What games in particular do you want to play?

kolderman wrote on 2020-01-12, 01:16:

What games in particular do you want to play?

I would really like to play them all again. I started on a 486 P75 with a 2mb trident video card. Played games on it for years, then I got into 3d games and got the voodoo 2. I replayed some of them with dosbox but Im not a fan of emulation. Should i get 2 video cards? one being a 3dfx?

All from what era to what era? It is impossible to build a PC that spans DOS to XP days, let alone modern PCs.

If you are serious about early DOS games get a pentium MMX that can be slowed down nicely. Pair it with a S3 Virge DX/GX and an ess audiodrive.

For Win98 games I would get a pentium4 or Athlon XP with a geforce FX 5500 (or better), and SB Live!.

But there are dozens of other options depending on what apsects of what games you care about. E.g. midi music, 3dfx glide games, genuine opl3 sound, a3d positional sound, etc etc.

And no, there is no real reason to get a 3dfx card unless you really care about it.

kolderman wrote on 2020-01-12, 02:56:

And no, there is no real reason to get a 3dfx card unless you really care about it.

Lies and slander! I don't care if Glide wrappers are totally indistinguishable from original hardware, it's just not the same 😜 Kidding aside, Phil made a decent video on a Voodoo 5500 alternative.

Wanting to play *all* games is really tricky though. Do you care about ancient early eighties DOS monochrome/CGA games? Then a turbo XT sounds like a good candidate. Do you want to play games with audio closer to that of a typical game console? The the Game Blaster is recommended. Want to try Tandy games? Time for a Tandy 1000 variant of some sort. Curious about early Sierra games and their unique soundtracks? Then a 386 at 33 MHz running an intelligent mode MPU-401 and MT-32 (Old) is now on the table. Do you want to hear dual OPL2 soundtracks for those games? Good luck finding the original Pro Audio Spectrum. Want to try a dual OPL2 solution that's slightly more common? Get a Sound Blaster Pro 1.0, but don't stick on anything faster than a 33 MHz FSB, but try to have it on a 486 of some variety so you can enjoy Ultima Underworld. Oh, shit, I forgot! Ultima Underworld really sounds best with a CM-32L since it has more sound effects. Man, they really outdid themselves on that one...

As you can see, if you try to hit everything you will find some edge cases, as documented here. You won't hit them all with one system, but you can pick and choose an era to start and go from there. My setup has become something running an IBM 5160, a Tandy 1000 TL, a monstrous Tyan K6-3+ board, another K6-3+ board for later DOS games, an Athlon XP 3000+, and a dual boot XP/7 machine running a 4790K and 980 Ti. I might throw a 486 with a Pentium Overdrive in there for good measure. In my case, that's what it takes to hit "everything" and that includes an army of MIDI equipment as well.

If I were to settle on one DOS-heavy machine and one Windows 98-heavy machine, it would be the Tyan K6-3+ board and the Athlon XP 3000+ board. Even then, I'd be running something like five audio cards, three video cards, two 3D accelerators, and an FMV-centric card.

So, with all that word salad dumped above, what game do you want to play first?

I don't care if Glide wrappers are totally indistinguishable from original hardware

They aren't, by definition. And there are some undesirable side effects, which 3dfx hardware didn't had.

thanks for the replies. looks like im in for a few different systems!

Also, a bad BIOS flash most definitely does not mean you killed a board. That KT7A for example has a nice socketed DIP-32 EEPROM that you can flash in pretty much any EEPROM flasher or failing that hot-flash on another motherboard. If you can't do it yourself, others can do it for you and if you don't know anyone, there are commercial flashing services too. Whatever you do, don't throw a beautiful and otherwise working board like that away for something so trivial!

Apart from that: as you can see, we're more than willing to help with suggestions, ideas and opinions, but the most important job is yours - figuring out what you want to run. The sharper you can focus that, the simpler and less contradictory the recommendations will be.

Also, a rough idea of budget and of where you are located are relevant for practicalities. If you can easily drop USD/EUR 500 for a Voodoo5, you're in a different ballpark than if you might struggle to scrape together 1/10 of that amount for a whole system. Do be careful with throwing too much cash around though, a lot of the satisfaction of this hobby comes from a sense of achievement. You can't buy that, you generally have to work for it. Just buying your way out of work may lead to an anticlimax in the end.

dionb wrote on 2020-01-12, 11:53:

Also, a bad BIOS flash most definitely does not mean you killed a board. That KT7A for example has a nice socketed DIP-32 EEPROM that you can flash in pretty much any EEPROM flasher or failing that hot-flash on another motherboard. If you can't do it yourself, others can do it for you and if you don't know anyone, there are commercial flashing services too. Whatever you do, don't throw a beautiful and otherwise working board like that away for something so trivial!

Apart from that: as you can see, we're more than willing to help with suggestions, ideas and opinions, but the most important job is yours - figuring out what you want to run. The sharper you can focus that, the simpler and less contradictory the recommendations will be.

Also, a rough idea of budget and of where you are located are relevant for practicalities. If you can easily drop USD/EUR 500 for a Voodoo5, you're in a different ballpark than if you might struggle to scrape together 1/10 of that amount for a whole system. Do be careful with throwing too much cash around though, a lot of the satisfaction of this hobby comes from a sense of achievement. You can't buy that, you generally have to work for it. Just buying your way out of work may lead to an anticlimax in the end.

Thanks for the reply. I do know about eeprom flashing with usb flashers and such but I think there is other problems with the board. It would not for any reason whatsoever boot from the cdrom. I replaced some caps that were bad and it was still having trouble booting from cdrom. I could boot dos, i tried all different cdrom drivers, and one out of 10 boots I might be able to access the cdrom with the d:\>dir command. Other times it would give a general read failure . tried 3 different drives with not luck. I got windows 98 setup started a few times and after the final reboot it would freeze as detecting DMI thing. I decided to reflash the BIOS because I thought it might be corrupted. Whenever I cleared the CMOS jumper the computer would start for a second and shutoff. It would do this over and over. I would clear it and try again. I left the jumper on for a long time and it did not make a difference. Then for no reason at all it would boot after about 30 tires and then it would work just fine until i had to clear the bios again. then the whole process would start back over again.

At any rate thanks for the info. On a side note im going to pick up a gateway 2000 p-75 today!! Cant wait to see what goodies it has in it!

joeyjojo wrote on 2020-01-12, 15:51:

[...]

Thanks for the reply. I do know about eeprom flashing with usb flashers and such but I think there is other problems with the board. It would not for any reason whatsoever boot from the cdrom. I replaced some caps that were bad and it was still having trouble booting from cdrom. I could boot dos, i tried all different cdrom drivers, and one out of 10 boots I might be able to access the cdrom with the d:\>dir command. Other times it would give a general read failure . tried 3 different drives with not luck. I got windows 98 setup started a few times and after the final reboot it would freeze as detecting DMI thing. I decided to reflash the BIOS because I thought it might be corrupted. Whenever I cleared the CMOS jumper the computer would start for a second and shutoff. It would do this over and over. I would clear it and try again. I left the jumper on for a long time and it did not make a difference. Then for no reason at all it would boot after about 30 tires and then it would work just fine until i had to clear the bios again. then the whole process would start back over again.

There's probably a very good reason, most likely caps that don't yet look broken but are bad regardless. If one cap of a certain type is bad, they probably all are. That might also explain the bad flash. I suspect that the 5V line was unstable and had dropped too low for reliable flashing and the 3.3V line was too low for reliable ATAPI tranfers.

At any rate thanks for the info. On a side note im going to pick up a gateway 2000 p-75 today!! Cant wait to see what goodies it has in it!

Sounds good! Probably a great DOS box 😀

dionb wrote on 2020-01-12, 15:59:

There's probably a very good reason, most likely caps that don't yet look broken but are bad regardless. If one cap of a certain […]
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joeyjojo wrote on 2020-01-12, 15:51:

[...]

Thanks for the reply. I do know about eeprom flashing with usb flashers and such but I think there is other problems with the board. It would not for any reason whatsoever boot from the cdrom. I replaced some caps that were bad and it was still having trouble booting from cdrom. I could boot dos, i tried all different cdrom drivers, and one out of 10 boots I might be able to access the cdrom with the d:\>dir command. Other times it would give a general read failure . tried 3 different drives with not luck. I got windows 98 setup started a few times and after the final reboot it would freeze as detecting DMI thing. I decided to reflash the BIOS because I thought it might be corrupted. Whenever I cleared the CMOS jumper the computer would start for a second and shutoff. It would do this over and over. I would clear it and try again. I left the jumper on for a long time and it did not make a difference. Then for no reason at all it would boot after about 30 tires and then it would work just fine until i had to clear the bios again. then the whole process would start back over again.

There's probably a very good reason, most likely caps that don't yet look broken but are bad regardless. If one cap of a certain type is bad, they probably all are. That might also explain the bad flash. I suspect that the 5V line was unstable and had dropped too low for reliable flashing and the 3.3V line was too low for reliable ATAPI tranfers.

At any rate thanks for the info. On a side note im going to pick up a gateway 2000 p-75 today!! Cant wait to see what goodies it has in it!

Sounds good! Probably a great DOS box 😀

I might revisit it down the road, but i got a few more old computers to play with for now.

Here it is. No surprises inside but its still a pretty good machine. Only one problem, I have no way to add software to it 🤣. I do not own a floppy disk of either kind and there are no cdrom drivers on the system. I need a boot disk with cdrom drivers and then I can burn some cd's and install windows 95 or 98. Its rocking 3.1 now. It did come with a printer and a 6 disk cdrom changer. Never seen one of them before. Im sure it works but I don't think it will read burnt cds and the autoexec.bat and config.sys are a mess. errors on boot. I would just much rather wipe the machine and start fresh with windows 95. Anyone know where I can get a floppy with cdrom drivers ready to go? I know about the floppy drive emulator but I really don't want to spend anymore money on these retro systems at the moment. I just picked up 2 lian li cases, 7 sound cards, 5 agp video cards and today this gateway 2000 p-75 plus some other odds and ends. My wife is going to get pissed here soon lmao.

Nice. I like gateways. If you search for boot disk downloads you will find plenty. There is even a tool that will format and write a good boot disk to a floppy drive. Pity the mobo doesn't allow booting from CDROM.