Hello Vogons,

I decided to build myself a retro PC to remind myself of the good old days once in a while.

Got a FIC PA-2012 Socket 7 motherboard, a Pentium MMX 233, SoundBlaster CT4760 (Live! Value) and a GeForce 2 MX (AGP) off eBay, put it all together and installed Windows 98SE.

DOS performance is great, but anything Direct3D related on Windows 98 is just a slideshow. Even Turok 2 runs at ~5fps and I remember playing that game on an AMD K5 90MHz and a Riva TNT2 back in the days, so it should probably run better, right?

I already tried:

- installing the VIA 4in1 drivers from philscomputerlab. Neither 435 nor 443 make any difference, even after manually installing the AGP bridge driver
- changing the AGP aperture size in BIOS and switching from AGP2x to AGP1x
- downgrading DirectX to 7.0a with Directx Buster
- older Detonator drivers for the GeForce (45.23 and 05.32)

Some games like I-War 2 (a DirectX 7 game) won't even run beyond the menu screen and a fairly simple Shadowman from Acclaim runs very slow, too.
I have 512MB RAM installed and downgraded that to one stick with 256MB, because I read of the uncached RAM problem here, but that still didn't make any difference.

I also installed Windows XP and the VIA 4in1 drivers (443) - the 3D performance is just as bad as on Windows 98.

Does anyone here have experience with the VP3 chipset? I'm out of ideas and I'd love to play a bit more than Commander Keen on this machine. 😎