Each machine is geared to a different gaming "era". The pentium III can do DOS games as early as 1993, and windows games up to 1999, maybe early 2000. The Packard Bell will not be able to run some windows games at acceptable framerates (late 1997 - early 2000 games) witch the PIII will excel at. I believe you should keep both.

Move the AWE64 to the Packard Bell - add another 16mb of ram on it, add a voodoo or voodoo2 (some games will only run correctly or at all on the original voodoo) and a faster CPU - a 200MHz non-MMX should do, since the overdrive CPUs are rare and expensive, and MMX doesn't add that much of a performance increase. Use this machine mostly for DOS games and some early GLIDE games like Tomb Raider, Uprising, Pandemonium and patched Carmageddon and Descent 3dfx.

For the PIII you can try to find a Yamaha DS-XG YMF724 (if you want to play windows games with great midi audio and sensaura 3d audio) or a Aureal Vortex (if you want A3D and decent midi audio) - or you could go with a Creative SB128 PCI / ESS ES1869 AudioDrive - these are cheap, easy to find, have good midi support in windows AND DOS (other two cards can't do DOS wavetable synth music) and sound good in windows.

** some socket 5 / socket 7 packard bell machines lack L2 cache - that makes them perform very poorly in 3d games. If your PB lacks L2 cache, you should keep it for dos games only or just stick with the PIII altogether.

You may want to check if the Pentium 200 has TR12 registers to manipulate. Might make a good slowdown machine using SETMUL.

Hmm, I'll have to see if I can find a 200mhz pentium, I don't know if this board supports it as I cannot find a ton of information about PB systems. I don't believe it has L2 cache either on the 133. The problem with my P3 is I wish I could underclock it some and get it down to maybe 500mhz or so because some games run ridiculously fast. I.e. Test Drive 3 feels like you're going 400x faster than you are.

I'm guessing I might bring the PB in the house and fire it up and start messing with everything. Would the general consensus be to put Windows 98 or Windows 95 on it? I have a few sound cards laying around also. I'm thinking I should just start over. I have a P2 300mhz and board but for some reason I cannot get it to boot for the life of me, it just won't do anything. Ideally I'd love to have that bad boy up and running but man.

You should keep both. Put something like a Voodoo 2 and the AWE in the Pentium 1 computer and upgrade to the 200mhz. P1 computers are perfectly fine for great DOS and early 9x stuff.

For the P3 machine put a Sound Blaster Live! or a Aureal Vortex card of some sort in there. Also you could most likely ditch the Voodoo 3 for a Geforce 2/3/4 Series of cards. That way you can play any 9x era game plus games up to 2002 perfectly fine.

Lots of options. If you have room for two systems, you can use the P3 for Win98 and the Packard Bell for pure DOS. The P3 is not ideal for older games, as it has fewer slowdown options with setmul. But the Packard Bell, even with a P200, will not be able to handle the later (1999-2002) games well.

I have a Packard Bell Multimedia C110 that came with a P120. I bought a POD 200MMX and it supports all the test registers, so as gdjacobs says, it makes a great slowdown machine. Here's how it performs:
SetMul - Multiplier control for VIA C3 / AMD K6+7+8 Mobile / Cyrix 5x86

To be clear, gerwin seems to think my POD 200MMX is unusual in its support of all the test registers:
What's up with all those Setmul switches?

Man, I might look into that - though on the topic, can anyone help me identify this board? This is the PII board I have and all I know is it came from a Gateway. It has a PII 300.

If your P133 is a P54CS, you may be able to OC it effectively, or it may be fast enough for your purposes.

I can't see the chipset. 440BX?

440LX, had to remove the processor to see it. The P133 not sure, I'll bring it in within the hour and start to take it apart and see. never knew of overclocking the P133.

blaker1983 wrote:

440LX, had to remove the processor to see it. The P133 not sure, I'll bring it in within the hour and start to take it apart and see. never knew of overclocking the P133.

Pentiums are unlocked. Just change the multiplier with jumpers and see if it works. The P120 on my PB runs at 133Mhz (the fastest non-overdrive speed the board runs) with no fuss.

So I'm looking again at this PII motherboard, I'm about to stuff it into a case really quick with a hard drive etc and see if it posts. Though I remember hearing about something with "oem" style motherboards having a proprietary power connector ?

Keep both machines. Install DOS 6.22 (and Win 3.11 if you like) on the P133, and use it for the older stuff that the P3 wouldn't handle as nicely.

133MHz is enough to run basically every single DOS game just fine, so I don't really see much point in overclocking or upgrading the processor. No real point in sticking a Voodoo 2 in there either... anything that you'd need that for would be better played on the P3. You *could* use a Voodoo 1 for the small number of games that would require it, but I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep over that. That S3 should do great for DOS games on it's own though.

The AWE64... is it a PCI or ISA card? If it's PCI, then you'll likely have trouble getting it to work in MS-DOS, but if it's ISA, then you'd be good to go. My preferred setup would be an old SB-16 for compatibility, paired with a Roland MT-32.

--Zero

Works for me, I appreciate the advice. I did get the P2 up and running but it has a hard drive in it with XP on it so it's in a boot loop. At any rate, on any of those 3 systems, what would you recommend for most compatibility? I know you said dos6.22 for the P133, it's already got Dos and Win95b on it. The P3 system has 98SE. Should I install 98SE on the P2 300 or 95? I want that to be my middle of the road machine as well as a back up and for when my son wants to hop on and LAN play.

blaker1983 wrote:

Works for me, I appreciate the advice. I did get the P2 up and running but it has a hard drive in it with XP on it so it's in a boot loop. At any rate, on any of those 3 systems, what would you recommend for most compatibility? I know you said dos6.22 for the P133, it's already got Dos and Win95b on it. The P3 system has 98SE. Should I install 98SE on the P2 300 or 95? I want that to be my middle of the road machine as well as a back up and for when my son wants to hop on and LAN play.

For the P1, it really depends on how much ram you plan to run on it. If you plan on using 64 mb or more, install win98 - there's no practical reason to install win95 except for nostalgia. Just make sure you system can cache all it's ram, otherwise it will run very slow - providing it has L2 cache. Personally, I'd stick with 32 to 64 mb of ram (just to be on the safe side) and use win95osr2 on it.

Dunno about the pentium II since you already have a p3 system. There are no games that will run exclusively on it. It's too fast for some dos games, and to slow for later windows games.