That Wavefront card is an Aztech Waverider 32. Good SB compatibility, OPL3 FM synth and wave table synthesis. Go with this card along with the Trio64+ for your 486 system.

That's what I was thinking, I knew little about the Wavefront, but the IDE port did seem useful for CDROM support. Though, I was thinking of just running it off the main IDE header. The Trio64 is a card a remember having back in the 90s, which is why I nabbed it.

Not a bad haul if the price was right 😁
The Trident 8900c is the second fastest Trident ISA card ever made, it only has 256k ram but easy to up to 1Mb. The Orchid is a Voodoo 1 and you need the pass-thru cable.
The Creative es1373 is a AudioPCI 64/128 and very low end card, can cause lots issues trying to get Win9x drivers to work from my experience....Not a fan of the X-FI, prefer a SB Live for DOS, Win9x, XP
The second ESS has onboard Wavetable proc and ram for fonts, not a bad card at all and will work under DOS/Win3.1 as well as XP iirc.

Horun wrote on 2023-08-12, 22:24:

The Trident 8900c is the second fastest Trident ISA card ever made, it only has 256k ram but easy to up to 1Mb. The Orchid is a Voodoo 1 and you need the pass-thru cable.

The Trident 8900c will only be fast if upgraded to 1MB. At 256KB, it only has 8 bit wide video RAM access, at 512KB, it has 16 bit wide video RAM access, and only at 1024KB it can utilize the full 32-bit memory bus. In my view, the Trident 8900CL and the Trident 8900D are both faster cards, making the 8900C the third fastest Trident ISA card, but you might count differently. Nevertheless, at 1MB the Trident 8900C is definitely fast enough for most purposes.

I wonder that this thread has so little hype over the Orchid Voodoo 1 card. Last time I checked, all 3dfx stuff is hardware some people would metaphorically kill for. The pass-through cable is a standard male-to-male VGA cable, and as I understand it, you can re-use the usual detachable LCD VGA cables as pass-through cables. Contrary to the Diamond Monster 3D, the Orchid version uses mechanical relays to forward the 2D VGA signal to the monitor, whereas the monster uses FET-based switches. Except for the audible clicking in the switching process, which is a matter of taste, the relay-based version is usually considered superior. All in all that card is a very nice Voodoo 1 card, so even if you don't play old Glide games you can still put that card on display somewhere. Remeber that Voodoo-based 3D cards exactly like this were what kick-started 3D accelerated gaming on the PC!

Oh yes, the Voodoo card is indeed interesting, since it deviates from the reference design, nice and compact.

If you can find a decent socket 3 board with PCI slots, and at least a DX4 cpu to feed the Voodoo, you're good to go. An AMD 486 DX4 133 with 16kB L2 write back cache maybe? 😜

PD2JK wrote on 2023-08-13, 05:26:

If you can find a decent socket 3 board with PCI slots, and at least a DX4 cpu to feed the Voodoo, you're good to go. An AMD 486 DX4 133 with 16kB L2 write back cache maybe? 😜

I don't think you suggest running at tripled FSB44 (which board has FSB44?), but at quadrupled FSB33. So I am quite confident you meant to write AMD 5x86 (internal code name DX5), not AMD 486 DX4.

Amd 5x86? What would be one of the Pentium equivalent Amd K5's?
It's been such a long time since i messed around with this era of computers, that age and beer have made things a little foggy 🤣 Plus up till about 97'-98' I was still using my heavily expanded Amiga 1200, so when I finally DID migrate over to PC's. Pentium chips were already well established and 486 systems were on the way out.

Some of my fondest memories using a 486 are when I was studying for my first IT qualification, we had labs filled with Escom 486's running Novell Networks. A lot of Doom and Duke 3D was played 🤣

Regarding the Trident, I've checked the chips installed "hy51c4256s-10", should I just buy six of these and populate all the sockets? Is fleabay the best place to buy these?

p.s A massive thank you to everyone who responded to this, this was EXACTLY the sort of discussion I was hoping to have. Cards like the Orchid I'm more than familiar with, having owned one back in the day. But the earlier stuff, I wasn't so familiar with. I'm really glad I bought all the cards he was selling, I paid £20 in total for everything here. I suspected the Trident would be a solid card to have, likewise the S3 Trio64, I'm fairly certain I had one of these, except mine was a little longer if I recalled and had another board sandwiched on top, which was either ram or mpeg2 decoder. I had that paired with an Orchid if I recalled.

My plan is to make a couple of systems
-1x 486 modest gaming setup, fast enough to run games from around 1991-97, I bought myself an Escom 486, identical to the one I used a college, so I can relive some Duke3D Hellz Yeah! 😀
-1x Pentium II system (I have a mobo, P2-233) I just need a few cards and a case. I seem to recalled owning a Pentium 2 system around 2001, I also think it was short lived, as we moved on to Pentium 3's.

It's not until I'm sat here typing, that I begin to appreciate the rapid rate computers progressed in the 90s and how often my father would upgrade both our computers, he would have HIS system and I'd have mine in my room. As a rule, they would be upgraded with almost the same HW, though my father was massively in to SCSI and I was in to gaming and writing. I'll shut up now, as I'm gibbering on 🤣

mkarcher wrote on 2023-08-13, 07:35:

PD2JK wrote on 2023-08-13, 05:26:

If you can find a decent socket 3 board with PCI slots, and at least a DX4 cpu to feed the Voodoo, you're good to go. An AMD 486 DX4 133 with 16kB L2 write back cache maybe? 😜

I don't think you suggest running at tripled FSB44 (which board has FSB44?), but at quadrupled FSB33. So I am quite confident you meant to write AMD 5x86 (internal code name DX5), not AMD 486 DX4.

Oops. Yes I meant the AMD 5x86, this one is still working on pure '486 tech', unlike an IBM/Cyrix 5x86c which is beginning to start to behave like a Pentium. Or am I wrong again.

Edit:
If you want to run Duke3D on a 486, you want to have the fastest processor around, if you want a smooth experience. Take out your wallet. 😉
Maybe consider running that game on the PII.

See I remember running Duke3D on a Dx2/66 without issue, I also recall playing Wing Commander 3: Heart of the Tiger on one. For the life of me, I don't remember what I had installed, but I know it was a DX2/66 as I have a soft spot for that processor.

PD2JK wrote on 2023-08-13, 08:51:

mkarcher wrote on 2023-08-13, 07:35:

So I am quite confident you meant to write AMD 5x86 (internal code name DX5), not AMD 486 DX4.

Oops. Yes I meant the AMD 5x86, this one is still working on pure '486 tech', unlike an IBM/Cyrix 5x86c which is beginning to start to behave like a Pentium. Or am I wrong again.

No, this time you are right. One might argue in what way "behaving like a Pentium" is exaggregated, but you already only talk about "start to behave like a Pentium". The Cyrix 5x86 contains speculation features that try to minimize pipeline stalls on jumps (Jump prediction / Return address prediction / Loop Optimization). The Pentium contains similar technology, whereas the 486 architecture has none of this. On the other hand, the Cyrix 5x86 does not have two parallel execution engines (U pipe and V pipe), which is another key feature of the Pentium architecture. Also, the 5x86 doesn't have dedicated L1 cache for code and data, while the Pentium processor does. This prevents data access from stalling code fetches (as long as you hit the L1).

To your excuse, it doesn't help that the "DX4" has a multiplier of 3 and the 5x86/DX5 has a multiplier of 4. The naming scheme already helps creating this confusion. Rumor has it that Intel planned to introduce a DX3 processor with a multiplier of 2.5, and given the architectural improvements of the enhanced DX4 core (bigger L1 cache, L1WB) they claimed naming it "3" for x2.5 and "4" for x3 was warranted. Now, who was the first company to use QuantiSpeed-type ratings for x86 processors? 😉

From what I've read now, the Trident 8900 might not be the ideal card to install in a 486 system, it might not be able to handle Doom, Duke, e.g games from the latter half of the 90's. Would that be a fair assessment?

You might want to have a card that support VESA modes. Your Trio64+ does that. Games from that era rely on CPU speed anyway.

Hiddenevil wrote on 2023-08-13, 09:41:

From what I've read now, the Trident 8900 might not be the ideal card to install in a 486 system, it might not be able to handle Doom, Duke, e.g games from the latter half of the 90's. Would that be a fair assessment?

Yes and no.

I used a trident 1mb card for a very good portion of the 90s on a 486 SX-33. I just did so with a copy of scitech's display doctor, and sucked up the memory use penalty. The trident card is "not as nice" as the S3 cards are, but "perfectly functional" (with caveats.)

That DOES look like it is actually a 256kb equipped Trident though, which is a big nono if you want anything better than Mode-X though. There's just not enough frame buffer for anything else, unless he puts more SRAM on it.

Here comes some "voodoo hype"...

mkarcher wrote on 2023-08-13, 01:22:

The pass-through cable is a standard male-to-male VGA cable, and as I understand it, you can re-use the usual detachable LCD VGA cables as pass-through cables.

Wrong. It's male-to-female VGA cable and you can't use standard male-to-male VGA cable as pass-through.

mkarcher wrote on 2023-08-13, 01:22:

Contrary to the Diamond Monster 3D, the Orchid version uses mechanical relays to forward the 2D VGA signal to the monitor, whereas the monster uses FET-based switches. Except for the audible clicking in the switching process, which is a matter of taste, the relay-based version is usually considered superior.

Actually the Orchid Voodoo 1 with these mechanical contacts in the relays is more prone to failure, so it's not superior to Diamond Monster 3D card.

As for the collection of cards. This SB X-Fi soundcard looks like it's not a real X-Fi based card (EMU20K1/2). Maybe it's some "x-fi" xtreme audio soundcard.

wierd_w wrote on 2023-08-13, 10:26:

Yes and no. […]
Show full quote

Hiddenevil wrote on 2023-08-13, 09:41:

From what I've read now, the Trident 8900 might not be the ideal card to install in a 486 system, it might not be able to handle Doom, Duke, e.g games from the latter half of the 90's. Would that be a fair assessment?

Yes and no.

I used a trident 1mb card for a very good portion of the 90s on a 486 SX-33. I just did so with a copy of scitech's display doctor, and sucked up the memory use penalty. The trident card is "not as nice" as the S3 cards are, but "perfectly functional" (with caveats.)

That DOES look like it is actually a 256kb equipped Trident though, which is a big nono if you want anything better than Mode-X though. There's just not enough frame buffer for anything else, unless he puts more SRAM on it.

What does scitech's display doctor do? I've not heard of it before

Would I be right in thinking I just buy 6 more chips for the Trident, matching to model number that is currently installed? What can I expect to run with the Trident? Will late 90's games be ok?

Scitech display doctor is a software based 'universal vesa bios extender'

It also happens to be freeware now, and available here, in the vogon's driver repository.
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=346

Trident cards DO have primitive 2D accelleration inside them, and scitech display doctor DOES know how to use it. When using SDD, the software univbe handler will thus provide hardware accellerated 2d modes, at higher resolutions.

Because SDD is a memory resident TSR, it will gobble down a not inconsiderable chunk of memory, which ,ight make it a deal-breaker. (Like with very crabby games, like ultima 7 part 2)

The 2d accelleration of the S3 cards is superior to those of the Trident, but one can get quite acceptable performance from the trident when a vesa interface is present. The S3 card comes with a vesa capable bios, and does not really need SDD.

The S3 card is the prefferable card, for this reason. However, in an isa only system, the trident is a great option to have.

Just YES, please put at least 1mb on it.

Hiddenevil wrote on 2023-08-13, 15:35:

Would I be right in thinking I just buy 6 more chips for the Trident, matching to model number that is currently installed? What can I expect to run with the Trident? Will late 90's games be ok?

Put six chips of same type and parameters in these RAM-sockets as the two on the card and it will be fine for higher resolution modes. Trident is 2D only card, so what games from the late 90s do you expect to be suitable for, windows solitaire? Its OK ISA card for some old 2/3/486 system.

If you want 3D games from mid to late 90s, use Orchid V00d00 in combo with S3.

Duke3d is the kind of '3d game' that the trident could do just fine (with sdd and more sram present).

Unreal, or similar games (like starsiege tribes), not so much.

I'll have to check what the Escom system came with, I'm not sure if the mobo has PCI at all. So it might be that I'm using the Trident.

How much should i expect to pay for the ram chips? Cheapest I've found it about £2.50 per chip