For DOS, 3.11 and 2D Win9x games the Virge will do just fine.
For 3D stuff you'll probably want Glide. The Voodoo3 you already have (bar compatibility issues) is actually a good single-board solution. So is a Banshee.

http://www.vintage3d.org/rage2.php - Perrmance, possibly better with the Rage
http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/ Compatibility (DOS) excellent with the S3 - there are quite a number that have problems with the Rage

Thraka wrote:

Originally I had a P1 233 MMX chip in there, but have since downgraded to a P1 200 non-MMX for compatibility reasons.

What was wrong with the MMX? I'm curious, because I currently run a P200 MMX but also have a P200 Non-MMX. If there's an advantage to using the non-MMX instead, I'll swap out my CPU.

Thanks!

Thanks for the reply guys. I couldn't find that comparative page.

The reason I took out the V3 was that I'm not really looking at playing games that will take advantage of glide because really I figure that my other machine, a P2 or P3 machine will have a nice NVidia AGP card with Voodoo2 SLI and take care of it no problem.

However, compatibility with V3 is pretty good.

I was starting to think that the built in Rage would be OK but I could see the refresh lines squiggle all over the place at 800x600 resolution and it was bugging me. That coupled with the incompatibility with some of the games, might as well as just throw in the S3. 😀

KT7AGuy wrote:

Thraka wrote:

Originally I had a P1 233 MMX chip in there, but have since downgraded to a P1 200 non-MMX for compatibility reasons.

What was wrong with the MMX? I'm curious, because I currently run a P200 MMX but also have a P200 Non-MMX. If there's an advantage to using the non-MMX instead, I'll swap out my CPU.

Thanks!

I tried to play Solar Winds and it kept locking up at the intro. I tried disabling Mouse and it got a bit further, actually started the game playing part but locked up there. Disable sound, no change. Disabled L2 Cache on the MMX and it worked, however the game loaded slow, quake loaded *really* slow. I swapped out the MMX for normal P1 and the game ran. Quake loaded much faster and the FPS were not that much different. Good enough for me. Quake and other modern FPS games that could really use the MMX features are easily played on a P2 or P3 machine.

So one game with a lock up, I figure there are more. Better to just have the most compatibility 😀

I don't know which Solar Winds game you mean, there are two on Mobygames, both from 1993.
Solar Winds: Galaxy requires a 386, Solar Winds: The Escape (Shareware) a 286. A PMMX should be fast enough, though I don't doubt that it feels too slow since you are used to the higher speed.

You definitely found out that it is a speed issue (and of course Quake will run like crap with disabled L1). Maybe it would be enough to run the PMMX at 200 or 166 MHz, though. It should be possible to go as low as 133 MHz with a 2x multiplier, 1.5x is interpreted as 3.5x resulting in 233 MHz. A PMMX is somewhat faster than a plain P1 at the same clock, but not that much faster that I'd expect a PMMX@133 to cause a speed related issue where a P1@200 works fine.

As for the video card I'd probably recommend that you just try to live with the Rage first and if that doesn't work out to use a different card, S3 being an excellent alternative. Since you are already seeing problems it's probably best to go ahead and install the card. Remember to use S3VBE20 and S3SPDUP if you want better performance for some games (S3SPDUP potentially incompatible with some other games).

Both games locked up on the MMX.

Loading was very weird. If I remember, the games didn't seem to run that much different, that wasn't the slow part. It was booting the computer and loading games that really seemed to slow down with the cache disabled. Quake for example would take over 30 seconds for some reason to allocate 30mb of memory (automatically) and I would have to use a command line option to force it to allocate a smaller amount to speed up loading. With MMX and cache on, it was almost an instant load. With the non-MMX it's only like 5 seconds to load. A good trade off in my opinion.