oerk wrote:

So, a P2-350 is plenty fast even for SNES emulation.

You need a 3 GHz processor for legit/accurate SNES emulation. If you are emulating the console today, you're going to want to use today's vastly superior emulators vs the hacks that came out in the 90s.

Beside the interesting nes-emulation discussion I think a GamingPC 1998 should use a voodoo3.
I also tested some other cards, but they are mostly useless. 32Bit Gaming with such a low-end CPU is useless.
Most Games from 1997-1999 look best on Voodoo und run best on Voodoo. Other Chips are in my opinion for that time useless.
The Voodoo3 has the best picture quality over all other chips at that time (only matrox are as good).

dr.zeissler wrote:

Most Games from 1997-1999 look best on Voodoo und run best on Voodoo. Other Chips are in my opinion for that time useless

While I agree that a V3 would be the best overall choice, I wouldnt go so far as to call other chips useless.

Both Ati and Nvidia have good offerings for this time and even less powerful cards from the likes of S3 have their own bonuses, like s3tc and stuff. Also Voodoo cards usually cost more than alternatives these days.

This build has a Diamond Viper V770 RIVA TNT2 32MB AGP card as the primary graphics card, which is leaps and bounds more powerful than a single Voodoo2 card alone is worth. Its 3dfx competition was the Voodoo3 anyway, but I really like nVidia's work with DirectX at the time. Besides, anything more powerful than this would be a waste on this motherboard, even if I upgraded to the 600MHz Pentium III Katmai processor. Anything more powerful would still get bottlenecked by either the 2x AGP bus speed limitation or by the CPU not being fast enough to keep up with it.

I used to do NES and SNES emulation on an old Packard Bell with 16MB of RAM and a Pentium 100MHz processor. This 350 MHz Pentium II and 128 MB of PC-100 RAM (now 256MB) is complete overkill for SNES emulation. Will it do N64 emulation? Not hardly. But I'm not trying to do that here.

Now, my Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop from 2005 will do N64 emulation absolutely smoothly, but we're talking about a 2.1GHz Pentium M, 2GB of DDR2-566 and a GeForce 7800GTX 256MB PCi-Express grahpics card running Windows XP SP3 and DirectX 9.0c.

Returning to the SLI problem, I may pull the 2nd card out, do 3dMark99 testing on both cards individually, then start moving the card around the PCI slots to find out which ones work best. I haven't ruled out a direct card problem, but the desk.cpl tab works perfectly fine without the SLI bridge and crashes with the SLI bridge installed. There's gotta be a problem here somewhere, because I think this rules out a driver issue.

Could also be that I need to change the memory map for the 2nd card.

I noticed Problems with V550 and V770 in my PII machine. Only the V330 was OK.
Please do this test: Install JazzJack2, reduce to 640x400 @ 8Bit and activate "Hardware-Acceleration"
Does it scroll SMOOTH or not? I tested several Gfx-Cards, only the V3 and the V330 (Riva128) scrolled smooth, all others NOT.

Might want to lead off with what JazzJack2 is, because I've never heard of it. And why would I care if it scrolls smooth on 8-bit at such a low resolution as long as it scrolls smooth at 16-bit or 32-bit at 800x600? I mean, details, man. Give details.

JazzJack Rabbit 2 is a platform Game and "Platformers" have to scroll smooth.

...because every-one that comes fromthe homecomputers (AtariST,Amiga, C64 etc.) knows what SMOOTH scrolling is,
but on the PC smooth scrolling is VERY rare. Look Trine etc. micro-stuttering, or full stutteriung BÄH!
interesting is, that some pc-games (dos/win) can scroll smooth, but they do that only under certain circumstances.
it's only a way to prove that the v3 IS indeed the best choice for a pc-gaming-rig up to 1999.
It's only an example, there are other things that makes the v3 the best card for that time.

I never got JazzJack2 scroll smooth on any other machine, with any other gfx-card (except r128) and any other resolution and bit-deph.
the mac-port of that game is a good expample. it's very poor port. it stutters all the time, regardless if it gets 200Mhz
and a good PCI 2D Card, or 1.6Ghz G4 with GF4-Ti4000. Such things make me angry.

Ok, understandable. But I didn't buy the V770 and the Voodoo2 cards to play 2d platform scrollers. I bought them to play Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Quake 1/2, Turok 1/2, Tomb Raider, Rainbow Six, Final Fantasy 7/8, Diablo 1/2, etc.

Then you will have to set the timeline higher. For your demand (Morrowind) you probably need a card with pixelshader-option for the water.
Wrong timeline with wrong hardware.

Turok e.g is glide optimized (1+2), therefore the v2-sli or v3 is a good choice.

Well granted I'll never run Morrowind on this PC anyway because the CPU requirements are higher than my 350MHz Pentium II. I think the minimum was 500 Mhz Pentium III.

I've read this thread, nice! I'll build a 1998 pc too! As always , sorry for my poor english.

In 1998 i was still using a p200mmx ,matrox mystique 220 paired with a voodoo2.The Voodoo 'magic' was awesome, but a bit overkill. Quake 2 looked great.
All my friends all had pentium 2 equipped with the mystical voodoo banshee (we all had this voodoo banshee craze at the time), i was left behind! In '99 i did build a celeron 400,sold the voodoo2 and bought a tnt2 ultra...

It is time to get back to the past!

I have a couple of qdi legend BX motherboards,they should be the correct age. Also have the asus p3bf but it's 1999,i'll use it for another project.

The Voodoo Banshee donated by one of my friends! (thanks again, i'll buy you a beer!) 16 mb agp from 1998
Ram? I'll go overkill, probably around 256mb .I think i just had 64 and later 128 mb in 1999.
Sound? Hmm, i don't know. I have a sb live,but it's too modern for 1998. I mean, it's from late 1998 but nobody had that at the time! I have a sb awe64 value, i'll use that.
windows 98 of course.
floppy, cd, lan etc.
Boot Hard drive? CF or SD. I know it's not very 1998 by having a Compact Flash as main mass storage , but i'm worried about 20 year old hard drives reliability 😊
2nd hard drive : 10 to 40 gb hard disk.I have many left,I'll use it for storage and that nice and fuzzy feeling of a mechanical motor spinning inside your case.
CPU? I can choose from 300 to 450 P2,(have lots!) I still have to decide. I'll probably put a 400,released in early 1998 and one of the 1st proc. to have 100 mhz bus.

The pentium 2 450 was also released in 1998. You may also try the celeron 300A. It can be a little bit faster than a pentium 2 at the equivalent speed especially on games. By using a 100MHz FSB you'll be able to run it at 450MHz and again be just a little bit faster than the p2 450 (at least I've seen some benchmarks, I don't own a pentium 450 🙁 )

Quite funny to see that back then a 150$ CPU could be faster than a 2000$ CPU with just a small part from tape

Imagine if we could transform a 40$ Celeron to a 2000$ Xeon nowadays X)

FFXIhealer wrote:

I used to do NES and SNES emulation on an old Packard Bell with 16MB of RAM and a Pentium 100MHz processor. This 350 MHz Pentium II and 128 MB of PC-100 RAM (now 256MB) is complete overkill for SNES emulation.

Well, my keyword was "accurate." If you don't care about emulation bugs, shortcuts, improper speeds, and the usage of hacks to get a game running, then I suppose it doesn't matter. But if you want accurate SNES emulation that brings your experience closer to using a real SNES, you need much more raw speed. Take a look at this article - http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accurac … -snes-emulator/

Again, I NEVER noticed stuttering or a slowdown on my 350MHz Pentium II system. SNES emulation was perfectly smooth and responsive. I have no idea why you think I need a 3 GHz Pentium4 to emulate a system that had a 3.58 MHz processor inside it. My experience has shown that none of that is necessary. It is perfectly accurate. I compare it to the SNES THAT I STILL OWN AND WORKS and the games I have. I trust my own eyes and experience over some article somewhere else.

No, it wasn't accurate. Not even close. That is just how you perceived it thanks to some of the hacks that were created for the emulators at the time. Also, it is possible the games that you played/play didn't require as much accuracy as others - which would make it easier to overlook any imperfections. But for accurate emulation, you want a much, much, much faster system than an old retro computer - or ideally, to just use the retro system (SNES) itself.

That article was written by Byuu - the author of the Higan emulator (formerly bsnes) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higan_(emulator). It is honestly a good read.

I am sorry if this news upsets you. However, it is the truth.

No, it's not the truth. A good half of that read is snake oil.

He's not talking about emulation. He's talking about SIMULATION, otherwise known as HARDWARE MODELLING. We do this shit in guitar amps. The good ones, yes, are Fractal's AxeFX, a $1,500 rack-mounted amp modeller unit. But I don't need to spend that kind of cash to get a really good, working Marshall crunch sound. My $300 Fender Mustang amp does it well enough and I move on.

Not everyone who plays old ROMs is trying to look for invisible bugs that don't affect their game. Nobody playing A Link To The Past is worried about some Speedy Gonzales game they don't own, don't play, never heard of, and don't care about.

If he's writing a hardware modeller, good for him. That's, like, a development kit. I don't need a dev kit. Hell, I don't even have any roms on my rebuild system anyway. I'm too busy trying to figure out why the Voodoo2 SLI isn't working. And here you come barging into the thread with an unasked for topic. Seriously, were you TRYING to derail the thread?

I contributed what I thought was valuable and useful information regarding the emulation of the Super Nintendo. I don't appreciate the way I have been treated here. Calm down.

SNES works on my Celeron433 but only for the Dos-Emulator. Win9x-SNES is to slow. Sound stutters, gfx stutters, but for Dos It's OK.

Well I managed to stabilize the Dual Voodoo2 SLI by moving the 2nd Voodoo2 card to the 3rd PCI slot and moving the NIC card down to the 4th PCI slot, leaving the 2nd slot bare. Now I can re-install all my games. It's pretty stable and 3DMark99 gave it a 3006 score on 800x600.

Nice!