Wanted to try quake now as max res on my win95 machine running a matrix g200 which afik is vesa 3.0 but I don't seem to be getting all the res options, not as quite as high as with the s3 anyways.

If you're running Quake under Windows you'll need to pass -winmem ## (# being the megabytes you'll want, say 16) in order to allocate more memory for higher resolutions. When Quake runs under Windows, it just only allocates 8mb, which is different from its behavior in DOS where it tries to allocate almost everything.

Note that Quake only goes as high as 1280x1024. It's a hard-coded limit (that can be removed or extended in the source - i've done 1920x1080 before).

leileilol wrote:

If you're running Quake under Windows you'll need to pass -winmem ## (# being the megabytes you'll want, say 16) in order to allocate more memory for higher resolutions. When Quake runs under Windows, it just only allocates 8mb, which is different from its behavior in DOS where it tries to allocate almost everything.

Note that Quake only goes as high as 1280x1024. It's a hard-coded limit (that can be removed or extended in the source - i've done 1920x1080 before).

awsome, thank you!

I wonder, what type of DOS support did the Matrox Parhelia have? I know this was one of the best 3D accelerators Matrox ever produced, and I think it would be pretty neat to have a system using one. I want to be able to play around with the EMBM support in Dungeon Keeper 2 and Descent 3 (assuming I ever obtain these games), but I also want to have a card more powerful than a Matrox G400 so I can run DirectX8 stuff better. I'm also aware that Matrox cards were well-renowned back in their day for excellent 2D quality.

I second FASTVID. Also recommend you try it after MTRR with cwsdpmi.

Think you'll have the least problems with Savage 2000, or Savage 4 (LT, PRO, or Xtreme) according to this chart http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/. I don't fully trust chart however since many complaints emerged against Riva TNT with certain modes; chart shows practically flawless compatibility.

BTW Voodoo 4/5 PCI (AGP?) have a bug in all 320x200 modes (Warcraft e.g.). Resembles overclocking artifacts on pixel edges. Someone mentioned Voodoo 3 also has it. It's not too bad but it's not perfect.

You mention some games that have glide support, so you might want a 3dfx card for that...

Also think many DOS vga benchmarks back in the day (or even today) happened without FASTVID or MTRR. Some slower cards in benchmarks may run a lot faster with FASTVID (faster than the fastest?). IMO it's better to get a card with no problems on any mode whatsoever, even if it's not the fastest. Most demanding game I've seen was Carmageddon in hires mode. Had k6II @ 400Mhz but only managed 10-15fps tops on that game (installed Voodoo 4 4500 PCI and was amazed to see glide get 60+ on the same machine); saw a Mac G4 @ 400mhz (the one with more cache) doing about 30-35FPS hires for the Mac version (Under Mac OS 8.X). I'm guessing you should have at least a Pentium II @ 450mhz+, or a K6III+ overclocked @ 600 Mhz; personally want a slot 1 Pentium II with passive cooling (why the heck don't they make CPU's like that anymore 😢 ).

Holering wrote:

I second FASTVID. Also recommend you try it after MTRR with cwsdpmi. […]
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I second FASTVID. Also recommend you try it after MTRR with cwsdpmi.

Think you'll have the least problems with Savage 2000, or Savage 4 (LT, PRO, or Xtreme) according to this chart http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/. I don't fully trust chart however since many complaints emerged against Riva TNT with certain modes; chart shows practically flawless compatibility.

BTW Voodoo 4/5 PCI (AGP?) have a bug in all 320x200 modes (Warcraft e.g.). Resembles overclocking artifacts on pixel edges. Someone mentioned Voodoo 3 also has it. It's not too bad but it's not perfect.

You mention some games that have glide support, so you might want a 3dfx card for that...

Also think many DOS vga benchmarks back in the day (or even today) happened without FASTVID or MTRR. Some slower cards in benchmarks may run a lot faster with FASTVID (faster than the fastest?). IMO it's better to get a card with no problems on any mode whatsoever, even if it's not the fastest. Most demanding game I've seen was Carmageddon in hires mode. Had k6II @ 400Mhz but only managed 10-15fps tops on that game (installed Voodoo 4 4500 PCI and was amazed to see glide get 60+ on the same machine); saw a Mac G4 @ 400mhz (the one with more cache) doing about 30-35FPS hires for the Mac version (Under Mac OS 8.X). I'm guessing you should have at least a Pentium II @ 450mhz+, or a K6III+ overclocked @ 600 Mhz; personally want a slot 1 Pentium II with passive cooling (why the heck don't they make CPU's like that anymore 😢 ).

I'm not really interested in running 320x200 games on this rig. For games that old which run in such a resolution, I would rather use a 486 or early Pentium. That way, I can also install an OPL3-compatible sound card.

And I have played with the idea of using a Voodoo card. The only problem is that I want this system to play early DirectX8 stuff as well as SVGA DOS games. That may sound like a big leap, but when you consider how CPU-hungry certain SVGA DOS games can be in modes higher than 640x480 (or in the case of Carmageddon, just 640x480), it's actually not that far of a stretch.

Would a pair of Voodoo IIs in SLI accompanying a Geforce or Matrox card be underkill for Glide games?

V2 SLI is a beast and scales immensely with CPU speed. A fast Pentium 3 goes well with it.

V2 SLI is roughly on the level of an AGP Voodoo 3.

However, V2 SLI can be paired with an AGP card like a GeForce. So you play DX and DOS high resolution games on the GeForce and glide games on the Voodoo 2.

Personally on a fast Pentium 3, a single Voodoo 2 card is quite fine.

On scaling immensely - that's a matter of perspective, v2sli may scale between a k6/2 and a 1.4 tualatin but it seemed level beyond a p4 2ghz that to me here:
soyo p4i845pe isa system

that's using quake3 on a p4 box.

ratfink wrote:

v2sli may scale between a k6/2 and a 1.4 tualatin

That IS tremendous scaling!

Obviously it will reach a limit at some stage 😀

Ah ok fair enough, easy to lose perspective with retro gear, maybe I did so myself - I was thinking some seem to talk as though v2's to just get faster and faster and hotter and hotter the more you crank up the cpu, until they blow up or melt or something equally OTT 🤣.

For my DOS SVGA Games, I'm using this :

Pentium II 400MHz SL2S7 - unlocked CPU.
512MB PC-100 SDRAM
Creative 3D Blaster Riva TNT2 32MB AGP
Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 x2 12MB SLI
Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Platinum
Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold with 8MB Memory Module
MusicQuest PC MIDI Card - connected to CM-500
120GB Maxtor HDD
1.44MB FDD
TEAC CD56E 6X CD-ROM Drive
Lite-ON DVD+RW RAM Drive
MS-DOS 6.22 in own partition
Windows 95 OSR2 in own partition

The system : The Return of the BEIGE! (Pentium II Inside)

@ Malik:
That is the HunkaChunka of SVGA gaming I've ever seen... 😲

mr_bigmouth_502 said: Would a pair of Voodoo IIs in SLI accompanying a Geforce or Matrox card be underkill for Glide games?

No, that would be overkill. That should run Quake 3 16 bit @ 1024x768.

You mention DirectX 8 gaming so I'd get a Geforce 4 TI (can get close and personal with Doom3 hehe). That should have least problems with svga games (heard Matrox cards can screen tear in some modes), and work as 2D for voodoo 2's with glide. Fastest PIII or Athlon TBird CPU would be a good combo IMO (make sure mobo has ISA slots hehe).

Speaking of DirectX 8, Radeon 8x00 cards were interesting considering they had a tessellation feature (increase polygon count on edges). Correct me if I'm wrong but, did the Gamecube do Tesselation? Remember Sonic Adventure 2 ported from Dreamcast had much smoother-rounder edges vs original Dreamcast; was it using tessellation? Would be interesting to know any PC games that supported this feature.

Holering wrote:

@ Malik: That is the HunkaChunka of SVGA gaming I've ever seen... :exclamation: […]
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@ Malik:
That is the HunkaChunka of SVGA gaming I've ever seen... 😲

mr_bigmouth_502 said: Would a pair of Voodoo IIs in SLI accompanying a Geforce or Matrox card be underkill for Glide games?

No, that would be overkill. That should run Quake 3 16 bit @ 1024x768.

You mention DirectX 8 gaming so I'd get a Geforce 4 TI (can get close and personal with Doom3 hehe). That should have least problems with svga games (heard Matrox cards can screen tear in some modes), and work as 2D for voodoo 2's with glide. Fastest PIII or Athlon TBird CPU would be a good combo IMO (make sure mobo has ISA slots hehe).

Speaking of DirectX 8, Radeon 8x00 cards were interesting considering they had a tessellation feature (increase polygon count on edges). Correct me if I'm wrong but, did the Gamecube do Tesselation? Remember Sonic Adventure 2 ported from Dreamcast had much smoother-rounder edges vs original Dreamcast; was it using tessellation? Would be interesting to know any PC games that supported this feature.

So with a fast Pentium III, a Geforce 4 Ti, and Voodoo IIs in SLI, I'll pretty much have the ultimate machine for playing mid/late '90s games, as well as some early 2000s stuff.

No need for such high hardware to play @ 640x480, not long ago I remember playing Duke Nukem 3D and Blood at 640 with an 486 120 Mhz 16 MB RAM, S3 Virge 2 MB and was totally playable, only 800x600 was a bit slow maybe around 15 FPS. Even in this 486 I played Starcraft with 8 CPU players and it always ran smooth except for a small slowdown in the early zergling rush. And I didnt even bother booting into DOS since they were already playable straight out from Windows 95. I remember that I was naive at the time and purchased that S3 Virge thinking it would let me play Quake 2 accelerated since it was labeled as a 3D card. I am trying to find one of those Dallas NVRAM batteries in order to get this machine to boot again and test this, but apparently you have to pay 80$ or more to get one and pray that it is still alive.

Also I dont like how some DOS games like Carmageddon, Blood and GTA1 look on 3DFX Voodoo, I think they look worse than software rendering since bilinear filtering causes the textures to become very blurry and the gamma gets weird in some of them and forces you to use 640 when they look better unnacelerated at 800x600.
I would rather go with any Pentium MMX since it consumes less power than P2 and some rare DOS games use MMX and for 3D the S3 Virge DX/GX since these cards got a lot of support from notable exclusive good games like Terminal Velocity and Destruction Derby or other of those rare cards like Rendition Verite and others, that like S3 had a special API for DOS games but those are hard to find but you keep period authenticity and decent speed.

I wanted to use a low power netbook with Intel Atom to play these games trough DOSBox to save power and trouble, but I was surprised that it wasnt enough to run System Shock and Blood smoothly at 640 and even 512 and lower res were a bit slow and a Pentium 4 at 3.2 Ghz just barely ran System shock at 1024x768 around 25 30 fps.
Then I tried to play them on a Pentium 2 366 Mhz from Win98 and they were unplayable at 800x600, and I found that the video card was the problem, it was an onboard SIS 530 once I switched it to an S3 Virge the framerate improved a lot even if the SIS 530 was much faster at playing Tomb Raider 2 in D3D, so the videocard seems to be really important even in these games and seems like some modern graphics have speed issues with them.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

So with a fast Pentium III, a Geforce 4 Ti, and Voodoo IIs in SLI, I'll pretty much have the ultimate machine for playing mid/late '90s games, as well as some early 2000s stuff.

I have to admit that in 95% of cases, my PIII makes my 286 -> Pentium systems redundant. It's a great platform for DOS.

@valencio - why settle for "playable" in this day and age? Playing Duke 3D - any any SVGA game for that matter - on a PIII is a much better experience than playing Duke3D on a 120MHz Pentium.

valencio wrote:

No need for such high hardware to play @ 640x480, not long ago I remember playing Duke Nukem 3D and Blood at 640 with an 486 120 Mhz 16 MB RAM, S3 Virge 2 MB and was totally playable, only 800x600 was a bit slow maybe around 15 FPS.

I just tried System Shock CD 640x480 on an intel 486 DX4 120 with tight cache+memory timings. It is not enjoyable, below 10 FPS. This is with VLB video. Cannot measure exactly because the system has trouble with the 40 MHz bus. But I am sure the PC Player benchmark at 640x400 will not get far from the 8,3 FPS, which I get running the 486 DX4 at 100MHz, or the 8,8 FPS other people get with their AMD x5 133MHz.

Better pick a nice framerate and matching Pentium 2/3 from my old table below, something above 34 FPS.

Quake v1.08 average FPS. From pure DOS: Video mode 640x480, timedemo 2, nosound, nojoy. System: GA-6BXC with Tualeron QID2QS CPU […]
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Quake v1.08 average FPS. From pure DOS: Video mode 640x480, timedemo 2, nosound, nojoy.
System: GA-6BXC with Tualeron QID2QS CPU. 128MB RAM. Voodoo3 video, either AGP or PCI variant. AGP divider=2/3.
With and without 'MTRRLFBE LFB WC' (write combining).

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1Speed MHz   PCI+WC  AGP+WC  PCI    AGP
24x_50=200   25,9    26,0    13,7   13,7
34x_66=266   34,3    34,4    18,2   18,2
44x100=400   50,5    50,9    25,0   27,0
54x133=533   66,4    67,5    27,0   35,8
68x_66=533   55,7    56,3    21,0   21,1

valencio wrote:

No need for such high hardware to play @ 640x480, not long ago I remember playing Duke Nukem 3D and Blood at 640 with an 486 120 Mhz 16 MB RAM, S3 Virge 2 MB and was totally playable, only 800x600 was a bit slow maybe around 15 FPS. Even in this 486 I played Starcraft with 8 CPU players and it always ran smooth except for a small slowdown in the early zergling rush. And I didnt even bother booting into DOS since they were already playable straight out from Windows 95. I remember that I was naive at the time and purchased that S3 Virge thinking it would let me play Quake 2 accelerated since it was labeled as a 3D card. I am trying to find one of those Dallas NVRAM batteries in order to get this machine to boot again and test this, but apparently you have to pay 80$ or more to get one and pray that it is still alive.

You must have had one crazy 486 then. 🤣 Of course, what I'm shooting for is awesome framerates at high resolutions, not just playable framerates at lower resolutions. I can already run most mid/late 90s PC games just fine on my main box using various forms of emulation, but what I really want to do is build a system that can run all of these games natively with high framerates and resolutions. A 486 or Pentium would certainly have the compatibility covered, at the cost of speed, while a Pentium 4 would cover the speed at the cost of compatibility. That's why I'm thinking of essentially creating a supercharged Pentium III box; it will be old enough to be compatible, but new enough to be fast! 😁

Just discovered something interesting that proves CPU isn't always a bottleneck (even with fastvid). Mr-bigmouth, you way want to reconsider hardware for svga gaming with directx8 possibility (games without speed cap might be too fast).

Installed a Rage 128 VR 32mb PCI (slower 64-bit mem bus) on my AM3+ mobo (see SIG), and any DOS game over 640x480 becomes slow (10-20 fps). Everything runs exactly how I remember in 1998-1999 with a K6 400 + onboard Rage GPU. This is with an fx6300 CPU. If I use a modern Nvidia GPU, I get fluid FPS no problem up to 1600x1200 (albeit with glitches), bet then older games run unplayably fast.. This is despite using fastvid and mtrrlfbe.

Mini-modern Rage 128 VR 32mb PCI review:
Rage 128 definitely caps playable speeds to 640x480 in Duke3D and Blood (800x600 if you don't mind 15-35 fps). Only good thing about bottleneck is smooth frame rate in low resolution games (might be useful for high resolution games that need speed cap too). Warcraft scrolls very smooth-natural despite running on a modern system. I'm actually very impressed with this GPU with accelerated 3d. Can use 32-bit color and textures in quake 3 arena with hunk megs increase, highest settings and cg_shadows 3 (character stencil shadows); 640x480 does 20-40fps+. Half Life is smooth @ 1280x960 in Opengl (even with flashlight). 32-bit 640x480 does look way better than 16bit 800x600 on typical Voodoo 3 cards IMO, in Quake 3 (compressed textures don't even look compressed in Q3; maybe not working?). Supports paletted textures for Final Fantasy VII (anti aliasing doesn't cause 2d artifacts); optionally dithers all 16-bit Direct3d games. Using 12-02-2000 9x drivers (newer drivers don't support paletted textures or run slow in my setup) with powerstrip and rage3dtweaker. Using highest quality driver settings with vsync off.

Holering wrote:

(compressed textures don't even look compressed in Q3).

The way Q3's texture compression works through post-loading the texture - the textures never came compressed. r_ext_compressed_textures usually defaults to 0, unless you run a Savage, in which it'll default to 1 (as well as defaulting the texture filtering to trilinear). The compression is done by the video driver.

Rage128 doesn't support S3TC.

This is not to be confused with Q3A's majority of textures being in JPEG. Compressed image format != compressed texture format

Holering wrote:

Installed a Rage 128 VR 32mb PCI (slower 64-bit mem bus) on my AM3+ mobo (see SIG), and any DOS game over 640x480 becomes slow (10-20 fps). Everything runs exactly how I remember in 1998-1999 with a K6 400 + onboard Rage GPU. This is with an fx6300 CPU. If I use a modern Nvidia GPU, I get fluid FPS no problem up to 1600x1200 (albeit with glitches), bet then older games run unplayably fast.. This is despite using fastvid and mtrrlfbe.

Your Geforce FX-whatever isn't all that modern 🤣

Considering that one is PCI and the other PCIe might as well install both and switch in the BIOS?