issues until I got a Slot A board months ago. I've just never combined these bits of hardware before... Voodoo2 will lock that up hard unless specific Athlon-fixed Voodoo2 drivers are used. I suppose Voodoo1 could indeed be problematic too depending on what's causing this instability.

swaaye wrote:

I didn't know of Voodoo1/2 + Athlon issues until I got a Slot A board months ago. I've just never combined these bits of hardware before... Voodoo2 will lock that up hard unless specific Athlon-fixed Voodoo2 drivers are used. I suppose Voodoo1 could indeed be problematic too depending on what's causing this instability.

And there the circle closes: Archimedian Dynasty need very old V2 drivers to run on it. So there is no way to use a V2 instead. So I decided not to even bother. Most 3dfx gaming looks better on a V5 anyway.

swaaye wrote:

I didn't know of Voodoo1/2 + Athlon issues until I got a Slot A board months ago. I've just never combined these bits of hardware before... Voodoo2 will lock that up hard unless specific Athlon-fixed Voodoo2 drivers are used. I suppose Voodoo1 could indeed be problematic too depending on what's causing this instability.

Well this is pretty new to me. I never had any issues - ran everything from V1 to V5 (except for V4) on AMD (both K6 and K7). What lock ups are u referring to?

Just google for Voodoo2 Athlon Drivers.

I had trouble with Archimedian Dynasty and V1 and V2 on the KT133a. The game was configured ok, it ran (in Dos) on another machine. 'Cache off' solved the problem but made the game too slow. Maybe it is chipset related? But they didn't make those Athlon drivers out of boredom.

Yup without those special Athlon Voodoo2 drivers, 98SE would freeze during boot, before getting to the desktop.

Maybe it is caused by the combination of Athlon and the VIA 686x southbridge? My board is AMD 750 + 686A. KT133A uses 686B.

swaaye wrote:

Yup without those special Athlon Voodoo2 drivers, 98SE would freeze during boot, before getting to the desktop.

Maybe it is caused by the combination of Athlon and the VIA 686x southbridge? My board is AMD 750 + 686A. KT133A uses 686B.

May be some issue with 686a then - I was running, and i'm running still Voodoos on Abit KT7a (686b) with no issues whatsoever. Using the latest V2 driver available FastVoodoo2 4.0 Gold Edition from 3dfxzone.it. A dozen or so years ago I ran stock drivers on win98 also with no issues. Was a Duron 700 on MSI K7T pro2-a back at the day i think. Now its Mobile Barton @ 2.2 Ghz. Honestly, I only encountered errors with Win95, but I think I was too 'nooby' back at '95 era to have remembered what the problem was. 😒

I vaguely remember that Live! had some issues with VIA and that messed up some PCI latencies or whatever - which caused some mess-ups in win98 (with or without voodoo), but its not directly 3dfx related. Maybe these athlon drivers you are referring to are optimized for 3DNow or smth?

Actually, ux-3 has a KT133A board and is having problems. But since you're not having trouble maybe the problem isn't as clear cut as blaming the VIA southbridge.

The VIA PCI problems are usually caused by shoddy BIOS programming. That's why George Breese's VIA PCI Latency Patch works. It reprograms the chipset during boot. Any sound card can have problems on these boards. Bandwidth is also usually affected and so part of the benefit is also improved performance from IDE, gigE, RAID, etc. Some VIA boards have been found to only manage 10-20MB/s on PCI as programmed by the BIOS!

Video cards can mess with sound cards too. 3D cards transfer a lot of data, and like to use as much bus time as possible. This can expose problems and the sound card producing noises makes it much more obvious than say IDE being slow.

What an irony: After I build this rig - mainly to run European Air War on it, I finally found a way to run it on my main machine again. At 60 fps with 16xAF and 8xAA. 😵

Yup, it's surprising how many old games are being fixed by fans. And of course there's GoG which pays to get the oldies fixed up.

I also have Gunship and M1 Tank Platoon II sitting here. IIRC, they all didn't work on the main rig.

With the most pressing need for 2000 MHz gone, I may return to the old P3 for retro needs.

swaaye wrote:

Yup without those special Athlon Voodoo2 drivers, 98SE would freeze during boot, before getting to the desktop.

Maybe it is caused by the combination of Athlon and the VIA 686x southbridge? My board is AMD 750 + 686A. KT133A uses 686B.

OT [or at least a side issue]... My xp2000+/a7m266 could run with a v2 under 98 with no problems - or none I found - with just standard v2 drivers iirc. But I had bad problems with a v2 sli setup on an athlon 700 slot A ms6167 board. Never got to the bottom of it but iirc I had hard lockups shortly after on bootup and reaching the desktop, but only when the v2's were installed..

A7M266 has AMD-761 and VIA VT62C686B.
MS6167 has AMD-751 and AMD-756.

ratfink wrote:

OT [or at least a side issue]... My xp2000+/a7m266 could run with a v2 under 98 with no problems - or none I found - with just […]
Show full quote

swaaye wrote:

Yup without those special Athlon Voodoo2 drivers, 98SE would freeze during boot, before getting to the desktop.

Maybe it is caused by the combination of Athlon and the VIA 686x southbridge? My board is AMD 750 + 686A. KT133A uses 686B.

OT [or at least a side issue]... My xp2000+/a7m266 could run with a v2 under 98 with no problems - or none I found - with just standard v2 drivers iirc. But I had bad problems with a v2 sli setup on an athlon 700 slot A ms6167 board. Never got to the bottom of it but iirc I had hard lockups shortly after on bootup and reaching the desktop, but only when the v2's were installed..

A7M266 has AMD-761 and VIA VT62C686B.
MS6167 has AMD-751 and AMD-756.

Now thats a known issue 😀 For SLI you may need to juggle a bit with drivers, especially with different card manufacturers but the fastvoodoo gold works wonders. 😀

ratfink wrote:

OT [or at least a side issue]... My xp2000+/a7m266 could run with a v2 under 98 with no problems - or none I found - with just […]
Show full quote

swaaye wrote:

Yup without those special Athlon Voodoo2 drivers, 98SE would freeze during boot, before getting to the desktop.

Maybe it is caused by the combination of Athlon and the VIA 686x southbridge? My board is AMD 750 + 686A. KT133A uses 686B.

OT [or at least a side issue]... My xp2000+/a7m266 could run with a v2 under 98 with no problems - or none I found - with just standard v2 drivers iirc. But I had bad problems with a v2 sli setup on an athlon 700 slot A ms6167 board. Never got to the bottom of it but iirc I had hard lockups shortly after on bootup and reaching the desktop, but only when the v2's were installed..

A7M266 has AMD-761 and VIA VT62C686B.
MS6167 has AMD-751 and AMD-756.

Did you have to mount heatsinks on the V2's with such a fast CPU?

sliderider wrote:

ratfink wrote:

OT [or at least a side issue]... My xp2000+/a7m266 could run with a v2 under 98 with no problems - or none I found - with just […]
Show full quote

swaaye wrote:

Yup without those special Athlon Voodoo2 drivers, 98SE would freeze during boot, before getting to the desktop.

Maybe it is caused by the combination of Athlon and the VIA 686x southbridge? My board is AMD 750 + 686A. KT133A uses 686B.

OT [or at least a side issue]... My xp2000+/a7m266 could run with a v2 under 98 with no problems - or none I found - with just standard v2 drivers iirc. But I had bad problems with a v2 sli setup on an athlon 700 slot A ms6167 board. Never got to the bottom of it but iirc I had hard lockups shortly after on bootup and reaching the desktop, but only when the v2's were installed..

A7M266 has AMD-761 and VIA VT62C686B.
MS6167 has AMD-751 and AMD-756.

Did you have to mount heatsinks on the V2's with such a fast CPU?

No I didn't use heatsinks, but to be honest I haven't used the systems much. It's like the joy was in building the machines and getting them running - I seem to have almost completely lost interest in playing games.

ratfink wrote:

I haven't used the systems much. It's like the joy was in building the machines and getting them running - I seem to have almost completely lost interest in playing games.

I am glad I can't say this completely for myself. While I do enjoy to tinker with all that stuff, I spend most of the evening airborn in a spitfire chasing bandits.

Even after 14 years, European Air War was the first flight sim that I would call "really believable" in terms of graphics. This moment had drifted before, from Finest Hour to swotl to Pacific Air War to Sabre Ace...
In retrospect, they all didn't seem good enough. EAW was the first to stay "realistic looking", even after many years. There was none before, that had such a credible look. I still love playing it.

I also found out, that the equally old Gunship! runs nicely on my main rig. (It is more arcadish than Longbow 2, but looks far more real) I have struggled with M1 Tank Platoon 2 too, but it seems I won't get it running on the big rig. I fixed the garbled screens (3Dwindower) and got the glide wrapper to kick in, but the mouse doesn't work but stays on the right side of the screen. Anyone knows a fix for that? PS2 vs USB perhaps? I'll try that.

So, back to topic: Both 1600x1200 heavy weights are gone. So I really rethink the whole project. With a P3, I'd have 2 ISA slots, AWE32 plus some DB carrier if I get the hanging note blues. So far, I could not be bothered much by it, but I would have the option. I'd get a Voodoo1 running in DOS as well.

Only problem left on the P3 would be the USB2.0 card. I have tried both a Nec and a Via USB2.0 Board. The Nec would freeze the PC as long as it is present. I tried hard to get it off other IRQs, but even then it just wouldn't work. The VIA does work with some bios settings and I can even get an external USB2.0 card reader to run in USB2.0 mode, but with the internal Card reader, it freezes too. On the KT133A, the same combination of card and reader works like a charm. Too bad! Any ideas?

I too have seen these problems with USB2 cards on 440BX. I think it's caused by 440BX being PCI 2.1 compliant while USB2 PCI cards typically require 2.2+. I imagine that is what the USB2 controller chips themselves are designed for.