1. Pentium 75? 90? Perhaps a 133?
2. Probably not great. An S3 card or Mach64 would probably be loads better. IIRC Trident cards of this period were slow and didn't always work right.
3. It's faster, noisier, and these days can be less reliable than good ol' IDE, and as always loads more expensive. On the ISA bus it's just not worth messing with.
4. If you want to run games older than ~1990, I'd say yes.
5. Absolutely. That Socket 7 machine would probably make a much better Win95 box. A 486 would probably be even better for pure DOS, unless you want to run Quake...
6. 42 my friend, 42.

Pentium 100, 133 or 166 would be my CPU of choice, I'd shoot for 16MB RAM, and an S3 Trio64 card on the PCI bus with a SB16 or AWE64 on the ISA bus.

Hey keenmaster, I''ll give a few of your questions a shot:
2. I've heard they are on the slow-to-mid-range end of performance, but that's all relative. My oboard Cirrus Logic is significantly slower than my TNT2 M64 in benchmarks, but I don't notice much during actual gameplay. Speaking of which, it seems the TNT2 M64 PCI is about as fast as you can get in DOS with excellent compatibility. Just sayin'.
3. SCSI's advantage is simultaneous access of multiple devices without performance loss. Unlike a master/slave setup on IDE, where only one can be accessed at a time (this won't happen if the drives are on different channels). Also, SCSI drives themselves tend to have higher transfer rates and access times compared to their IDE cousins of the same generation. Disadvantages are noise, cost, complexity, power and heat. Oh, and slower boot up times due to the additional initialization. In my experience, in a single drive setup for DOS gaming, there's no advantage to using SCSI.
4. if you ever think you'll buy a big box game with 5 1/4" disks and you want to play/install of them, then that. 😀

That trident of course was slower than a s3 trio64 since it was a 32 bit chip however is fine for a socket 5 build, i think the fastest cpu for that platform was a pentium 120.

I strongly recommend a socket 5/7 build with a better card like a S3 trio64 or better yet a Riva 128 as they are both faster and offer solid compatibility. Don't bother with SCSI unless you are in need of a money pit.

Sedrosken wrote:

1. Pentium 75? 90? Perhaps a 133? 2. Probably not great. An S3 card or Mach64 would probably be loads better. IIRC Trident cards […]
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1. Pentium 75? 90? Perhaps a 133?
2. Probably not great. An S3 card or Mach64 would probably be loads better. IIRC Trident cards of this period were slow and didn't always work right.
3. It's faster, noisier, and these days can be less reliable than good ol' IDE, and as always loads more expensive. On the ISA bus it's just not worth messing with.
4. If you want to run games older than ~1990, I'd say yes.
5. Absolutely. That Socket 7 machine would probably make a much better Win95 box. A 486 would probably be even better for pure DOS, unless you want to run Quake...
6. 42 my friend, 42.

Pentium 100, 133 or 166 would be my CPU of choice, I'd shoot for 16MB RAM, and an S3 Trio64 card on the PCI bus with a SB16 or AWE64 on the ISA bus.

1. OK, cool. I have a 75, a 100, a 133, and a 200, but I'll probably stick with the 75 for now and see how it goes since all the jumpers are already set for that and I can't figure out what the model number of my MB is.
2. Well... I guess I'll just have to deal with it, since that card's all I've got right now. If the performance is adequate for most early 3D stuff (e.g. Doom) and all 2D stuff then it'll be great.
3. Yeah, I'm moving to IDE for this machine since I tried the SCSI card, it doesn't work right away, and I'm just not willing to put the effort into something which I have no experience with. I don't even know if my SCSI drive works.
4. Well, I don't really, so maybe I don't need it.
5. I might want to run Quake. But that video card is probably a bottleneck for it. Oh well. I probably have other plans for that Socket 7 board.
6. I should have known... But are you sure it isn't 54?

clueless1: Sorry I'm not quoting any more; I'm on my phone which is a pain in the rear. The light bulb went off with your SCSI explanation, thank you! I wish I had a TNT2 M64 PCI, but unfortunately all of mine are AGP.

nforce4max: Ha. Yeah, I guess a money pit is the last thing I need now 🤣

Now I'm starting to put this machine together, and right away I'm running into problems with the disk drives. Here are my problems:
1. The CD drives aren't recognized by the BIOS. I'm 99% sure I have the cable in properly but I can check it again.
2. My second floppy drive (B:) isn't working. I know it isn't the drive itself since I pulled it from a system in which it was working already. I know I have the cable in properly on that one. It clicks a few times on boot up in the same manner as the first drive (A:) but it won't boot from it or read from it, I just get a General Error on drive B:.
3. I can't get the stupid hard drive to work! I'm using a 20GB drive (known working) since both of my smaller drives are broken. I know the BIOS supports LBA since it detects the drive and reports it as such, but do I still need to install an overlay anyway? I just can't read the drive at all, boot from a floppy and C: isn't there. It is formatted already btw and I'm using a DOS 7.1 boot disk.

So, any thoughts on those problems?

Also, for the sound card I'm using two: an SB16 and an AWE64. I'm hoping to use both in pure DOS, the SB16 for digital sound and OPL3, and the AWE64 for MIDI. Is there a reliable way to do that? It kind of has to be that way since those are my only DOS-compatible sound cards and I'm not buying any MIDI cards or boxes anytime soon, unfortunately.

And thanks for helping me, I don't know where I'd be without you guys 😁

Have you set the BIOS to auto-detect the IDE devices, or are you manually specifying CD-ROM, etc? I've seen manual selections cause really weird problems before.

It's probably possible to have both sound cards installed, though I kind of doubt you can use them simultaneously (except maybe in Windows). They'll just be on different IRQs.

dondiego wrote:

That trident of course was slower than a s3 trio64 since it was a 32 bit chip however is fine for a socket 5 build, i think the fastest cpu for that platform was a pentium 120.

There are actually faster chips available for such a platform, for example some of the Pentium Overdrives and perhaps also some 3rd party CPU upgrades.

1. Maybe the motherboard doesn't support booting from CD? which would still be normal for that period of time. If that's the case you wont see anything in BIOS. Does a Win98 boot disk find the drive ok?

2. is the 2nd FDD a 3 1/2 or 5 1/4 drive? Have you set the drive type in BIOS correctly? Maybe swap the drives, some like being at the end of the chain.

3. Can fdisk see the drive? the partition may be formatted in a way dos doesn't recognise.

4. (Ok you didn't put 4 but I'm making it #4) Do you actually play any games that use adlib? if not you wont really miss the OPL chip. Any other sound method (FM, digital, Sound blaster, Midi, etc) are exactly the same on both cards. (AWE is just a SB16 with the EMU chip added)

Jorpho wrote:

Have you set the BIOS to auto-detect the IDE devices, or are you manually specifying CD-ROM, etc? I've seen manual selections cause really weird problems before.

Yes, everything's auto detect right now. I have to run the auto-detection from the BIOS setup screen, which is then saved in the CMOS. It detects the hard drive but not the CD drives.

Tetrium wrote:

There are actually faster chips available for such a platform, for example some of the Pentium Overdrives and perhaps also some 3rd party CPU upgrades.

Would my Pentium 200 work?

chinny22 wrote:

1. Maybe the motherboard doesn't support booting from CD? which would still be normal for that period of time. If that's the case you wont see anything in BIOS. Does a Win98 boot disk find the drive ok?

Aha. Should have thought of that... I will try the Win98 boot disk today and see if it works. So it won't show up in the BIOS if it doesn't support booting from CD, but a DOS CD driver would find it?

chinny22 wrote:

2. is the 2nd FDD a 3 1/2 or 5 1/4 drive? Have you set the drive type in BIOS correctly? Maybe swap the drives, some like being at the end of the chain.

It's a 3 1/2". Yes, the drive type is set correctly. I'll try swapping them today, and make absolutely sure I've got that cable in correctly... my mind can play tricks on me.

chinny22 wrote:

3. Can fdisk see the drive? the partition may be formatted in a way dos doesn't recognise.

I haven't tried fdisk, all I know is that it doesn't boot from it (and it does have DOS installed on it; I pulled it from my defunct DOS machine) and a DOS boot disk can't change to the C drive. I'll try fdisk today, also I might try booting up my Maxtor MaxBlast disk and see what happens.

chinny22 wrote:

4. (Ok you didn't put 4 but I'm making it #4) Do you actually play any games that use adlib? if not you wont really miss the OPL chip. Any other sound method (FM, digital, Sound blaster, Midi, etc) are exactly the same on both cards. (AWE is just a SB16 with the EMU chip added)

Yes, I care a lot about having that real OPL3 chip that's in my SB16. I didn't know SB16 has any sort of MIDI capability other than the OPL3. Is it possible to use that in DOS somehow? I want to be able to go to a game's sound setup, choose General MIDI with port 330, and have it work. But do I still need an external MIDI box for that? That's why I put the AWE64 in it; I want MIDI sound without the external box.

keenmaster486 wrote:

Yes, I care a lot about having that real OPL3 chip that's in my SB16. I didn't know SB16 has any sort of MIDI capability other than the OPL3. Is it possible to use that in DOS somehow? I want to be able to go to a game's sound setup, choose General MIDI with port 330, and have it work. But do I still need an external MIDI box for that? That's why I put the AWE64 in it; I want MIDI sound without the external box.

AWE is AWE, not MIDI. It only works for games that directly support the AWE chip. For real MIDI you have 2 options:
1. external box through MPU401 or compatible interface (e.g. sound card MIDI/joystick connector)
2. hardware wavetable connected to the waveblaster header on sound card

Why not go Socket 7 with say a K6-3+, you can control the multiplier in bios, so you can have a nice dos and windows 98 system

Another option (if the board supports it) is a Pentium Overdrive MMX. Mine supports all of setmul's test registers, which gives me better range than most non-Overdrive Pentiums--all the way down to 386DX-25, with some faster 386 as well as slow 486 options in between.

stamasd wrote:

AWE is AWE, not MIDI. It only works for games that directly support the AWE chip. For real MIDI you have 2 options:
1. external box through MPU401 or compatible interface (e.g. sound card MIDI/joystick connector)
2. hardware wavetable connected to the waveblaster header on sound card

Hmm... the wavetable header might be an option sometime in the future. For now I'll just use the AWE64 for AWE-specific games and the SB16 for everything else.

candle_86 wrote:

Why not go Socket 7 with say a K6-3+, you can control the multiplier in bios, so you can have a nice dos and windows 98 system

Because I want this system to be pure DOS, I have no real need for Windows games, and I'm too lazy to replace my motherboard 🤣

clueless1 wrote:

Another option (if the board supports it) is a Pentium Overdrive MMX. Mine supports all of setmul's test registers, which gives me better range than most non-Overdrive Pentiums--all the way down to 386DX-25, with some faster 386 as well as slow 486 options in between.

Hmm... well, that's not in my stash so I can't do that. I'm kind of limited right now since I'm not buying any new parts for quite a while.

So all of the drive issues were just me being stupid. The floppy drive problem was because all of the disks I was trying to use in the B drive were bad. The CD drive problem was because of A) the BIOS doesn't boot from CD and B) the master drive was set to "slave" 😵 doh! The hard drive problem was just because the MB won't boot from a drive on the secondary IDE. I moved it to the primary IDE and it works perfectly. Running a low level format now 😀

keenmaster486 wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

There are actually faster chips available for such a platform, for example some of the Pentium Overdrives and perhaps also some 3rd party CPU upgrades.

Would my Pentium 200 work?

What you can also see on wiki: The official support for Pentiums on socket 5 is 75 to 133MHz.

This comes due to the BF/BF0 jumper, setting the multiplier ratio. The point is: socket 5 has only one jumper, so only the ratios 1.5 and 2.0, with FSB 50,60 and 66 you have 75 to 133MHz.

With socket 7, you have two or three jumpers, to set more different ratio's for higher clocked cpu's. So, you're 200MHz should not work.

Also these further cpu's works on socket5:

• Intel Pentium Overdrive (125–166 MHz)
  Intel Pentium MMX Overdrive (125–200 MHz)
  AMD K5 (PR75–PR200)

Right now I'm trying to set up a network card. I tried a D-Link DFE-530TX+ and a 3COM930TX and both the drivers say the cards are not present or not installed, even though they are definitely installed in PCI slot #2. What gives? Do I need to set something in the BIOS to make them work?

I know for a fact that the 3COM card works, because when I boot up it runs the network bios and gives me a "Press N to boot from network..." option. What am I doing wrong? I have a Linksys LNE100TX I could try if all else fails.

EDIT: It's a 3COM905TX card, sorry.

I wonder if a 233mmx would work on your board. Besides being overvolted I mean. the cpu translates the 1.5x jumper setting to 233mhz. Stick a good heatsink and fan on it and make sure to cool the VRM's and I bet it would work and survive.

A pentium 75 - 100 mhz range is more then enough to play dos games like on a 486 class machine. These cpus would normally be to slow if you want to build a low class windows 95 machine.. For this windows 95 machine a pentium 133 mhz should recommended.

I tested a buddies Pentium 100 on a socket 5 Intel NX "Neptune" motherboard with that same Trident TGUI9440 graphics card.
Here's the scores.

3d Bench2 70.8
PCP Bench 22.6
Doom 46.25
Quake 19.1

Robin4 wrote:

A pentium 75 - 100 mhz range is more then enough to play dos games like on a 486 class machine. These cpus would normally be to slow if you want to build a low class windows 95 machine.. For this windows 95 machine a pentium 133 mhz should recommended.

OK, well, good, since it's pure DOS and right now I have a Pentium 75 in it.

BSA Starfire wrote:

I tested a buddies Pentium 100 on a socket 5 Intel NX "Neptune" motherboard with that same Trident TGUI9440 graphics card. Here' […]
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I tested a buddies Pentium 100 on a socket 5 Intel NX "Neptune" motherboard with that same Trident TGUI9440 graphics card.
Here's the scores.

3d Bench2 70.8
PCP Bench 22.6
Doom 46.25
Quake 19.1

Wow, those are surprisingly good... Do you think those scores would be different on a P75? i.e., is the video card or the CPU the bottleneck there? I'll run those benchmarks myself, but I don't want to use anything above 100MHz if possible for two reasons: one, I like systems with sub-100MHz speed, and two, all the jumpers are set for 75MHz and I'm too lazy to do all the work of figuring out how to set them differently (there's no model number on the motherboard).

So does anyone have any ideas on why my network cards aren't detected by the drivers? I set all of the BIOS PCI settings to exactly what the manuals said, to the best of my ability - a lot of the settings simply weren't there. I know (from a hardware info program) exactly what the slot #, bus #, irq #, etc. is of the 3COM card (and I set those manually in NET.CFG), and I know it works since I can go into its network BIOS after the MB POSTs, but the driver says it's not present in the system. Frustrating, I really want to get IPX networking to work on this thing.

On a side note, will a modern router work with the IPX protocol? I want to get 3-player netplay going with my two retro machines and another computer with DOSBox Megabuild.