VOGONS


First post, by Scythifuge

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Greetings,

Something amazing happened, and I got my hands on two Gateway Pentium III PCs (both with SuperDisk drives, wow!), about a week after I decided to recreate an upgraded version of my last prebuilt PC, a Tabor II based gateway Performance 450 (it had a 6x DVD, Voodoo3, SuperDisk, integrated sound until I bought a Live! card, 64mb of RAM, and a HDD probably 20GB or less.) My Asus P2B based Ultimate Voodoo Machine is acting unstable with the IDE controller and with some other annoying issues (probably needs a recap.)

I plan on moving all of the components over to a Gateway GP7-700 (I lose a 5.25 bay and one of my drives and that is the only thing making me stall - I need an external 5.25 floppy drive or an external CD-RW.) I also plan recreating my old Gateway (upgraded, of course) with a GP7-550, all I need to do for that is find a DVD drive similar to the old Gateway, and add a CD-RW, as I bought one from Gateway as a later upgrade, which came with Easy CD Creator on a Gateway labeled disc. I also have a system restoration cd and many other Gateway discs and keyboards, so this is really awesome on a super-nostalgic level.

I digress... (shocking, I know!)

I keep looking, but information on the Tabor III seems sparse. My Asus P2B is an older board, but with the last beta bios, I can run 512mb of RAM and run 128gb HDD. Are there any known limits with the Tabor III, and are there any bios updates to be had? Is there anything else I should know? It will contain a Voodoo5, a Voodoo2, a Voodoo1, a Live! card, an AWE card, a CF/IDE 3.5 drive, some sort of optical drive, and a 5.25 floppy drive.

Thanks!
Scythifuge

Reply 1 of 22, by darry

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Scythifuge wrote on 2021-06-11, 00:32:
Greetings, […]
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Greetings,

Something amazing happened, and I got my hands on two Gateway Pentium III PCs (both with SuperDisk drives, wow!), about a week after I decided to recreate an upgraded version of my last prebuilt PC, a Tabor II based gateway Performance 450 (it had a 6x DVD, Voodoo3, SuperDisk, integrated sound until I bought a Live! card, 64mb of RAM, and a HDD probably 20GB or less.) My Asus P2B based Ultimate Voodoo Machine is acting unstable with the IDE controller and with some other annoying issues (probably needs a recap.)

I plan on moving all of the components over to a Gateway GP7-700 (I lose a 5.25 bay and one of my drives and that is the only thing making me stall - I need an external 5.25 floppy drive or an external CD-RW.) I also plan recreating my old Gateway (upgraded, of course) with a GP7-550, all I need to do for that is find a DVD drive similar to the old Gateway, and add a CD-RW, as I bought one from Gateway as a later upgrade, which came with Easy CD Creator on a Gateway labeled disc. I also have a system restoration cd and many other Gateway discs and keyboards, so this is really awesome on a super-nostalgic level.

I digress... (shocking, I know!)

I keep looking, but information on the Tabor III seems sparse. My Asus P2B is an older board, but with the last beta bios, I can run 512mb of RAM and run 128gb HDD. Are there any known limits with the Tabor III, and are there any bios updates to be had? Is there anything else I should know? It will contain a Voodoo5, a Voodoo2, a Voodoo1, a Live! card, an AWE card, a CF/IDE 3.5 drive, some sort of optical drive, and a 5.25 floppy drive.

Thanks!
Scythifuge

According to some sources, the Tabor III is an OEM version of the Intel WS440BX .

WS440BX product brief :

Filename
70258701.pdf
File size
441.48 KiB
Downloads
82 downloads
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 2 of 22, by Scythifuge

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darry wrote on 2021-06-11, 01:11:
According to some sources, the Tabor III is an OEM version of the Intel WS440BX . […]
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Scythifuge wrote on 2021-06-11, 00:32:
Greetings, […]
Show full quote

Greetings,

Something amazing happened, and I got my hands on two Gateway Pentium III PCs (both with SuperDisk drives, wow!), about a week after I decided to recreate an upgraded version of my last prebuilt PC, a Tabor II based gateway Performance 450 (it had a 6x DVD, Voodoo3, SuperDisk, integrated sound until I bought a Live! card, 64mb of RAM, and a HDD probably 20GB or less.) My Asus P2B based Ultimate Voodoo Machine is acting unstable with the IDE controller and with some other annoying issues (probably needs a recap.)

I plan on moving all of the components over to a Gateway GP7-700 (I lose a 5.25 bay and one of my drives and that is the only thing making me stall - I need an external 5.25 floppy drive or an external CD-RW.) I also plan recreating my old Gateway (upgraded, of course) with a GP7-550, all I need to do for that is find a DVD drive similar to the old Gateway, and add a CD-RW, as I bought one from Gateway as a later upgrade, which came with Easy CD Creator on a Gateway labeled disc. I also have a system restoration cd and many other Gateway discs and keyboards, so this is really awesome on a super-nostalgic level.

I digress... (shocking, I know!)

I keep looking, but information on the Tabor III seems sparse. My Asus P2B is an older board, but with the last beta bios, I can run 512mb of RAM and run 128gb HDD. Are there any known limits with the Tabor III, and are there any bios updates to be had? Is there anything else I should know? It will contain a Voodoo5, a Voodoo2, a Voodoo1, a Live! card, an AWE card, a CF/IDE 3.5 drive, some sort of optical drive, and a 5.25 floppy drive.

Thanks!
Scythifuge

According to some sources, the Tabor III is an OEM version of the Intel WS440BX .

WS440BX product brief :
70258701.pdf

Thank you! I hope this has a bios update. I can put 512mb of Ram in the P2B, but the original release of this board allows only for 384mb.

Reply 4 of 22, by Scythifuge

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Okay, it detects a 4gb CF card, so this mobo has severe HDD size limitations, which is bizarre for a board paired with a 700mhz CPU. Hopefully I find a bios update, because I can't get it to recognize 32gb cards. I fear that this will be a 20gb or less board, and that will really, really suck!

Reply 6 of 22, by darry

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Scythifuge wrote on 2021-06-11, 01:54:

Okay, it detects a 4gb CF card, so this mobo has severe HDD size limitations, which is bizarre for a board paired with a 700mhz CPU. Hopefully I find a bios update, because I can't get it to recognize 32gb cards. I fear that this will be a 20gb or less board, and that will really, really suck!

A PCI SATA controller or an XTIDE can make that drive size limitation a non issue .

Reply 7 of 22, by Scythifuge

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darry wrote on 2021-06-11, 02:03:
Scythifuge wrote on 2021-06-11, 01:54:

Okay, it detects a 4gb CF card, so this mobo has severe HDD size limitations, which is bizarre for a board paired with a 700mhz CPU. Hopefully I find a bios update, because I can't get it to recognize 32gb cards. I fear that this will be a 20gb or less board, and that will really, really suck!

A PCI SATA controller or an XTIDE can make that drive size limitation a non issue .

Indeed, though I don't have any available slots. The only way I can add this feature is if I find a combo card with ethernet.

Reply 8 of 22, by darry

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Another option is selling the Tabor and getting an Asus P3B-F with a modded BIOS . See Adding XT-IDE option ROM to Asus P3B-F BIOS [Thanks to DenizOezmen, it actually works!!!]

Similar BIOS mods are probably for other boards as well, but beyond my skillset .

Reply 9 of 22, by Scythifuge

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darry wrote on 2021-06-11, 02:38:

Another option is selling the Tabor and getting an Asus P3B-F with a modded BIOS . See Adding XT-IDE option ROM to Asus P3B-F BIOS [Thanks to DenizOezmen, it actually works!!!]

Similar BIOS mods are probably for other boards as well, but beyond my skillset .

I have been looking at other boards before grabbing these Gateways today. I am hunting down the latest bios and hoping for the best. The other option is to forget about having a NIC (which is what I was facing with the P2B before nixing the Voodoo2 SLI idea,) and use an IDE or SATA controller card. I also need to find a small footprint card, unless I can figure out how to provide more airflow to the Voodoo5.

Reply 10 of 22, by FAMICOMASTER

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Scythifuge wrote on 2021-06-11, 01:54:

Okay, it detects a 4gb CF card, so this mobo has severe HDD size limitations, which is bizarre for a board paired with a 700mhz CPU. Hopefully I find a bios update, because I can't get it to recognize 32gb cards. I fear that this will be a 20gb or less board, and that will really, really suck!

I wouldn't call it a severe limitation, mechanical hard disks of that size were nearly unheard of at the time. 32GB would be more reasonable but it very well could just dislike your adapter. Sometimes they can be picky.

Worst case you can always run some version of Windows NT off a small boot disk and use the large disk independently as a slave.

If this is the board I think it is, they were sold in a lot of Gateway's home computers and I've had to pass on them numerous times because I've had reliability issues with them in the past. All 4 of the ones I had have failed in some manner which deems them useless.

How did you run out of slots? Isn't this a full ATX board? Even if you skip a slot for the video card that should give you 5 free slots.

Reply 11 of 22, by Scythifuge

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FAMICOMASTER wrote on 2021-06-11, 03:52:
I wouldn't call it a severe limitation, mechanical hard disks of that size were nearly unheard of at the time. 32GB would be mor […]
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Scythifuge wrote on 2021-06-11, 01:54:

Okay, it detects a 4gb CF card, so this mobo has severe HDD size limitations, which is bizarre for a board paired with a 700mhz CPU. Hopefully I find a bios update, because I can't get it to recognize 32gb cards. I fear that this will be a 20gb or less board, and that will really, really suck!

I wouldn't call it a severe limitation, mechanical hard disks of that size were nearly unheard of at the time. 32GB would be more reasonable but it very well could just dislike your adapter. Sometimes they can be picky.

Worst case you can always run some version of Windows NT off a small boot disk and use the large disk independently as a slave.

If this is the board I think it is, they were sold in a lot of Gateway's home computers and I've had to pass on them numerous times because I've had reliability issues with them in the past. All 4 of the ones I had have failed in some manner which deems them useless.

How did you run out of slots? Isn't this a full ATX board? Even if you skip a slot for the video card that should give you 5 free slots.

After researching the issue, it seems that Gateway's last bios for this board will see only up to 64gb, which is unacceptable, so I will buy a controller card.

The slots are full, because I am running a Voodoo5, a Voodoo2, a Voodoo1, a Sound Blaster Live!, and an AWE32. That leaves me with one slot for either a NIC, a USB card, a USB/NIC combo card, or an IDE controller which will circumvent the issue.

Reply 12 of 22, by PC Hoarder Patrol

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The vogonsdrivers link is the correct one for the Tabor III (OEM SE440BX-3) - here's the same BIOS update linked direct from Gateway on archive.org, along with the complete custom BIOS engineering history from Intel

https://web.archive.org/web/20070125165315/ht … esktop_bios.asp

Filename
vp14.exe
File size
671.9 KiB
Downloads
45 downloads
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception
Filename
P14-0019.doc
File size
41 KiB
Downloads
54 downloads
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 13 of 22, by Scythifuge

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PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2021-06-11, 04:11:
The vogonsdrivers link is the correct one for the Tabor III (OEM SE440BX-3) - here's the same BIOS update linked direct from Gat […]
Show full quote

The vogonsdrivers link is the correct one for the Tabor III (OEM SE440BX-3) - here's the same BIOS update linked direct from Gateway on archive.org, along with the complete custom BIOS engineering history from Intel

https://web.archive.org/web/20070125165315/ht … esktop_bios.asp

vp14.exe

P14-0019.doc

Thank you. It seems that I have no choice but to buy a controller card if I am to use my 128gb SD-to-CF-to-IDE stuff, and my NOS 120gb Seagate IDE drive..

Reply 14 of 22, by FAMICOMASTER

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Scythifuge wrote on 2021-06-11, 04:00:

The slots are full, because I am running a Voodoo5, a Voodoo2, a Voodoo1, a Sound Blaster Live!, and an AWE32. That leaves me with one slot for either a NIC, a USB card, a USB/NIC combo card, or an IDE controller which will circumvent the issue.

I sorta get the dual sound cards, a lot of people here seem to have one for DOS and one for Windows, but... Three non-matching Voodoos? I don't think you can run a 1 & 2 in SLI and the 2 is just a better version of the 1... Why have the Voodoo 1? I'm not sure I get the point of having the 1 & 2 when you have a Voodoo 5 already either.

Doesn't that board have USB integrated? Does anyone even make a USB/NIC combo card? The closest I can think would be a USB network controller which would be painfully slow and difficult to get drivers in such a system...

Reply 15 of 22, by Scythifuge

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FAMICOMASTER wrote on 2021-06-11, 06:52:
Scythifuge wrote on 2021-06-11, 04:00:

The slots are full, because I am running a Voodoo5, a Voodoo2, a Voodoo1, a Sound Blaster Live!, and an AWE32. That leaves me with one slot for either a NIC, a USB card, a USB/NIC combo card, or an IDE controller which will circumvent the issue.

I sorta get the dual sound cards, a lot of people here seem to have one for DOS and one for Windows, but... Three non-matching Voodoos? I don't think you can run a 1 & 2 in SLI and the 2 is just a better version of the 1... Why have the Voodoo 1? I'm not sure I get the point of having the 1 & 2 when you have a Voodoo 5 already either.

Doesn't that board have USB integrated? Does anyone even make a USB/NIC combo card? The closest I can think would be a USB network controller which would be painfully slow and difficult to get drivers in such a system...

If you put the glide files belonging to the Voodoo card that uses them in the game's root directory, that game will use that particular Voodoo card. This allows one to run every glide game on one system. There are Voodoo1 only games, Voodoo2 games, and then Voodoo 3-5 games. The system does have integrated USB 1.0, not 2.0 which may be possible via add-in card. There are USB/NIC/(sometimes firewire) combo cards. I have seen one and will probably buy it next month to play with in one of these systems. There are USB-NICs with Windows 98 drivers - it would be slower than a NIC but faster than dial-up (which I am adding to each system via serial dial-up for each system without an available slot for a modem.)

Part of why I do with my hobby is to find and utilize obscure components along with some newer drives and/or adapters in old systems. I have a quest to build the Ultimate Voodoo Pentium III, which has, at least temporarily, become the Ultimate Gateway Voodoo PC, as a way to honor the last prebuilt system I ever had, and to be able to use by Gateway software binder full of Gateway drivers and apps that I used to have, back in 1999. I had a Pentium 90 with a Voodoo1, and ended up getting a Pentium 450 with a Voodoo3 when I got the Gateway. After a couple of years, I bought the components to build my first PC, an AMD K6-2, and I never bought another prebuilt system again (save for laptops or old, used PCs.)

I'll eventually build a 1.4Ghz Pentium III for the Ultimate Pentium III system, but right now I'm recreating my Gateway in two enhanced flavors - an upgraded version of the one I have that adds 100Mhz and doubles the RAM and will be Voodoo3 based like my original, and the other one adds 250Mhz, utilizes 512mb of RAM, is Voodoo5 based with a Voodoo1 & 2, and adds AWE32 (until I get the AWE64 Legacy) for DOS, and utilizes CF-SD adapters in a CF-IDE 3.5 drive in order to have different SD cards with different OS and driver set ups (Windows 98SE card that disables the Voodoo1 & 2; a Windows 95 card that uses the Voodoo5 ONLY for the 2d portion; and MS-DOS card; a WFW 3.11 card; an XP card; and a Linux card.

Reply 16 of 22, by dionb

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FAMICOMASTER wrote on 2021-06-11, 06:52:
Scythifuge wrote on 2021-06-11, 04:00:

The slots are full, because I am running a Voodoo5, a Voodoo2, a Voodoo1, a Sound Blaster Live!, and an AWE32. That leaves me with one slot for either a NIC, a USB card, a USB/NIC combo card, or an IDE controller which will circumvent the issue.

I sorta get the dual sound cards, a lot of people here seem to have one for DOS and one for Windows, but... Three non-matching Voodoos? I don't think you can run a 1 & 2 in SLI and the 2 is just a better version of the 1... Why have the Voodoo 1? I'm not sure I get the point of having the 1 & 2 when you have a Voodoo 5 already either.

Doesn't that board have USB integrated? Does anyone even make a USB/NIC combo card? The closest I can think would be a USB network controller which would be painfully slow and difficult to get drivers in such a system...

I get the Voodoo 1 as there is some DOS stuff that being DOS needs specific HW support in the software and only runs on the V1. But a V2 and a V5? I'm not aware of anything the V2 will do that the V5 won't. If you had lots of PCI slots free, why not? - but wth slots at a premium I'd lose the V2.

That said:

Scythifuge wrote on 2021-06-11, 04:21:
PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2021-06-11, 04:11:
The vogonsdrivers link is the correct one for the Tabor III (OEM SE440BX-3) - here's the same BIOS update linked direct from Gat […]
Show full quote

The vogonsdrivers link is the correct one for the Tabor III (OEM SE440BX-3) - here's the same BIOS update linked direct from Gateway on archive.org, along with the complete custom BIOS engineering history from Intel

https://web.archive.org/web/20070125165315/ht … esktop_bios.asp

vp14.exe

P14-0019.doc

Thank you. It seems that I have no choice but to buy a controller card if I am to use my 128gb SD-to-CF-to-IDE stuff, and my NOS 120gb Seagate IDE drive..

As the Spartans famously said: "If..."

SD - to - CF - to - IDE sounds awful at best anyway, but if you insist on going down the SD route with all the protcol conversions involved, you can easily have two 64GB cards that will work instead of a single 128GB card.

Personally I'd jut go with a <64GB SSD (or two or three if you really need the space) and a SATA-PATA adapter on the motherboard's IDE port. Gets you better performance than with the Frankenstein-solution and saves a PCI slot too. I have some Intel X25E 32GB and 64GB SLC drives for exactly this kind of system.

Reply 17 of 22, by Scythifuge

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dionb wrote on 2021-06-11, 11:40:
I get the Voodoo 1 as there is some DOS stuff that being DOS needs specific HW support in the software and only runs on the V1. […]
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FAMICOMASTER wrote on 2021-06-11, 06:52:
Scythifuge wrote on 2021-06-11, 04:00:

The slots are full, because I am running a Voodoo5, a Voodoo2, a Voodoo1, a Sound Blaster Live!, and an AWE32. That leaves me with one slot for either a NIC, a USB card, a USB/NIC combo card, or an IDE controller which will circumvent the issue.

I sorta get the dual sound cards, a lot of people here seem to have one for DOS and one for Windows, but... Three non-matching Voodoos? I don't think you can run a 1 & 2 in SLI and the 2 is just a better version of the 1... Why have the Voodoo 1? I'm not sure I get the point of having the 1 & 2 when you have a Voodoo 5 already either.

Doesn't that board have USB integrated? Does anyone even make a USB/NIC combo card? The closest I can think would be a USB network controller which would be painfully slow and difficult to get drivers in such a system...

I get the Voodoo 1 as there is some DOS stuff that being DOS needs specific HW support in the software and only runs on the V1. But a V2 and a V5? I'm not aware of anything the V2 will do that the V5 won't. If you had lots of PCI slots free, why not? - but wth slots at a premium I'd lose the V2.

That said:

Scythifuge wrote on 2021-06-11, 04:21:
PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2021-06-11, 04:11:
The vogonsdrivers link is the correct one for the Tabor III (OEM SE440BX-3) - here's the same BIOS update linked direct from Gat […]
Show full quote

The vogonsdrivers link is the correct one for the Tabor III (OEM SE440BX-3) - here's the same BIOS update linked direct from Gateway on archive.org, along with the complete custom BIOS engineering history from Intel

https://web.archive.org/web/20070125165315/ht … esktop_bios.asp

vp14.exe

P14-0019.doc

Thank you. It seems that I have no choice but to buy a controller card if I am to use my 128gb SD-to-CF-to-IDE stuff, and my NOS 120gb Seagate IDE drive..

As the Spartans famously said: "If..."

SD - to - CF - to - IDE sounds awful at best anyway, but if you insist on going down the SD route with all the protcol conversions involved, you can easily have two 64GB cards that will work instead of a single 128GB card.

Personally I'd jut go with a <64GB SSD (or two or three if you really need the space) and a SATA-PATA adapter on the motherboard's IDE port. Gets you better performance than with the Frankenstein-solution and saves a PCI slot too. I have some Intel X25E 32GB and 64GB SLC drives for exactly this kind of system.

I want to play Voodoo 2 era games on a Voodoo 2, and have each game use the glide version it was programmed for. I like to work on these strange projects for fun and to accomplish things that cannot be normally done. The SD-CF-IDE set up works on another board from that era, though now that it doesn't work with this one, I want to "win" the scenario by trying a different approach. Part of the fun is working within the limitations and to make the best retro PC I can with hybrid original and newer parts.

Having to make sacrifices (NIC or no NIC? USB 2 or stick with USB 1? Or none of those and get an ATA133 card?) is also a part of the game. Now I am back to trying to find a pocket parallel-ethernet solution for broadband, even if I end up never using it. I remember surfing the net on a 10//100 NIC on my 486DX2/66, and then surfing the net with broadband in MS-DOS. I did it a few times just to see it work, felt accomplished, and haven't done it since. It is like solving puzzles in computer/video games, but in real life.

A lot of people think my projects are weird or they try to talk me out of it (which I never understood,) though I love having some unique aspects to this hobby that many of us enjoy. Recently, people tried convincing me to buy and LCD and to forget about collecting a few CRT monitors. Another example was when I made a post about finding 1990's made hubs and switches. I got a lot of support and suggestions from people, though there were some who suggested that I just go with modern switches instead. That is too easy, and modern stuff has a different aesthetic. I use a 3.5 bay CF-IDE drive for the convenience of not having to worry about acquiring mechanical drives that will fail, and the SD cards as cartridges like an old game console is a neat idea. Other than that one part, the rest of the PC will look exactly like it did in 1999, and the entire set up, including the PC desk, is all retro, period correct stuff and everything works, or will work when I am done. It is all a part of the fun.

Reply 18 of 22, by chinny22

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Don't know how much space you have but for me this is the perfect excuse to have multiple PC's

#1 Late dos/early 9x PC build around the Voodoo 1.
#2 All rounder PC with the V2's and say a GF4 Ti or FX card for strong Glide and D3D performance
#3 Glide focused V5 build.

Benefit of your Slot 1 motherboards is that gives you 3 different systems to have 3 different ISA sound cards as well. You could have all of the "big three" represented Creative, ESS, Yamaha, or go slightly crazy with Midi.
Also allowing you to have a EAX and a A3D build for Windows side of things.

Realistically you could probably combine build #1 with either 2 or 3 if needed.

Just an idea, I get the wanting to have the "Ultimate 3DFX" so to speak, but if your having to compromise then will you really be satisfied with it?
or if you do want to keep the 1 PC to rule them all approach I like the idea of having multiple cards and swapping out, that's the beauty of cards. You could say have three 64GB cards with he first having all your V1 games, 2nd having V2 games, etc

Reply 19 of 22, by Scythifuge

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chinny22 wrote on 2021-06-11, 15:28:
Don't know how much space you have but for me this is the perfect excuse to have multiple PC's […]
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Don't know how much space you have but for me this is the perfect excuse to have multiple PC's

#1 Late dos/early 9x PC build around the Voodoo 1.
#2 All rounder PC with the V2's and say a GF4 Ti or FX card for strong Glide and D3D performance
#3 Glide focused V5 build.

Benefit of your Slot 1 motherboards is that gives you 3 different systems to have 3 different ISA sound cards as well. You could have all of the "big three" represented Creative, ESS, Yamaha, or go slightly crazy with Midi.
Also allowing you to have a EAX and a A3D build for Windows side of things.

Realistically you could probably combine build #1 with either 2 or 3 if needed.

Just an idea, I get the wanting to have the "Ultimate 3DFX" so to speak, but if your having to compromise then will you really be satisfied with it?
or if you do want to keep the 1 PC to rule them all approach I like the idea of having multiple cards and swapping out, that's the beauty of cards. You could say have three 64GB cards with he first having all your V1 games, 2nd having V2 games, etc

Facing compromises makes me research things to figure out new approaches. It is how I learned about the Xircom pocket ethernet adapter, and looked into serial modems, and found a usb/ethernet combo card that I am looking at. It allows me to try and experience "new" things that I never got to try out , back in the day. However, I have considered moving the Voodoo1 to another system, as I can put a Pentium II back on the P2B, or in the 2nd Gateway, or in a Pentium 60 machine I have. I have a ton of options. I have a 5200 FX 64MB that came with one of the Gateways (I haven't looked at which card is with the other one, though it is probably a TNT,) and I can always buy more components. However, if I do that, it will probably be down the road after I "win" with the Ultimate Voodoo Gateway, and use it for a while.

I used to do stuff like this and slap old computers together a lot, and then I was in the motorcycle accident and then experienced a couple of other accidents, and I had stopped doing a lot of this stuff, and I ended up losing MANY spare components, from graphics cards to RAM sticks of all kinds to stacks of optical, floppy, and hard drives, and I had given it up as a hobby. The drive to work on these projects came back along with a strong wave of nostalgia (I blame the state of our world for that, from how people are behaving to the loss of older technologies in favor of "progress," and the loss of many businesses and institutions that I used to believe would be around, forever.) It has lead to me learning about all sorts of things, both old and new.

I was heavy into emulation, through DosBox and 86Box, though it just isn't the same (though when we can mount physical drives in 86box and emulate Pentium IIIs and they fix the dynarec and solve the crackling sound in Win98 problem, and hopefully emulate the AWE64, the Live!, and Voodoo5 cards, I may build an 86box specific PC in a beige desktop or mini-tower and experiment my building all sorts of virtual systems. There is just nothing like playing games and using apps on original hardware. I even replaced my 4DPS motherboard; I found an awesome Russian who was selling one on ebay. It took almost 2-2.5 months to arrive, but it was worth it (I hope to visit Russia someday and visit with the seller and have a beer, we had similar experiences with computers in our youth.) So I rebuilt my 486DX2 66, and even though I will use an SD card with a strict MS-DOS setup and bought moslo deluxe (and will probably buy moslo 4biz for Windows,) I will still use the 486 more often to run games up to early 1995 on real hardware (and SD/CF cards.)

Another thing I have considered, is adding other voodoo cards to systems, if I find them at good deals. My first 3d accelerated experience was on my Pentium 90 (overclocked to 100Mhz because if I didn't, the intro speech from Veil of Darkness was screechy and scratchy - I have no idea how as a teen, I figured that out.) I bought a 3d card which was trash - some Creative Labs card, and I was able to convince a clerk at Electronics Boutique (ah, remember that place?) to let me exchange it for a Diamond Monster 3d card, and I bought Myth - The Fallen Lords. My mind was blown, and so I promptly bought Dark Forces II - Jedi Knight, and that was the first 3d game I ever played from start top finish with a 3fdx card. It was why I selected the Voodoo3 (never had a Voodoo2 back in the day) when I bought my Gateway in 1999, and why the recreated Gateway 99 will have a Voodoo3, despite arguably better cards being available. So I may build a Voodoo1 based Pentium 90/100. It won't be the same, because I have no idea what the components were - it was a CTC computer (I can't find any info on the company,) with a Televideo 2d card, and a Sound Blaster Pro compatible card that I have no idea what it was, though if I can find video examples of the set up program, I remember how the music sounded when testing the port, irq, and dma set up. I can put any Voodoo1 in there, it doesn't have to be a Diamond, as they were all the same except for the Canopus cards.

I digress, yet again, hehehe! I hope that my walls of text aren't a bother. Writing is another hobby, I have many experiences to share, and I love providing details for proper context.