For your first example, the athlon 1800+ , i would go with a soundblaster live or Audigy.
Then you have EAX.

With two ISA slots, you can use a second sound card for your 2nd retro PC with pentium 2 cpu.
An OPL3 compatible card would be nice.

Niark42 wrote on 2021-05-05, 10:22:

Good morning all, after mounting my win7 / winxp pc, i want to go on the adventure of a winxp / win98 and a win98 / Dos in order […]
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Good morning all,
after mounting my win7 / winxp pc, i want to go on the adventure of a winxp / win98 and a win98 / Dos in order to extend my backward compatibility.

I have 2 computers in stock,

The first one under the hood:
SOLTEK SL-75DRV5
GPU: palit geforce 4fx5600
CPU: AMD athlon AX1800
sound card: creative labs CT4810

The second:
ASUS P28
GPU:ATI 3D
CPU: p2
sound card: sound blaster AWE64 gold CT4390

Is this a good config in terms of compatibility?
What can I do to improve them?

both are good a good basis for your ideas. if they were in front of me then the athlon one would become a windows XP machine and the P2 would be windows 98 for its DOS credentials

i'd guess 512mb-1gb ram for the athlon and 256 mb for the P2 would be very comfortable and a couple of suitable IDE hard disks in the 20+gb range if you want, or something else like CF if preferred

very nice projects to have 😀

For the 2nd one you probably mean: ASUS P2B ?

The AMD is probably a tad too slow for WinXP. The BX platform is great for a versatile DOS/Win98 system.

In user experience, both can be sped up considerably with a small SATA drive (look around for msata disks) on a PCI-adapter (Promise).

Thank you for your attention regarding my project,

After checking, the motherboard is indeed an asus P2B.

The AMD computer was my first personal computer and was running win xp without having any problem with it. My goal is to put a dual boot xp/98Se to enjoy more games with its power. I don't want to have full win 98 and Dos compatibility on it.

To continue my idea, the P2 will allow me to play games not compatible with the amd and will run in 98Se/Dos.
This will allow me to play in lan to the games compatible with both computers.

I already have a powerful Xp computer so I don't want to have a monstrous power with the amd but rather use it as a bridge between two.

Concerning the soundblaster live or Audigy card, is it essential for the amd?
What is the advantage compared to my current sound card (Creative Labs CT4810)?
In my research, I had read that they were rather for backwards compatibility DOS hence my question.

As for the ram memory, I was thinking of putting 3GB for the amd and using a patch to allocate 258MB to the win98Se boot.
Is this possible or are there persistent problems?

Concerning the hard disks, the old ones still work, so I might as well use them until their last breath.
On the other hand, I have a 128GB ssd that is sleeping and I read that win xp accepts them. Is it possible to use it with a sata adapter? And if so what would be the advantages and disadvantages?

It really depends on the games you want to play.

Using DOS, the CT4810 is good as any other creative live! , and also together bad in terms of FM-emulation.
When using mainly win98 or xp , the results are OK , but as i said the main difference to a Live! or Audigy card is EAX.

If you want to use is then you have no other choice.
Here is a list of supported games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_EAX_support

melbar wrote on 2021-05-06, 04:59:

Using DOS, the CT4810 is good as any other creative live! , and also together bad in terms of FM-emulation.

Small correction here. The CT4810 has the worst FM synth emulation known to man. It belongs to the Ensoniq Audio PCI family of cards, all of which do an absolutely terrible job in that area.

OTOH, the FM synth emulation of the SBLive/Audigy cards sounds slightly better, but it's still a far cry from proper OPL3.

The CT4810 is a rebadged Ensoniq AudioPCI, maybe 1 step better then standard AC97 onboard Audio
It makes a change to SBLive/Audigy cards for Win9x and its dos support is kind of useful but for XP I'd also want a Live! or better. You gain EAX, sound fonts and it uses the same drivers in dos. The fact you can pick up a Live! for almost nothing means I don't see any reason to settle for "2nd best"

If it was me I'd actually put in in the P2 as a 2nd soundcard and use for Windows. No matter which PC you use it in make sure you download the 8MB Waveset from here to improve Midi.
http://vogonsdrivers.com/index.php?catid=41&menustate=47,38

Everything else about the AMD looks pretty good. The fx5600 is towards the lower end of the FX series but has great backwards compatibility and think is good match for the CPU and more then capable for anything in 98. XP may struggle a bit but that could also be due to the CPU and anyway you have the Win XP/7 for when that happens.
Besides it's got nostalgic value, that's reason enough alone.

The P2B is the best Slot 1 motherboard only rived by the SE440BX made my Intel themselves IMHO.
I've found any Win9x game that doesn't like XP is more then happy on a P3 600. Depending on the motherboard revision you may be able to upgrade further though.

Video do you mean the 3D Rage? that seems pretty weak even for the P2. This fits right into the golden era of 3DFX so a Voodoo or even Banshee would be good here, or if your not wanting to spend that much a GF2/GF4MX are good matches.

Audio: The AWE is good choice for ISA and dos. That system also has enough power to ply dos games within windows should you want to mess around with sound fonts.
The AWE (or any ISA card) is quite noisy though. Not much of an issue with low quality compressed dos games but starts to show itself in Windows. This is why I'd also add the CT4810
You could swap the CT4810 for a live here as well, but it does start getting a bit boring having the same sound card installed in multiple PC's

Thanks , Joseph_Joestar , for these examples.

Yes they are worse and the PCI128 cards are even more ... coming straight out from hell 👎🏾

I have a PCI128 card, thanks god i have several alternatives to avoid the use of this 'piece' of hardware 😀

Excuse me for answering you so late,
thanks to you I understood the advantages of these sound cards and you made me want to get them.

I just received my geforce7900 gtx which is actually a quadro fx5500.

following this, i wonder if i will not put my radeon hd 3850 back on my win 7 / wp and use the quadro fx5500 on the xp / win98 odrinator.

I read that the geforce fx5500 was compatible win 98 but I can not find for the quadro. Could someone confirm to me that there are indeed official drivers?

And concerning the radeon hd 3850 there are many drivers for xp but it is a card under direct x 10 that can it pose compatibility problems of games under xp?