PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Haha, this is where it all started 😊

Bugger I already started and got the Velocity 100 and V3 3500 results in. Testing the Banshee next. I use Serious Sam SE all the time under XP, didn't think of using the first one 😀

Glide capable games I am using are Turok 2 and Unreal.

I would love to try Turok and Turok 2 on my P2 system using Glide, but I've been hesitant to get those games because I already have them on N64 on my shelf. I remember playing Turok 2 in full 480i resolution with the Expansion Pak (I still have it installed in my N64) and it was glorious in the day. I can only imagine how good it would look on my Voodoo2 in 600p.

SPOILER: Sam will be very slow on K6 by the way.

Yes I will find out soon 😀

The GOG version runs fine unpacked from a folder. And it has benchmarking feature built-in, which is great.

It's a massive project though, will keep me busy for a while and I'll do a entire video series around because there is just too much otherwise.

OK so I've run into a weird problem with my Sound Blaster 16 ISA CT2230 in DOS. While running only a handful of games (namely DOOM patched to 1.9) my 'voice' audio just cuts out, leaving the midi music to play. Once or twice it has been in reverse and the midi has hung on a note but I'm aware of that hardware bug on my card. The Disappearance of the normal effects is strange though, a quick reset or re-running the mixerset.exe seems to bring it back, but only till I run one of the games I mentioned earlier. There are plenty of things it runs fine eg. C&C but I believe that's because it doesn't have midi music and Descent runs perfectly.

Any advice would be welcome.

EDIT: I'm using the drivers provided on the Legacy Driver page for SB16 Install Disks (INST CSP & PnP) I've only installed the main INST and CSP addon, I believe I don't have a PnP card.

Do you run DMA and IRQ shared with LPT1 ?

I Don't think so, I checked the bios for IRQ and DMA conflicts and I think it's all correct. Heres a screeny. Hardware settings for the card are ADD:220 IRQ:5 L-DMA:1 H-DMA:5.

~
(While taking this photo I noticed DMA 5 was set to PnP/PCI instead of ISA! Might that be causing the problem? I've also done some more testing and the games that usually cause the most trouble ie. Duke3d and Descent both work flawlessly. Only Doom 1.9 does not.)

EDIT: Can confirm changing the bios DMA 5 to ISA from PnP made no difference, sounds still starts off working then the digital effects stop and the midi continues.

Don't know if you already decided on the video card yet (I think V3, but you have a PCI card, IIRC). I can vouch for the FX 5200 (which I know you have a FX 5600). I'm playing around with a retro PC build myself. In my stash of video cards, the FX 5200 was the fastest I have for AGP 1.0/2.0 (5v), which is what I'm limited to with the Compaq Deskpro P650 (440BX).

It works surprisingly well! I always had issues with playing Duke 3D (or any games) that required VESA 2.0 (I sooooo wanated to play Duke 3D in 800x600 - the max res for the game, I believe). With the FX 5200 (and about 20 years later) I can now. 😀 And being a relatively newer/late DX9/OpenGL card, it runs Quake and Quake II perfectly. In fact, (maybe it's me), but I think it does Quake and Q2 (and other Glide/OpenGL games) even better than the single VooDoo2 card I have (higher res, 32-bit colors).

I still have the 1x VooDoo 2 card installed next to the FX 5200, but I don't see any reason to use it. I couldn't afford another V2 card at the time, and now I can't find a 2nd to match with it - a Canopus Pure3D II - or if I do find them, the price was too high for me.

I have the same SB16 CT2230. It's rare, but sometimes it bugs out and I get no music, but I get digital audio (opposite of your issue). I have an issue with Jill of the Jungle and getting music to work. I get a lot of FM noise - even after slowing down the CPU (and the game speed runs fine), so I don't think it's a CPU speed issue.

Enjoy the process! As I go along, I install a game I remember I had and get motivated to keep going when it actually runs perfectly. 😀

Not my first post (I was lurking here for a while - first post was at the ebay forum "not for me, but maybe for you") where I found a great Asus P3B-F (thanks, Vogons people!), but definately 3rd or 4th one. 😀 Wanted to see if my input can help a fellow retro PC gamer since you guys helped me lots here (just by reading and lurking).

A FX runs Quake II most certainly better than a Voodoo 2 😀

In multiple ways: Better image quality, 32 bit colours, much higher resolution and optional AF and AA.

I'm currently testing Nvidia cards with a K6-III+ 550 MHz and I'm up to a GeForce2 Pro and will definitely check out the FX as well. One downside are potential driver issues simply because the period correct, and often most compatible drivers, don't support such newer cards.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

One downside are potential driver issues simply because the period correct, and often most compatible drivers, don't support such newer cards.

I don't recall what version of nvidia drivers I'm using, but so far so good. GLQuake and Quake2 are the only games I'm running in Windows 98 SE right now. I have a GOG version of the first 3 Tomb Raider games - I'll have to check those out and report back.

I don't know when I will get the Asus P3B-F, but when I do, I'm going to make an image of the C: partition, then swap the board to see if Win 98 can handle it. If not, I'll have to reinstall Win98SE from scratch. Most of my DOS games and installers are on the 2nd partition anyways.

I'm mentioning that because I have a feeling I won't get around to testing out Tomb Raider/Win98SE/FX5200 gaming until after I figure out how to migrate everything to use the new board. I have a feeling the mobo I have now (original mobo for the Compaq Deskpro P650 440BX) disk controller is on it's way out. Occasionally getting a 1783 - IDE controller error on boot up.

Hello Vogoneers! What a rigmarole I've been through.

Firstly I'd like to thank everyone who helped me out picking system parts and deciding on the gfx card to use.
So this build has certainly been interesting, I went with the 3dfx Voodoo3 2000 16mb PCI which works great! (Now the system is working...)

Firstly I got the system running under pure MS-DOS 6.22 with Windows 3.11 and updated the bios to the latest available with large drive support (F7b). Along side this I had installed and configured a IDE SD card adapter with a 64gb SDXC card which had a separate fresh FAT32 partition with a untouched Win98SE on it. It all worked fine. Got networking working in Win3.11 (winstack) and in DOS (Realtek RTL8139 packet driver). Played some quake world in dos with a nice near 60fps at 320x200. I improved this using a DOS Glide version of quake along side MXK6OPT.exe - A K6-2 video memory access optimiser. All seemed good but then I ran into problems with the Sound Blaster 16 (CT2230 ISA) as described in a previous post the digital effects would cut out leaving only the MIDI playing in games like DOOM/DII and Duke3D, I couldn't fix this problem. Multiple re-installs, different Creative drivers and Bios setting changes didn't fix it.

While looking for a solution online I found one post on a random site describing a similar problem dated around the year 2000, their fix was changing out a Seagate HDD which apparently was interfering with the card?! It was the only thing left I could try, so I gave it a go. In the process of copying the Seagate HDD (ST340810A 40GB) and swapping it with another the drive lost two pins (pin 1 and pin 38) the solder holding the pins in place had crumbled away leaving the pins in my external drive adapter 😠.

So I moved onto a fresh drive and planned on doing a fresh install... Drive un-able to boot off, stuck at 'Searching for boot record on IDE-0... OK'. I tried about 6 other drives same problem. Boots fine off DOS floppy and can browse and install to C:\ on all of them, but BIOS cant get past 'IDE-0...OK' when booting directly off the drive. I though well I'd broken the mother board or something, re-flashed the bios same results. Plugged the SD card IDE adapter back it, it boots!

So now I'm running Windows 98 SE with dos 7.1 configured as per Phill's video here http://www.philscomputerlab.com/ms-dos-mode-tutorials.html everything runs perfectly, made a copy of the install because I know Windows 98 can be a pain with corrupted system files after crashes or even just installing drivers, Glad I did too. So getting 3D Windows games to work was the nightmare i was expecting, not because of Drivers but just Windows in general. DirextX, Windows 98 UnOfficial SP3, IE5/5.5/6 and 98Lite just lots of things that didn't want to play well together.

It's now all working! Heres what I did/have in TLDR form:

The Build:- Same as first post but with 128MB of ram and Voodoo3 2000 PCI 16MB.
The System & Install order:- Windows 98 SE, Drivers for LAN + Sound + Amigamerlin's 2.9 3Dfx Drivers (highly recommended!), updated IE 5.5 then 6, UO SP3 main update, DirectX 8.2, DirectX 9.0c. This is STABLE.

As for the sound issues in DOS, digital effects in Doom/DII still cut out after a while, but it's much much longer (about an hour now as opposed to 5 mins). This doesn't happen in Windows only in DOS MODE, so must be caused by the dos drivers alone. Since both Duke3D and Doom work in Windows I have no problem with this.

EDIT: This problem persists even into windows, but only when running DOOM/DUKE3D after an hour or so, It also kills all wave effects in Windows. A reboot fixes it. Not sure if Driver issue or fault on the Sound Card, I'm leaning towards Driver or Bug as disabling the hardware in Device Man and enabling it again fixes the sound.

The only game other than them causing me trouble which is still a mystery is Rogue Squadron 3D, in one earlier unstable install of 98 it ran fine when patched to the latest version in Glide mode (not so much D3D which errored on launch). Now on my stable system it will only run un-patched at v1. Patching it causes the menu not to work which is apparently a problem with DirectDraw, but the game now does run in both D3D and Glide mode. I'm fine with not patching the game so this is a moot point.

Benchmarks coming soon. Will also test impact of additional RAM over the cacheable limit. Cheers W.

Whiskey wrote:

What I have at hand right now out of the cards suggested are the Voodoo3 2000 which is the PCI version and a Radeon 7200 SE which is AGP. If i can track them down I know I've got a Voodoo 4 & 5 stashed away somewhere. Personally I never had any nVIdia cards till the geforce 440 MX came out as I was rocking a Voodoo5 5500 AGP for a long time before then.

I know the feeling. My history was like this:

486 - DOS/Windows 3.1
Some weird unknown graphics adapter. I was too young to investigate or know better.

100Mhz Pentium - Windows 95 (Packard Bell)
The built-in 1MB motherboard chip. Again, too young to care.

350MHz Pentium II - Windows 98 FE (custom build)
This one had the Diamond Stealth II G460 8MB AGP card.

1.6GHz AMD Athlon XP - Windows XP (custom build)
This started with an ATI Radeon 7500 64MB AGP card.
I eventually upgraded to an ATI Radeon 9800 AGP card.

2.1GHz Pentium M - Windows XP (Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2)
nVidia GeForce Go 7800 GTX 256MB PCI-Express - my first nVidia card ever and boy was it powerful!

2.8GHz Core i7-860 - Windows 7 Home
nVidia GeForce GTX 480 1.5GB PCI-Express 2.0 - I eventually got 2x in SLI mode - crazy performance!

4.0GHz Core i7-6700K - Windows 10 Home
nVidia GeForce GTX 980Ti 6GB PCI-Express 3.0 - Again, stupid amounts of graphics power.

Looks like after I hit nVidia cards, I never looked back.

Similar for me too FFXIhealer. I'm lucky my dad was really into PCs when I was growing up (im 27 now)

486DX with dos 6.22 and win 3.11 (I still have some of the parts that were in this but sadly not many) too young to know or care at the time.

AMD K2-500 which we built together with his dad too (thats the cpu I'm using for this build). With 98SE on it, we skipped 95 and 98 waiting for SE which was lame. Couldn't play C&C 95 which I owned for 2 years while I waited 😵

I built my first PC with my own money which was a AMD Athlon 1100Mhz which had a GeForce 4 in.
This machine got upgraded alot. At some point I switched over to ATI cards so I could play Deus Ex 2 and Unreal 2 The Awakening which both needed Shader 2.0 cards (the ATI one was cheaper).

At some point I did a rebuild and upgraded to a AMD Athlon XP 2400 then XP 2800+ they were all K7 chips I think. Cards swapped between Nvidia and ATI for a while during the AGP phase.

Next was the first Intel machine I built which was a Core2Duo which I still use as a server today which got a ATI X1950 then eventually an upgrade to a ATI HD 4850.

Current machine is a Intel Core i7 3770K and a AMD (not ATI any more) HD 7970 GHz Edition, I reckon its time for a new build soon 😉

You're sticking with them hot-ass ATI cards?

FFXIhealer wrote:

You're sticking with them hot-ass ATI cards?

Haha, I wouldn't say it was out of choice. I've always been on the budget end of high/mid range hardware. Things are picking up again with the whole Nvidia vs AMD GPU wars recently.
The new AMD RX480 looked promising for the price conscious gamer who is not really looking to invest in 4K yet, except for its power consumption issues...
The Geforce 1080 certainly packs a punch well over the RX480 when it comes to 4K, but almost double the cost.

Personally I think I'll see who wins the mid price battle in the next few months and go with whatever looks like the best bang for the buck.

As for my retro build I have the first few results from my benchmark tests of the Voodoo3 2000, and will continue to add more as I do them here https://goo.gl/v3EOXs

Hi all, it's been a while so here's what I've settled on for the graphics card (, have also been using and adjusting the for the last month or so and made a few swaps with the rest of the build).
I have underlined any notable changes as well.

Final Build:-
Gigabyte GA-5AA Motherboard - With PS/2, Parallel and USB header Brackets installed.
AMD K6-3+/450ACR Super Socket 7 CPU - Swapped out the K6-2 for the 3+ for cache/memory/stability reasons.
Creative Sound Blaster AWE64 Value ISA CT4500 Swapped out the Creative Sound Blaster 16 CT2230 because there was something wrong with the FM output.
256MB SDRAM PC133 Less memory at a high frequency has proved much more stable.
Realtek 10/100 LAN Card
HDD 120GB Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9
SD to IDE Adapter with a Class10 Samsung SDXC Pro 64GB Card
2x Mitsumi 3.5" 1.44 Floppy Drives
52x IDE CD-ROM Drive w/ Audio pass-through
40x IDE CD-ROM Drive
200W AT Power Supply

3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 APG 16MB Memory - Went with the 3dfx for glide support, note this is not the PCI V3 2000 I was using before, But the AGP 3000 version I pulled out of a donor rig recently.
Cirrus Logic CL-GD5446 (HC-A) PCI Card - Using the AGP slot for graphics free'd up a slot for a well supported 2D graphics card for classic dos games.

I'm getting really good results on the usual games GLQuake, Quake 2, Half-Life etc. But also some better than expected results on Quake 3 Arena at 1024x768 (Avg 40fps on High Detail). I will try and capture some gameplay as soon as i can.

A side note: With the imminent arrival of the Dreamblaster X2 and the S1 Black I've got a sound card lined up for testing which is labelled Schubert v1.2 with a ESS AudioDrive chip (ES1868F). It has a Wavetable header and I think it was Phil that mentioned that the ESS chips have a clean sound for use with headers. So I'll get that into this rig and if it works well with the dos/midi side of things. If it does I'll swap out the AWE 64 for that and put in a Creative Audigy for the EAX 3D sound support with Win 98 Games.

Thanks for reading.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the DOS game support of a V3. The 5446 is a great card for DOS compatibility, but I doubt you'll need it.

FFXIhealer wrote:

You're sticking with them hot-ass ATI cards?

You're kidding right? You said you owned a GTX 480... those get hotter then AMD's R9 290X! The 1080 gets pretty hot too, especially the founder's edition with the shitty blower cooler (82 to 85 in demanding games and it's noisy as all hell - the only reason it won't reach 90 is because it throttles at 85C) - then there's the 580 witch is cooler then the 480 but not by much. There's also the 280 series witch are smoldering hot just like the 480 - and there's the 8800/9800 GTX (and the shitty single slot GT) witch used to die from thermal stress, and of course the original vacuum cleaner - the FX 5900 Ultra - so nvidia has a worse track record when it comes to heat.

As for ATi/AMD:

- 9800XT - moderately hot, but not exceptionally
- X800/X850 - moderately cool
- X1900 - pretty cool, but also pretty noisy
- 2900XT - hot and moderately noisy - not as hot as the 8800 GTX, but close
- 3870 - cool and quiet
- 4870 - cool and quiet
- 5870 - fairly cool but can get noisy
- 6870 - cool and quiet
- 6970 - hot-ish
- 7870 - very cool and quiet
- 7970 - fairly cool and quiet (including the GHz edition)
- R9 280x - fairly cool and quiet
- R9 290X - hot but fairly quiet (very quiet if using a non-reference cooler)
- 380X - cool and quiet
- 390X moderately hot but quiet
- Fury X - cool and quiet
- RX 470/480 - cool and quiet.

Count them. The only cool high-end cards from nvidia are the GTX 680, GTX 780 and the 980.

Whiskey wrote:

Haha, I wouldn't say it was out of choice. I've always been on the budget end of high/mid range hardware. Things are picking up […]
Show full quote

FFXIhealer wrote:

You're sticking with them hot-ass ATI cards?

Haha, I wouldn't say it was out of choice. I've always been on the budget end of high/mid range hardware. Things are picking up again with the whole Nvidia vs AMD GPU wars recently.
The new AMD RX480 looked promising for the price conscious gamer who is not really looking to invest in 4K yet, except for its power consumption issues...
The Geforce 1080 certainly packs a punch well over the RX480 when it comes to 4K, but almost double the cost.

Personally I think I'll see who wins the mid price battle in the next few months and go with whatever looks like the best bang for the buck.

As for my retro build I have the first few results from my benchmark tests of the Voodoo3 2000, and will continue to add more as I do them here https://goo.gl/v3EOXs

You mean over double the cost - RX 480X is ~ 1200 lei / 260 euro while the GTX 1080 is 3000 lei / ~665 euro - so yeah, you get twice the performance but for 2.5x the cost. Personally, I went with the GTX 1070, but only because I got a rally good deal on it.

gdjacobs wrote:

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the DOS game support of a V3. The 5446 is a great card for DOS compatibility, but I doubt you'll need it.

Thanks for the advice gdjacobs, I've taken out the 5446 and swapped out the AWE64 Value for a ESS AudioDrive ES1868F with the X2 Dreamblaster attached! Interestingly the ambient temp of the rig is about 4 degrees cooler now.

kanecvr wrote:

You mean over double the cost - RX 480X is ~ 1200 lei / 260 euro while the GTX 1080 is 3000 lei / ~665 euro - so yeah, you get twice the performance but for 2.5x the cost. Personally, I went with the GTX 1070, but only because I got a rally good deal on it.

Yea sorry, over double! I was going to build a new pc for my living room (games/media centring/music recording) so was probably going to go budget level anyway... But then AMD announces the AM4 Ryzen chips and the Vega GPU's some time for next year... It's been a long time since I built an AMD rig (Athlon XP) and their performance over cost always gives intel and nvidia something to worry about. So looks like I'm waiting to see what 2017 brings to the budget market.