I'm posting this in old hardware - but this project is of interest to people into vintage sound cards and 3DFx. I'm going to give some background and bring you up to speed with where I'm at today.

A couple of years ago, I built a computer that was meant to cover almost the whole spectrum of 90's PC gaming and software. The goal was to build a machine that could slow down to the speed of a 386 while boosting up to a level that would be envious in 1998 and decent in 1999. I had very little space, so a desktop form-factor was needed (a printer had to go on top) and I wanted to run a variety of Operating Systems without having to bend over backwards with multiple partitions and boot managers.

I have a decent collection of parts from back in the day, so I settled on the following.

• Gigabyte GA-5AX

• AMD K6-2+

• 256MB SDRAM 100MHz

• Voodoo 3 3000 16MB

• Obsidian SB50-4220 (Voodoo1 6MB with extra TMU)

• SB AWE64 Value with SIMMCONN

• 3Com Etherlink III

• 250GB SATA Drive (using SATA to IDE adaptor

• Front facing 3.5" CF to IDE adaptor (used for boot drives)

• 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive

• 5.24" 1.2MB floppy drive

Using a variety of compact flash cards, I was able to deploy a few operating systems, including DOS, WfW 3.11, Windows 98, Windows 2000. Ubuntu 8.10, SUSE Linux 7, Windows NT 4.0

Certain things were less than perfect with this build. I could not get 3D acceleration working under either Linux distro, I found it impossible to deploy Windows 95 (I am aware of the CPU speed bug and had patched that out), certain games refused to display under DOS and getting DOS games to recognise the Voodoo 1 just did not seem to work. The motherboard also seemed to have problems with my AMD K6-III+, refusing to POST with it installed.

Recently, I decided to take a new approach with the system. I now have a little more room, and on my KVM is a Pentium III system with a Voodoo 5500. This is going to cover late-era Windows 98 games really well, as well as high end glide games. Bearing that in mind, I felt that I could in some ways, deliberately compromise the K6 DOS system to make it much more DOS focused.

First job on the agenda was to replace the capacitors on the board. It is over 20 years old now and I figured the electrolytic capacitors had likely dried out. After doing this, we now had joy running the K6-III+. OK, so that was a win, but now to cripple performance. I have reduced the bus speed from 100MHz to 66MHz, to allow the K6 to drop down to lower clock-speeds (133MHz) and generally slow it down. I have also disabled the motherboard cache in the BIOS, relying entirely on the CPU cache. This does affect performance, but as the K6-III+ has 256KB of on-die cache, the hit is not appalling. However, when all cache is disabled and clock-speed dropped, we have a system performing very much like a 386DX which is going to be great for the likes of Wing Commander.

We now hit new aspects of the adventure though, as we try and make the combination of add-in cards work for me. My original intent was to swap the Voodoo3 for a Savage4., The latter is a slower card, but like the Voodoo should have good VESA compatibility and DOS game support and most importantly will not conflict with the Voodoo1. This however, was an unmitigated failure. A NiB HIS card that I had been holding for the last 10 years seem to cause a world of conflict with the other cards in the system and at certain times cause some display corruption at boot. Actually, every Savage4 card that I tried did this. This includes what looks to be a late-era PCI card and a Diamond Speedstar A90. The latter is a recent acquisition that I need to test on another platform as it seems to lock up when running 3D. But installing that first and then swapping it for the HIS card seemed to resolve the conflicts. Nonetheless, Savage4 was proving to be surprisingly problematic. For now, I have a 4MB PCI S3 VirgeDX installed and this works very nicely. An AGP 8MB variant is currently in its way.

Now whilst battling the Savage4, I was also battling the Obsidian. For some reason, I could not install any 3rd party 3DFX drivers - including the original Obsidian drivers, and have this card display a 3D output rather than a large band of colour. Furthermore, this seems to be unique to this system, as I can run the card in a Dell Celeron system that I have without issue. In fact, it's going to go back there, as in researching the problem on these forums, it seems the Voodoo2 has broad compatibility with all of the glide games that I wanted to run on the Obsidian. Having removed the Savage4 and actually having 2 identical Voodoo2 cards sold as an SLi package that I bought around 16 years ago, I have decided that this is the ideal solution. At this stage, I can only tell you that the cards work and that the performance in testing is everything that I could hope for it. How it runs under DOS and what compromises I may have to make is still to be determined.

The other thing to change is the sound card situation. I have recently been able to buy an Orpheus 1. I had been on the waiting list for a while, but when Leo contacted me to say that I could now take up the opportunity, I made sure to do so. I have ordered the full monty card, complete with MPU401 and DreamBlaster X2GS. My original plan was to run the Orpheus next to an Aureal Vortex2 - the latter in Windows only, the former in DOS. As you may be able to guess, this was not perfect. It did work and both cards sound fantastic, but SimCity 2000 has been my nemesis. The issue (which I still have) is that I cannot get any sound effects. When running the installer, the game seems to make the sound card pop through the speakers, but fails running any sound effects. I have tried swapping out the Vortex 2 for a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold, the idea being that this should have perfect SB compatibility. Still no dice unfortunately. I have decided to retain the AWE64 in the system for now, as hopefully this will give me a lot of options for DOS audio. A will setup another thread to discuss that.

So that's where I'm at. The system works, but is very much unfinished and may be subject to further changes yet. Advice and tips would be appreciated and current spec and pictures can be seen below.

• Gigabyte GA-5AX

• AMD K6-III+

• 128MB SDRAM 100MHz

• S3 VirgeDX 4MB

• Voodoo2 8MB SLi

• SB AWE64 Gold

• Orpheus 1 with Dreamblaster X2GS

• 3Com Etherlink III

• 250GB SATA Drive (using SATA to IDE adaptor

• Front facing 3.5" CF to IDE adaptor (used for boot drives)

• 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive

• 5.24" 1.2MB floppy drive