Well my retro activity for this week is all about testing Geforce 3 cards VS everything else.

I'll be testing and sharing the results in a week or two about the geforce 3 TI 200 64MB, Geforce 3 TI200 128MB (and OC'ed version), Geforce 3 TI 500 64mb, Geforce 5 5600 (64bit), Geforce 6800, Geforce 7800GS, ATI 9700 pro, AMD HD 3450 AGP and AMD HD 4670 PCI-E in Doom3, Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2004, Painkiller, 3DMark 2000 and 2001, 3DMark 2003 and possibly Need for Speed underground if i ever find how to benchmark that game.

All this in a Athlon 3200+, ASROCK 939 Dual - SataII, 1GB single channel.
Doing this for fun, not sure if i can deliver 😜

EDIT: Geforce 3 video cards obviously are going to get smashed in these games, probably apart from Unreal Tournament and also against the Geforce 5 5600 (64bit).

rick6 wrote:

Well my retro activity for this week is all about testing Geforce 3 cards VS everything else. […]
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Well my retro activity for this week is all about testing Geforce 3 cards VS everything else.

I'll be testing and sharing the results in a week or two about the geforce 3 TI 200 64MB, Geforce 3 TI200 128MB (and OC'ed version), Geforce 3 TI 500 64mb, Geforce 5 5600 (64bit), Geforce 6800, Geforce 7800GS, ATI 9700 pro, AMD HD 3450 AGP and AMD HD 4670 PCI-E in Doom3, Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2004, Painkiller, 3DMark 2000 and 2001, 3DMark 2003 and possibly Need for Speed underground if i ever find how to benchmark that game.

All this in a Athlon 3200+, ASROCK 939 Dual - SataII, 1GB single channel.
Doing this for fun, not sure if i can deliver 😜

EDIT: Geforce 3 video cards obviously are going to get smashed in these games, probably apart from Unreal Tournament and also against the Geforce 5 5600 (64bit).

Probably..... Yet.
You might encounter other issues, like I have had with GF4 and FX-5XXX cards.
My woes with GeForce-4 and Unreal Tournament 99 and how to solve it.

That said.
I have not tried any GF3 cards ever. Never had one, so I can only report what
other have reported. That GF3 are better at 1999/00 games, than GF4 cards.
It is not allways about raw power for me. I want error free gfx over power.
Other can see past small parts not being rendered correctly. I simply can't.

Well, one of these Geforce 3 will be my main card from 2002\2004, and i played a LOT of unreal tournament on it and never had any issues, still i always hated Direct 3D renderer and always used the opengl renderer instead. I just might do the same here.

I'm just not sure yet about the nvidia driver version to use, if 4x.xx or 6x.xx. mostly because of Doom 3..

Made some progress on Far Cry. Finally cleared the last checkpoint on the Pier level after a dozen tries or so. I keep forgetting I have grenades; once I remembered, I cleared it on the next attempt. 😀

Such a great game 😀

I installed various flavours of DOS on a new machine. 6.22, 7.1 and also FreeDOS. Planning on doing tutorials on these, might come in handy if you are new to DOS.

It will be interesting to see a bit more of FreeDOS. I have a hard disk utility that uses a FreeDOS bootdisk, that's the extent of my experience with it. 😀

Managed to connect my 486 retro rebuild to the internet using a serial
crossover cable and an XP laptop as a bridge to my wifi. In fact...this
exact post was made on said 486 using Netscape Navigator Gold 3.0.

Absolutely no images are loading, there are Java errors every four
seconds, and the layout is utterly broken. I tried to post a screenshot,
but I don't think it submitted. I'll know for sure once I check this post
on a more modern system.

EDIT: Nope, didn't post. So, I'll post it here from my main system. 🤣

Building a new house, so packed away all of my vintage computing stuff. =(

Nothing to do for about a year! UGH!

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Such a great game 😀

I installed various flavours of DOS on a new machine. 6.22, 7.1 and also FreeDOS. Planning on doing tutorials on these, might come in handy if you are new to DOS.

It is a great game, until it suddenly isn't. Those bloody 'trygens' or whatever they're called killed it for me.

Just like in Crysis 🤣 Although the Aliens are far more frustrating...

installed that china union ms-dos 7.1 on my c3 system.
I'm waiting in a pata cd drive I can use to get windows installed. I can't get a sata dvd drive working in dos.
oddly it see's my sata hdd but not the dvd drive.

badmojo wrote:

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Such a great game 😀

I installed various flavours of DOS on a new machine. 6.22, 7.1 and also FreeDOS. Planning on doing tutorials on these, might come in handy if you are new to DOS.

It is a great game, until it suddenly isn't. Those bloody 'trygens' or whatever they're called killed it for me.

I don't know whether to thank you or hate you. 😀 I just googled the trigens and my stomach dropped. Tons of posts about "too hard even on the easiest skill level". I'm playing on the easiest skill level and still struggling at certain stages. The checkpoint system is frustrating when you lose a bunch of progress just a few feet away from the next one. I remember owning this game when it came out, but using it mainly as a benchmark. I probably figured it was too hard back then too.

Installed PCem v11 with Win98se and 98lite. Attempting to recreate my retro PC in emulator form. So far it is working very well. I can play voodoo 1 games at nearly full speed. Quake 1 & 2 and Frogger. Some early D3D games work well. Tested Monster Truck Madness 2. I also played some Jazz 2 and Fury 3 using a USB NES Gamepad. PCem just needs a few more small tweaks, and it will be nearly perfect for Win9x usage. I want the ability to force a windowed mode resolution with aspect locked. D3D CRT shader support would be cool as well. That is one of my fav features of the Duam DOSbox build. Been quite some time since I've been this enthusiastic about a new emulator.

clueless1 wrote:

I don't know whether to thank you or hate you. 😀 I just googled the trigens and my stomach dropped. Tons of posts about "too hard even on the easiest skill level". I'm playing on the easiest skill level and still struggling at certain stages. The checkpoint system is frustrating when you lose a bunch of progress just a few feet away from the next one. I remember owning this game when it came out, but using it mainly as a benchmark. I probably figured it was too hard back then too.

I'm sorry mate I didn't realise that this is your first play through - belated spoiler alert!

Yes those bloody trigens sucked but the game still had some great levels after they were introduced, defs worth continuing to the end at least once.

-

Finally started inventorying all of my boxed games, after I had gone through my entire house collecting all the boxes of boxed games and the intent was to quickly sort everything according to genre and finally have all my games sorted in one place. But once I sat down and had the first box in my hands, I just had to open it up and take a look inside, checking every CD for scratches and quickly sniff through all the paperwork. Some of it even smells kinda new!

This might be a long night 🤣!

dogchainx wrote:

Building a new house, so packed away all of my vintage computing stuff. =(

Nothing to do for about a year! UGH!

Well, thankfully you'll still have us to provide you with the latest retro-news 😁

Bought my first round of GOG summer sale games. Tested for real DOS compatibility and found I could easily run Wizardry 6, Sim City 2000 and Lands of Lore on my DOS PC. Played a few minutes of each and got that warm fuzzy feeling of experiencing these games again for the first time in over 20 years. Crazy thing was, before I bought them, I didn't remember owning Lore, but as soon as the intro started with Patrick Stewart's voice, the horse running along the edge of the canyon, and that silly gargoyle guy mining that blue ring, it all came flooding back. Wiz6 probably won't ever get played--PC speaker sounds and EGA graphics are pretty tough to swallow for a 1990 title unless you originally played the game and are reliving nostalgia.

-

Trying out my Geforce3 ti-500 in some MS-DOS 'high resolution' VESA games on my high-end dos gaming rig. Testing out new card to see if it's any faster than my GF2-Ultra at VESA games. Can't play with my big 3770k at all now (see modern hardware thread for details) SO playing with my older computers instead. Might go try installing my recently aquired AthlonXP 3000+ into my nforce2 system today and see how it overclocks. Probably use it to play either some Diablo II, or Starcraft Broodwar today. Wish I had a friend into Starcraft I to play online with me (one that doesn't cheat). And someone "casual" not in to this stupid "rush rush rush rush kill now" online stuff all the kids on battle.net do.

After over a year of no PC building I got the bug again and have decided to reconfigure 2 legacy boxes:

"L2" currently: P3F-B/P3-933/Rendition 2200-8mb/V2-SLI/W95C/Vortex2 will change to: W98SE/VA6/GeForce2-GTS/V2-SLI
"P1" currently: Abit VA6/C300@450/V3-3000/W98SE will change to: W95C/Abit BH6/Rendition 2200-8mb/V1/Vortex1 + DB

The Rendition was an awkward fit for the P3-933 (though nicely scaled for the V2 pair), but perfect for the C300.

The reconfigured P1 will now be a nice early 3D platform: Rendition + Voodoo 1 well scaled for the OC'ed C300A. W95C is good for a number of pre W98 transitional 3D games that were patched with W95 in mind (like HIND).

I have a few reclaimed GTS cards laying around and the P3-933 makes a nice fit and lets me explore one of the decent GPUs I never had an opportunity to play around with back in the day. I went from S3 to V5 to 9700 Pro so basically skipped early nVidia until jumping on a pair of 7800GT's in SLI circa 2005.

Assembling drivers and preparing drives for the various swaps involved. Gonna be fun...