Voodoo 1 was released in 1996 and voodoo 2 in 1998. Warcraft will probably run too fast on a pentium 2 and pentium 2 400Mhz wasn't released before 1998. Voodoo 1 will work fine, but I would probably go for a better video card. Perhaps Riva TNT would be a good period correct choice for such Pentium 2.

Can't the speed of the game be adjusted in Warcraft?

Yep, you can.

- 9. MAKING YOUR SYSTEM RUN FASTER --------------------------------------------------------------------- Adjust the speed using […]
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- 9. MAKING YOUR SYSTEM RUN FASTER
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Adjust the speed using the Options Dialog or the + or - keys.

The EMM 386 memory manager (EMM386.EXE) slows the game speed of Warcraft
considerably. Use HIMEM.SYS only (without EMM386), or another memory
manager like QEMM or 386MAX to increase game speed. Refer to your
DOS manual to change your memory configuration. Also, please refer to
the notes regarding EMM386.EXE in the TROUBLESHOOTING section.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-02-23, 15:42:

Can't the speed of the game be adjusted in Warcraft?

Yep, you can.

Game speed isn't much of problem on fast CPUs. Screen scrolling speed is. You can adjust that too, but it doesn't help much when you get to around 500 MHz. WarCraft 2 suffers from the same issue, though it's a bit less pronounced.

On topic, not sure if your motherboard has AGP and USB, but if it does, you want Windows 98SE. Support for those is much more limited in Win95 OSR 2.5.

I’d save the isa vga / voodoo combo for a super 486.

A Pentium2 could use a much faster gpu and that would give it access to a much larger selection of games. Pretty sure a Pentium2 can get playable FPS on Quake3 with a Geforce2 MX.

You can't go wrong with a Voodoo 😉

Binary, thanks for the response!

I have a 486dx2 66 with Windows for workgroups running on it. I "could" bump that to a dx2 100 and still be able to slow it down with turbo function for older DOS games. Thinking Perfect General 2, or even Railroad Tycoon.

I too had thought to use the voodoo card there, but I ran into issues finding drivers for 3.1 - seems like they didn't support anything earlier than 95. DOS support?

Do you think the combination that I mentioned would be a good one for the p2 400 Win 95 machine? Or have any specific recommendations that would suit it better?

1992-1997 is the sweet spot for what I will be using it for. Many DOS games at the time were still basic 2D when 3dfx showed and changed everything.

aaronkatrini wrote on 2020-02-23, 16:27:

You can't go wrong with a Voodoo 😉

Yeah, I have a soft spot for them!

I decided that I would just go with a single card solution and the Diamond Speedstar 64 (ISA) carrying the Cirrus Logic 5429 chip. This should do well for the 486 66 machine.

The Voodoo one, or maybe a two... since the 95 machine is powered with a 400mhz p3.... will be running with a Cirrus Logic PCI card carrying the 5446 chip version which Phil likes.

I am sure that there are faster solutions but my primary care is rock solid 2d performance in DOS and that does exclude some of those faster options.

Thanks for the advice and as always, thanks Phil.