Phil,

Since this setup is CPU bound just curious if you tried underclocking the Voodoo3 down a bit to see where it starts making a difference. I am interested for several reasons including increasing the lifespan of the card. I like the 80mm cooling solution.

It turns out that this particular board is very slow with a V3 card. Using something else will give you quite a bit of extra performance.

Never thought over lowering the clocks to prolong life, could be a good idea though.

Example? GeForce4 MX440?

squareguy wrote:

Example? GeForce4 MX440?

No, a different motherboard 😀

Got much better scores with an IWill board.

Just different board or did it also have a different chipset?

squareguy wrote:

Just different board or did it also have a different chipset?

Not sure. But the GA-5AX is particularly slow with a V3 card.

Ok I think I have the same Voodoo3 card you have, I will try it on my board when I get a chance and compare some numbers.

Yeah... I remember the GA-5AX as somewhat slow back in the day's.
What it lacked in terms of speed and power, it really made up in stability.
This board literally ran and ran for day's without any other issues than being a bit slow.

With TNT2-Ultra and V2-SLI, the board runs well enough for games like NFS-2K and UT99.
Resolutions higher than 800x600 is nice. Yeah....
You just don't NEED 1024x768 in order to get that retro feel.
Anything heavier in terms of software, then go for something better.

Soyo SY-5EMA+ motherboard
Eteq 4-in-1 drivers (chipset)
Voodoo3 3500
K6-2+ @ 400-MHz (66*6)

Unreal Gold 226b
1024x768 default settings
35 frames-per-second

Is this about what you got with your IWill board? I am going to try a MSI5169 with a Ali chipset too. I think it is the same chipset as the GA-5AX. I also have a Azza PT-5VMX board with Via chipset.

Okay same setup and system with underclocking

183-MHZ 35 fps
166-MHz 35 fps
143-MHz 34 fps
125-MHz 33 fps

then I switched in a Voodoo3 1000 (Velocity 100) 8MB card

Both TMU's enabled / Single TMU (stock)

143-MHz 33 fps / 30 fps
125-MHz 31 fps / 27 fps
100-MHz 29 fps / 22 fps

Interesting results. I think I will build this system with my cheap Voodoo3 1000, possibly glue on a different heatsink with fan, run it at 100-MHz with a single TMU enabled. This should last a very long time, play what I want and I have faster machines for anything more advanced. At 800x600 this produces 30 fps. Anyway you can definitely see it is CPU bound. I really like this setup Phil came up with and plan to get this thing finished soon and get it home to be my main gaming box for a while. I am really wanting to focus on some older stuff right now like Dune 2, Lords of the Realm 2, Command and Conquer Red Alert, among others. The final decision on speed and TMU's will be playing Thief 1 and 2.

Here is my crappy bat file for in windows 98 to swap between full, pentium and 486 modes. Wish I could do 386 too but not sure how to turn off motherboard cache in windows.

If you are in 'reboot to ms-dos' mode comment out exit or you'll go back to windows.

1@echo off
2cls
3
4:START
5::::::
6
7cd c:\setmul11
8
9setmul.exe > nul
10echo.
11echo.
12echo  1: FULLSPEED
13echo  2: PENTIUM
14echo  3: 486
15echo  4: Exit
16echo.
17echo.
18
19choice /c:1234
20
21if errorlevel 1 set choice=fullspeed
22if errorlevel 2 set choice=pentium
23if errorlevel 3 set choice=486
24if errorlevel 4 set choice=exit
25
26cls
27
28goto %choice%
29
30
31:FULLSPEED
32::::::::::
33echo.
34echo FULLSPEED
35echo.
36echo.
37setmul.exe 6 > nul
38setmul.exe l1e > nul
39setmul.exe l2e > nul
40goto end
41
42
43:PENTIUM
44::::::::
45echo.
46echo PENTIUM
47echo.
48echo.
49setmul.exe 2 > nul
50setmul.exe l1e > nul
51setmul.exe l2e > nul
52goto end
53
54
55:486
56::::
57echo.
58echo 486
59echo.
60echo.

61setmul.exe 2 > nul
62setmul.exe l2d > nul
63setmul.exe l1d > nul
64goto end
65
66
67:END
68::::
69
70rem | choice /c:ab /t:a,3 > nul
71
72
73:EXIT
74:::::
75
76cls
77exit

Nice doing a batch file 😀

As for the motherboard cache, AFAIK the BIOS is the only way to adjust that.

I have been playing with this setup for a while now. I can definitely say that the Yamaha 71x ISA sound card is a perfect match for this. I played around with several other cards and I kept coming back to this one. Too bad my motherboard has issues with the YMF724. If anyone knows of a Socket-7 board that works flawlessly with the YMF724 please let me know. The Voodoo3 serves this system well but I have to make a decision if I care more about Glide or about Delta Force 2. If I end up caring more about Delta Force 2 then it will be a Nvidia card for sure. Since I am only using the 66-MHz bus speed I am also highly tempted to switch over to an Intel chipset based Socket-7 motherboard and use a PCI card instead of AGP. Too bad Intel never made a chip like the K6-2/3+ because its better FPU would be very welcome for this setup. It is a tone of fun though and however it turns out it will be my primary gaming system for the foreseeable future.

I think this system is served best with Windows 98 SE vanilla, just like Phil's, with one exception. Use 98lite to swap the 98 shell for the 95 shell. This makes Windows actually usable when you slow the processor down and/or disable caches.

dr.zeissler wrote:

The Scrolling in JazzJack2 is smooth under the following circumstances: […]
Show full quote

The Scrolling in JazzJack2 is smooth under the following circumstances:

- "Hardware-Mode" chosen
- GFX-Card must be "Nvidia RIVA128 or 3dfx Voodoo3"
- Resolution has to be changed to 640x400

Please test this.
Doc

I just got around to testing this on my system (K6-2 @500MHz, Voodoo 3000 AGP, WIn98 SE). It feel pretty smooth with hardware scrolling @640x480x16B. Tested with the original Jazz2 as well as with Christmas Chronicles 99.

what drivers DX6 6.1 7.0 ?

Voodoo3 driver from 23-Nov-1999, DirectX 8.1 (4.08.01.0901).

that's interesting. did not know that exists a real dx8.1 driver... is it for win2k/xp?
i formely used the dx7 driver, but it has some issues with older games and jazz2
was not stutterfree, so I downgraded to dx6.1 with the dx6.1 driver for the voodoo3.

Doc

Sorry, I may have misunderstood. I have DirectX 8.1 installed, but I am not sure the Voodoo driver itself utilizes any of it. From dxdiag, the graphics driver is 3dfx16v3.drv, version 4.12.01.1213. The Mini-VDD is 3dfxv3.vxd.