swaaye wrote:

Frankly I have a hard time seeing why one would want to even use a retro machine for games newer than ~2000. These games almost always run fine on modern machines. Of course if the excuse is to play with newer old hardware, then I understand.

BTW, the Tualatin Celeron which is rarely talked about is a good match for 440BX. It's a pretty nice Celeron too considering it has 256K L2 like a PIII Coppermine. Of course you still need a Tualatin Slotket and compatible VRM for it.

Can the BX chipset handle 133mhz fsb reliably without screwing up the timings of the AGP and PCI slots? A Tualeron would probably be a better bet since it is only 100mhz FSB.

Jorpho wrote:

If I'm not mistaken, there is nothing inherent in the chipset that makes ISA support impossible; it's just a matter of finding a motherboard with the slot.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

You wouldn't think the later Intel 845, 875, and 945 chipsets would have ISA slots either, but they can. You just have to look into industrial motherboards rather than consumer ones, as I found out. Those are the ones that tend to have ISA slots on more modern platforms.

Just be careful, you will need an IO controller (i.e. Southbridge chipset) that still supports ISA DMA, otherwise you will not be getting any sound out of your old ISA sound cards since they need DMA to operate properly. For Intel-based motherboards, you will want ICH5 or previous generation Southbridge chipset. I will avoid 9xx chipset since usually they are paired with ICH "Express" family (ICH6 onward). IIRC, ISA DMA is also needed by DOS drivers (e.g. SB16 emulation) for some PCI sound cards to work properly.

thegardentool wrote:

Most the games I'm interested in playiing are from the mid 90s to early 2000s and include a mix of Windows and some DOS titles, but I'm pretty sure many of them will work straight from Windows 98. Some of them would include the early Blizzard titles, Rainbow Six titles, the early Command & Conqurer series, the early Elder Scroll games, and of course others.

If your target is _late DOS_ to Win9x era, you might be able to get away _without ISA_ at all. I'd recommend an Aureal Vortex2-based sound card with a good GM/GS daughterboard or external module. In that case you could even go with a P6/Tualatin descendant that can run over 3GHz+ easily under air cooling (in the form of Celeron Conroe-L, Pentium E or Core 2 Duo) with an LGA775/8xx-chipset motherboard such as the ASRock 775i65G board (865G/ICH5/AGP 1.5V, most recent revision 3.0 released in 2012) and you'll still be able to run Win98SE on it.

Of course a BX-based system is alright too if you're OK with the 1~1.4GHz limit after some careful selection of components (as Swaaye said, you're better off trying to install post-2000 games on a modern NT-based platform first anyway). And especially if you can get them for dirt cheap. Even though I had Northwood, P4/Netburst just isn't my favorite. I'll choose the more efficient Conroe-based Celeron any day. It still carries the "Tualatin spirit". 😀

sliderider wrote:

Can the BX chipset handle 133mhz fsb reliably without screwing up the timings of the AGP and PCI slots? A Tualeron would probably be a better bet since it is only 100mhz FSB.

EVERY 440BX board I've ever seen, from top-of-the-line Asus, to the cheap Taiwanese crap has settings for 133fsb and they ALWAYS worked. The early pentium 3's didn't mark for 133fsb but there always seems to be more jumper settings online. Quality boards like the Asus P3B-F DEFAULT overvolted the memory and chipset. Not by a lot, .2V if memory serves, but it made the board ROCK solid. I had one as a kid, my p2-450 ran great at 675. (150fsb)

BTW, The pci bus is NOT overclocked at 133fsb.

sliderider wrote:

Can the BX chipset handle 133mhz fsb reliably without screwing up the timings of the AGP and PCI slots?

PII Deschutes 350/100 @ 434/124:

PIII Katmai 450/100 @ 600/133:

PIII Coppermine 1000/133:

PIII Coppermine 1000/133 @ 1125/150:

(Also see previous page for Tually 1400/133 @ 1578/150)

440BX: OMNIVM OPTIMVS FVIT! (amongst them all the best it was!)

sliderider wrote:

What patch is that that costs $21? Why pay for something you can get for free?

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/145982-using- … ram-update-fix/

http://download.cnet.com/Unofficial-Windows-9 … 87_4-52713.html

Yeah, tried those already. They might work for 768 MB-1 GB systems, but 2 GB of RAM (plus another 256 MB for VRAM)? Win98SE still wasn't stable. Apparently, the limit for Win98SE is around 1150 MiB (presumably system RAM and VRAM combined) before an overflow occurs and all hell breaks loose.

The patch in question is this one. Yes, it's rather expensive for what it is, but if you look on the MSFN forums some more, you'll find that a lot of people seem to be using that patch without complaints.

archsan wrote:

Just be careful, you will need an IO controller (i.e. Southbridge chipset) that still supports ISA DMA, otherwise you will not b […]
Show full quote

Jorpho wrote:

If I'm not mistaken, there is nothing inherent in the chipset that makes ISA support impossible; it's just a matter of finding a motherboard with the slot.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

You wouldn't think the later Intel 845, 875, and 945 chipsets would have ISA slots either, but they can. You just have to look into industrial motherboards rather than consumer ones, as I found out. Those are the ones that tend to have ISA slots on more modern platforms.

Just be careful, you will need an IO controller (i.e. Southbridge chipset) that still supports ISA DMA, otherwise you will not be getting any sound out of your old ISA sound cards since they need DMA to operate properly. For Intel-based motherboards, you will want ICH5 or previous generation Southbridge chipset. I will avoid 9xx chipset since usually they are paired with ICH "Express" family (ICH6 onward). IIRC, ISA DMA is also needed by DOS drivers (e.g. SB16 emulation) for some PCI sound cards to work properly.

If your target is _late DOS_ to Win9x era, you might be able to get away _without ISA_ at all. I'd recommend an Aureal Vortex2-based sound card with a good GM/GS daughterboard or external module. In that case you could even go with a P6/Tualatin descendant that can run over 3GHz+ easily under air cooling (in the form of Celeron Conroe-L, Pentium E or Core 2 Duo) with an LGA775/8xx-chipset motherboard such as the ASRock 775i65G board (865G/ICH5/AGP 1.5V, most recent revision 3.0 released in 2012) and you'll still be able to run Win98SE on it.

Of course a BX-based board is alright too if you're OK with the 1~1.4GHz limit after some careful selection of components (as Swaaye said, you're better off trying to install post-2000 games on a modern NT-based platform first anyway). And especially if you can get them for dirt cheap. Even though I had Northwood, P4/Netburst just isn't my favorite. I'll choose the more efficient Conroe-based Celeron any day. It still carries the "Tualatin spirit". 😀

Ah, so 875P is pretty much as recent as it gets for ISA slots that are usable for our purposes? Fine by me; anything more modern is probably overkill for most Win9x games (as if Pentium 4 at 3+ GHz wasn't overkill enough), plus PCI-Express graphics cards probably won't have Win9x drivers anyway, maybe unless they're GeForce 6 Series.

NetBurst is a rather crappy architecture, but I don't know of any Athlon XP or Athlon 64 boards with ISA slots, let alone ISA slots that support DMA.

As for getting by without any ISA sound cards...sure, I've got a Turtle Beach Montego II (Aureal Vortex 2), but then there's that whole matter of Eradicator being designed to utilize the EMU8000 on the AWE cards specifically for a sort of proto-EAX effect (it actually loads some sound effects as a SoundFont so the EMU8000 can process them), TFX being the one game to use the ASP/CSP, etc. It's for those fringe cases that I insist on having an actual AWE32/64 installed.

But maybe the SB Pro emulation will come in handy at some point, for all I know. I also won't have to worry about bugged MPU-401 interfaces with hanging/dropped notes (an infamous issue with most AWE32s) if I ever feel like bothering with MIDI daughterboards.

sliderider wrote:

Can the BX chipset handle 133mhz fsb reliably without screwing up the timings of the AGP and PCI slots? A Tualeron would probably be a better bet since it is only 100mhz FSB.

Many 440BX boards with 133MHz FSB seem to only have a 2/3 divider for AGP even if they hav a 1/3 divider for PCI.

So at 100MHz everything is fine but at 133MHz your AGP is running at 88MHz.

anantech seems to think this is a limitation of the chipset while the PCI lock can be changed by the motherboard manufacturer: http://www.anandtech.com/show/239

I have an Abit BX6 rev 2 and I was running a P3 1.4 Tualatin (full P3 with 133MHz FSB) and a Voodoo 5 5500.
While it was usually running happily at 133MHz FSB it would occasionally fail to POST.

I swapped to a 1.4 Celeron tualatin and haven't had any issues since.

It's just something to be aware of if you run a 440BX board at 133MHz FSB or higher. If you've got a PCI video card, or an AGP card that can handle the higher bus speeds you should be right.

It is strange that the chipset has the 1/3 PCI divider but lacks 1/2 for AGP. If I run an AGP card, I don't go above 100 MHz FSB because I don't want to deal with the little issues that arise with various cards.

Actually I'm not really convinced that 440BX is reliable at 133 in general. My Abit BF6 BIOS reduces FSB in-order queue depth from 8 to 1 when I choose a 133 MHz CPU preset. Apparently Abit engineers noticed errant behavior at 133.

hopefully this site sheds some light on some chip-sets verses the 440bx. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/rdram-avenger,151.html

I *JUST* got an Intel OR840 board, and I dropped a pair of 1ghz chips in it. Its picky as all hell on ram but I think I have enough to get some good benchmarks out of.

Getting back on point, There is ~no~ difference between 440 and the 820 @ 100mhz. There is on the 840, but keep in mind, the 840 is dual cpu and dual channel ram. Even with that, you only gain ~6% more fps in Quake 3. At the time, rdram was THREE times more expensive than 'regular' ram. Rdram, while having impressive bandwidth, sucked in the latency department. the 850 chipset increased the speed to 1066, and could really compete with ddr, but that was a pentium 4 chipset.

What about the 440GX?

MrTentacleGuy wrote:

What about the 440GX?

the GX was "mostly" reserved for the pentium 3 xeon chips. It just so happens, i have one! YAY! I'll post some speedsys scores later once I remember where I put the results. (damn floppy disks)

I like this quote 😀 , sums it all:

"When planning the 440BX, something went horribly right."

chinny22 wrote:

I’ve just finished playing Warcraft and now half way through Warcraft 2 on my P3 1Ghz on a BX board and a Gforce Ti 4600 😀

BX is rock stable in any OS, if you get a high end P3 and later graphics card like the one above you can play all the C&C’s up till Generals and Blizzard games up to Warcraft 3 or safely run your favourite Voodoo card for glide games.
I’m not one for overclocking etc so run at 100 mhz FSB if you find an Intel board with the Yamaha on board sound you also get great GM Midi (90% sure this doesn’t work in pure dos though) so no need to get daughter boards or external midi devices, otherwise Asus boards can be run with a 133FSB with the right video card as mentioned already

What slowdown program did you use? I remember having to install a win9x-based slowdown app on this one P3 1GHz box I had to get Warcraft II running correctly (it ran, but waaaay too fast 🤣)

sliderider wrote:

What patch is that that costs $21? Why pay for something you can get for free? […]
Show full quote

NamelessPlayer wrote:

You wouldn't think the later Intel 845, 875, and 945 chipsets would have ISA slots either, but they can. You just have to look i […]
Show full quote

Jorpho wrote:

If I'm not mistaken, there is nothing inherent in the chipset that makes ISA support impossible; it's just a matter of finding a motherboard with the slot.

Also, no card is "perfect". An Audio PCI card could very well meet all your needs.

I advise you to reconsider. Down this path lies madness.

You wouldn't think the later Intel 845, 875, and 945 chipsets would have ISA slots either, but they can. You just have to look into industrial motherboards rather than consumer ones, as I found out. Those are the ones that tend to have ISA slots on more modern platforms.

Unfortunately, those industrial mobos with ISA slots tend to be hideously expensive, but there are a few based on 845 and 875 being sold on eBay right now that aren't selling for exorbitant prices, if you don't mind Socket 478 Pentium 4s.

As for DOSBox, while it's very convenient for most DOS games out there, it's still missing a few features that you can only get with real hardware, particularly sound card-related ones. Whether having those features is worth building and maintaining a DOS gaming system is up to you.

(And you're not kidding about the madness. Trying to set up a Win98SE/WinXP dual-boot setup where Win98SE doesn't crap all over itself with more than 512 MB of RAM installed is proving to be extremely troublesome, especially without paying $21 for that RAM limitation patch.)

What patch is that that costs $21? Why pay for something you can get for free?

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/145982-using- … ram-update-fix/

http://download.cnet.com/Unofficial-Windows-9 … 87_4-52713.html

I've looked into this before and the "$21 patch" is actually completely different then the unofficial SP2.1. SP2.1 merely contains patches from M$ themselves. 😜 Also, it's not even the latest unofficial SP anymore; someone released SP 3.5 for Win98 not too long ago. Haven't tried either of them, since I haven't used Win98 outside of a VM in a long time, but I'm going to do it one of these days on my old Acer Travelmate or something.

TELVM wrote:

I like this quote 😀 , sums it all:

"When planning the 440BX, something went horribly right."

Not all, they forgot to include the 512MB limitation of the i815 chipset 😜

Yeah, the real question is what went wrong with the i8xx?

pentium 3 was too damn successful. the first gen pentium 4's were a FLOP. Hell even the last pentium 4's were bad compared to what amd offered. Then they decided to make the pentium 3 64bit and the core 2 series was born. These chips smacked around amd like a red-headed stepchild in an alabama walmart.

The common thinking at the time was more mhz = better. Intel and amd had a cold war of sorts, to get to 1ghz. if memory serves amd got there like 2 weeks before intel. Hindsight is 20/20 and its easy for us to say "omg what was Intel thinking" but I remember the computer illiterate only looked at MHz. I believe Intel thought they could use the P4 and ramp up massive MHz that will continue to sell chips. Well it backfired on them by the time they got to 3.6GHz.

the 8 series' downfall was in my opinion, two part. #1: It wasn't needed. You don't get a whole lot of performance by going 100 to 133fsb. Usually 5-10%. #2 they bet on RDRAM.

If intel had just made the 450 chipset... all they needed was official 133fsb support, ata66, agp 4x. and it would have sold like there was no tomorrow. If you need more memory speed, just make it dual channel. Oh well.

Core 2 came out in 2006, meaning it was in the works in 2003 or earlier. So I don't think Intel was ever delusional about P4 architecture. It was just one approach they used for a few years. The Core Duo in 2005 was already a sign of AMD's future pain. Intel has many R&D folks and has many projects in the works at one time. Core 2 and successors do have a few P4 similarities.

Even if we don't find Willamette and 810-820 (or 845 SDRAM) appealing they were very successful. Plus the 810/815 512MB aspect was only meaningful for high end users. These machines shipped with 64-128MB of RAM typically.

RDRAM may have been the best choice for P4 considering DDR didn't really show until 2001. P3 just got dragged along perhaps to help RDRAM adoption. If you ignore the prices, RDRAM + 850 was pretty sweet at the time.

luckybob wrote:

pentium 3 was too damn successful. the first gen pentium 4's were a FLOP ...

I certify that the information given above is complete and correct.

luckybob wrote:

... These chips smacked around amd like a red-headed stepchild in an alabama walmart ...

🤣 🤣 🤣

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

What slowdown program did you use? I remember having to install a win9x-based slowdown app on this one P3 1GHz box I had to get Warcraft II running correctly (it ran, but waaaay too fast 🤣)

War2 I have Battle net edition which worked fine. Warcraft 1 gameplay was also fine but scroll speed was unusable even on slowest but I just learnt to click on the mini map. Warcraft 1 isnt known for its fast paced action 😉