Athlon 64 should be fine with a modern PSU.

6600GT is a good starting point for Win9x, It doesn't have as good compatibility as the Ti cards you mention but as you already own the card I'd try it out first and see if you need to go out and buy something else.
Voodoo3 only matters if your playing Glide games, It's Direct 3D performance wont be as good as the NVidia cards and aren't cheap. Really comes down to your games list.

Wireless keyboard/mouse can work. First off you want something that doesn't require drivers. Certain Logitech and MS devices just needed you to press a button on the device for it to sync with the USB transmitter.
With any luck Bios will have an option like "Enable Legacy USB Mode" this means as far as windows is concerned its just a regular PS2 keyboard and mouse, this will get around Win9x's patchy USB support as well.

If BIOS allows you to put SATA in IDE or compatibility mode then you can use SATA drives. as Windows just see's them as IDE anyway.

Your current CPU is already overkill for Win9x, CPU speed is only going to affect load times at this point. choice is up to you.
Dos is a very different OS. This rig will make for a great Win9x build, but terrible dos one.
If your prepared to make compromises you can make this play some dos games, but you'll end up with a PC that's average in both OS's
Personally I'd create another PC for dos or just use DOSBox.

I've got windows at 1600x900, works fine. Games on the other hand are a mixed bag. websites exist on how to get games displaying at higher resolutions then originally designed, of course this is more work for the graphics card so you may be forced to downsize anyway.

You can find Win98 on the internet easy enough but that's not legal of course. If you want a legit copy 2nd hand is your only option.

If you can succeed with installing Win98 on this you'll be able to build something like a 486. Hardware wise not much has changed. Apart from jumpers for things like CPU, installing a PCI-E, AGP, ISA card is all the same. It's the software side that's different. But to answer your question Say around 1995/Pentium era ATX started being a thing, late 90's it was the standard

RedCharles wrote on 2020-11-05, 07:26:

I also have an 6600GT 128mb, but if I've understood things correctly I should acquire a 4200TI or 4600TI, and possibly a voodoo3?

If you are looking for an AGP Voodoo3, be careful. That card needs 3.3V while AGP slots on newer motherboards supply 1.5V. The AGP slot is keyed so that you can't insert an incompatible card, so it's best to check before making a purchase.

Additional info on AGP slot compatibility can be found here.

Working on it.

Getting the CD Rom to mount to case required me to dive pretty deep into my parts bin.

Had to order a cable extension for the CPU power. I'm hoping this board has some IDE legacy mode so I can install Win98SE directly to an SSD.

Found some PS2 wireless ball mice yesterday on ebay. Which blew my mind. Ball mice have not been a part of my life since before Iraq War II.

Mounted it using a small TV mount. Still waiting on parts.

That looks really cool and it's a great way to save desk space. Are you going to wall mount a monitor for it or use a kvm with the fragbox?

I have all three computers hooked up to one monitor, which is on an arm. The sound for all three computers is wired into a Pioneer receiver 94txh. And I would like to use three sets of wireless keyboards and mice, but I'll have to see what works.

So a KVM is receiver for keyboards and mice. I have literally never considered it. Did know it was an option. I'm going to look into it more.

I'm look at Hammer Fid Control in Phoenix bios. After looking at Phil's video, it looks like I need to trim that down to 800 and lower the voltage too.

There's no watch battery on this board. Blows my mind. HD audio header was directly below the I/O and had two jumpers on it. Weird. Newer Ryzen CPU fans fit on old boards, which is awesome. There's little blinking lights on the PCI slots and the north bridge cooler. Very 2005 RGB. There really are a lot of ports on this ECS KV2 extreme motherboard.

Been trying to boot from a sata cd drive. I don't think the motherboard sees it. I tried another sata cd drive, but it doesn't see that either.

It sees an ide laptop drive that has a sata converter on it. Which makes me wonder why it's skipping the cd rom during the boot sequence.

It sees a bootable USB XP drive.

I ordered a sata to ide adapter.

So I remembered I had this makeshift drive sled. It works. Slowly.

I got it to boot from this. Drive sounds terrible.

Still dont know why it doesn't see either sata cd drive in bios.

Also, my bios labeled the ide laptop drive as a SCSI drive.

EDIT: After some trying, swapping and formatting. WinXp and Win98 do not see the hard drives. I'm buying sata/ide adapters.

Is that an actual Thermal Take case, made for excactly that? Looks soooooo great!

Yes, but you have to buy the TV mount separately.

RedCharles wrote on 2020-11-13, 08:37:

Yes, but you have to buy the TV mount separately.

Loving it. What's the model name? And wonder if standard ATX fits there, like my bp6 😍

Thermaltake P3

I'm having some issues getting windows 98 SE to run right. Lot's of blue screen "hit enter to continue" right on startup. I don't know what set it off. Could have been the PCI USB 2.0 card; I selected the wrong drivers I think. Or it could have been the generic monitor driver. Mistakes were made.

I reinstalled Win98 again. Didn't help anything. Sometimes when I put in the 98 disc, it tries to format the partition, but it asks me to put in the 98 disc, which is weird, because that's what's already in the drive. Regardless I need to format it and start over.

I installed Windows 7 on the other partition to format the Fat32 partition, but Windows 7 would not touch it. So I'm going to have to either add another hard drive to the system or take the hard drive out and put it in a sled. I'm nickel and diming myself. Five dollars for a cord here, and thirty dollars for a part over there. It's a lot cheaper hobby than a classic car, but I have spent a few hundred more than a planned.

This all started when I couldn't get Rainbow Six Raven Shield's sound to work right on Windows 7 or Windows 10. And now I've got like nine computers in my house. And I have been enjoying Rainbow Six in glorious EAX. The game has a strange control layout, and I can easily remember how to play the game, but I don't remember most of the missions. So it's a weird experience of being good at the game, but almost experiencing it for the first time again.

But back to my Windows 98 problem. Before I started getting all the errors on start up, I did try to install Sega Rally 2, which would not run on Windows XP. This set off my Windows 98 quest. I can remember running Sega Rally 2 on my parent's P3 computer back in 98. Still using the same discs; I've had them in my CD pile for 22 years. One of our neighbors was pilot. He used to fly into Hong Kong, and he bought retail pirated copies of games. I used to get a half dozen here and half dozen there. They had pictures of the actual game box inside a clear plastic sleeve that had sticky flap that held the cd in place. Those sleeves are long gone. Anyway, I really wanted to run that Sega Rally 2 game. And it was very disappointing that it would not run.

I'm still waiting on a few parts to finish the build. Once I get it all running I'll give a video tour of my office set up.

Windows 98 is a lot cleaner and more intuitive than Windows 10.

First off I'd copy the Win98 folder off the CD onto the HDD somewhere and run the install from there, its much quicker and means you know the CD or drive aren't the causing the issue.

How much ram do you have currently installed? ideally you want 512MB or less at least for the installation, you can bump it up after it's all installed and patched if you need more RAM for the other OS's
(you can install with all the ram installed, just involves bit more trickery to keep the install happy)