Have you got some other systems or cards to test? An i440BX motherboard perhaps 😉
Maybe try Glide with a Voodoo 3 first?

Once I had issues with Glide in Tomb Raider, which were caused by wrong BIOS settings: passive release and video RAM cachable IIRC.

Shadow Warrior has two Glide patches, only the oldest patch allows it to run on a voodoo 3, but textures are horribly misaligned. Not very helpful for your question anyways.

Don't have any other MB's to test with 🙁. I have 4 other AGP video cards, but every last one of them have other major problems that preclude me using them in the long run (though I guess I could put them in for testing purposes only.) I had a PCI Rage II+ card I could have tested with except I just put it in the mail 🙁.

With Tomb Raider, something a mite interesting happened. Thinking back to my old system, TR1 worked fine with a single Voodoo 2 card. So I removed one and tried it. It loaded just fine, until I hit ESC to get the menu, at which point it locked up hard (had to reboot.) Since then, I haven't been able to get it to work again 🙁 Tried both cards by themselves, tried both glide2x.ovl files (the one from the CD, and the latest official one.)

Still trying to track down why Shadow Warrior locks up after a few seconds. I've tried VESA drivers, I've fiddled with BIOS settings, I've turned everything that can be turned off, off. I'm waiting now to try and get either Tomb Raider completely working, or SW non-3dfx working before re-installing the 3dfx patch there. I did try with both of the Voodoo 2 cards removed, and it does the same thing. Had high hopes on my latest round of testing. Pulled everything except 1 stick ram & vid card. Ran for several minutes, then freezes. Swapped out the RAM and same thing. Put the AWE32 back in and it freezes quickly, leave it out and it takes longer, but still freezes 🙁

I've also discovered 1 other game (so far,) that is giving me problems. But since I don't exactly have an original, I can't be sure that that isn't the cause. Been looking to buy an original for 4 years now. Found it for the Amiga, no problem. Having problems finding a DOS version 🙁

Ok, solved Shadow Warrior (and maybe some of the other issues, will have to test to see.) Now I'm trying to get SLI working 🙁

Turns out that getting Tomb Raider to work with 3DFX and getting Shadow Warrior to stop freezing, I had to dial my system back to 500Mhz instead of 800. May be able to go above that, maybe do some testing later. Only problem is that under clocking the MB is rather difficult 🙁 The Bus Speed Multiplier jumpers don't have any effect and there aren't any settings to change in BIOS. Probably one of the later BIOS upgrades disabled it as the MB came with the last version already installed. Thinking about dialing it back if I can find the BIOS files and the AFLASH.EXE program to change it with (safely.) Not going to risk losing another MB to bad-flash BIOS. Will do some research on that eventually to get the exact speeds. Actually had the single Voodoo 2 working in TR at 533Mhz (before switching the CPU out.)

So now, take the second Voodoo 2 card out and everything I've tested works just fine. Put it back in with the SLI cable and poof, TR 3DFX stops working. Attached a second pass through cable (sort of - a pin is missing - it's really an extension cable,) and it worked for 2 seconds. Going to try and dial it back again - my choices (without changing the BIOS,) are 333Mhz (66Mhz FSB - 5x Multiplier,) 500Mhz (100Mhz FSB - 5x Multiplier,) 533Mhz (66Mhz FSB, 8x Multiplier,) and 800Mhz (100Mhz FSB - 8x Multiplier.) Going to also try tweaking the PCI bus if I can. Don't really want to change it off of 33.3Mhz if I can, will check the BIOS first. Actually, going to go 333Mhz first and if that doesn't work, then I'll start fiddling with PCI Bus speeds. Technically, it's running at 33.48Mhz right now, but don't see how .18Mhz would make that much of a difference.

Off for more testing....

Tomb Raider should work in SLI mode, but if you want to disable it just set SST_SLIDETECT=0 in a batchfile prior to startup. You don't need the SLI in Tomb Raider anyway since its locked to 640x480. 100mhz FSB should not be a problem.

Also for Voodoo2, use the patches in this thread: Voodoo 2 DOS Glide compatibility matrix

I "think" tried the SST_SLIDETECT=0 option. I do know I tried several SLI environment variable settings, I think that was one of them. 100Mhz FSB, I don't think, is the problem. I think it's the overall system speed. A single card worked fine with 100Mhz FSB at 500Mhz total speed, and at 66Mhz FSB 533Mhz total speed. It turns out that 2 cards SLI work just fine at 66Mhz FSB 333Mhz Total Speed. Would like to try at 100Mhz FSB and 300Mhz Total Speed to check, but can't under the current situation 🙁 I can only think it has something to do with how fast it's accessing the PCI bus cards. 500Mhz on 2 PCI cards is too fast it seems. There may be some environment variable I can set for that, but it is also a problem with Shadow Warrior non-3DFX mode (oh, at 333Mhz Shadow Warrior 3DFX works just fine in SLI.) Considering upping it to 500Mhz again to check out Shadow Warrior again that way, but it seems to be tied in with the glide2x.ovl file and not the actual program. Upgrading to a non-official driver may fix that little issue. Not sure if I want to do that or not though.

I also discovered (through testing,) that at 333Mhz (66Mhz FSB,) I have to double pass-through the card. It won't work at all if I don't. Don't know if that's a speed thing, or something with my cards. All the web sites I searched on this specifically stated you only have to connect the pass-through to the closest card to your 2D card. One of the reasons I wasn't worried when my second card didn't come with a pass-through cable. I'm off to eBay now to get another one (this 8 foot extension cable is just a little cumbersome.)

Right now I'm researching the BIOS settings to find out exactly what they each do, and also reading up on the environment variables to see about adjusting those. My last step will be to start trying newer, 3rd party, drivers. I don't really want to limit myself to 333Mhz, that's barely an upgrade from the 233Mhz I had before. I'm not worried about games playing too fast on this system (that's what DOSBox is for, IMHO.) I built this mainly for the mid-range games that aren't speed dependent, but won't run on a newer OS. DOS, Windows98, Windows 3.1 is all that's on this system. 500Mhz, yes, I can accept that (as one of my CPU's is a 500Mhz one,) though I'd rather go higher if I can. If I can get the multiplier working right, I'll test at 350Mhz, 400Mhz, 550Mhz, 600Mhz, 650Mhz, 700Mhz, & 750Mhz as well (assuming I can get the SLI Voodoo 2 cards to work at higher speeds as well.) Considering 1 card worked at 533Mhz and 2 cards worked at 333Mhz, I think it's logical that 1 card should work at, at least, 666Mhz. Maybe faster, again I need to find out exactly where the problem is occurring.

But I won't be able to get past Shadow Warrior crapping out at 800Mhz, so that is probably my absolute cap. Though, if I can get 133 * 5.5 working, that would be ideal in this situation (that's 733Mhz.) That's as high as a 133Mhz FSB CPU goes (without over clocking the MB or the CPU,) without going over 800Mhz. I'm thinking that I'd rather have a 133Mhz FSB at 733Mhz than a 100Mhz FSB at 750Mhz (as high as a 100Mhz FSB chip goes without going over 800Mhz.)

Still, what it boils down to now is: Testing, testing, testing. I would have never thought of this is the 15th page of my Google search didn't lead to someone saying TR started working when he under clocked down to 500Mhz. I'm starting to get a little tired of Google 🙁 page after page of unrelated results. I counted 11 individual result sites that didn't have a single one of my search terms. And I'm not counting the sites that had 3000+ words at the bottom that were "search catchers" (I hate those sites as well.)

Well, I've tested SLI up to 416Mhz with it still working. That's the last point I can test until 500Mhz (where it fails.) Still trying to find a BIOS version that will re-enable the multiplier jumpers on this MB (P3V133.) If anyone has one where the jumpers work, are you willing to use AFLASH to make a backup of your BIOS so I can use it? Just in case (though I know it's a long shot,) I'm attaching the AFLASH utility below 😀 According to the ASUS web site, I can go back as far as 1002.006 before my CPU is no longer supported, my current version is 1003.002 beta, (which is also the last version.) I did find a version 1003.001A, but the multiplier jumpers were still disabled, and the hardware monitor didn't work (not 100% sure it was a valid bios for this MB.)

Alternately, anyone know of a way to get Voodoo 2 SLI to function over 416Mhz? First, I'd sort of like to know the exact limit (I can't test between 416Mhz and 500Mhz.) Second, this will tell me exactly which CPU I need to keep an eye out for. I'd sort of like to find out at what frequency Shadow Warrior stops working, as well as what other games may run into this difficulty. I know non-SLI Voodoo 2 works at 533Mhz, and Shadow Warrior runs fine at 533Mhz, but what about 700Mhz? I'm aiming to get this system as fast as I can while still being able to run both SLI and all my games (that won't go at light speed because the system is faster than it was expecting.)

Currently, if I swap my 800Mhz CPU back in, I can test 600Mhz and 666Mhz (thanks to the disabled multiplier jumpers.) Get those working again and I can start testing more freely. 450 & 466 for SLI, 550 - 766 for Shadow Warrior (in 33.3Mhz, 37.5Mhz, 41.65Mhz, & 50Mhz increments.)

edit: Oops, forgot to attach the file, hate it when I do that 😀

I think you're on a wrong path with the BIOS and downclocking. I would look at other things. I've been using TR 3DFX on much quicker PC's than your 800mhz. What patch are you using, the Rush or Voodoo Graphics patch?

Try swapping the PCI slots: Voodoo 2 DOS Glide compatibility matrix

Swapping PCI slots was my first action. Cycled them through all 4 possible locations (though the last one is one I'd rather avoid - like to keep the shared ISA slot available, just in case.) Tried it with cards in reverse order. I've done everything I can think of in the BIOS to tweak the PCI functionality. Playing around with different environment variables now (SST_SLIDETECT=0 doesn't help.) Shadow Warrior 3DFX also fails at the same point as Tomb Raider. Also, yes, I'm using the Voodoo Rush patch and not the Voodoo 1 patch.

This is something that is rather frustrating to me as I know I've seen others using SLI V2 up to 2Ghz (or maybe it was 1.4Ghz - don't remember off hand,) but definitely faster that the 1Ghz top speed of this MB. I've also seen people talking about playing Shadow Warrior on faster systems too. I went through 4 MB's before I got to this one, so I'd rather not replace it yet again. I might just do so anyway, if I can get one compatible with the cards I have, and my needs. I'd really rather have an Intel chipset, if I can, but they are the worst about deciding that people don't need a second floppy drive. Or even a 5.25" drive as the A drive (see my list of my first 4 failed MBs below.) The bad floppy board was the "first" chipset to support PIII CPU's (according to Intel's site,) so can I really expect a later chipset to re-enable the floppies?

One just fried on me. Well, it was old and had been sitting in the garage for 5 years - unprotected, so no real surprise there. Another only allowed 1 floppy drive, one of the reasons I'm rebuilding my vintage system after my P233MMX system went out was to install a 5.25" drive for my stack of games on that size disk. One was just BAD advertisement (first negative feedback I've ever left on eBay,) and only had 1 ISA slot and not the 2 it advertised. What can I say, the guy never responded to my complaint - got a refund on it, and am still waiting to see if he's going to demand the MB back or not. The last one seemed to be OK, and still does really, but nothing ever seemed to work right on it. Windows 98 wouldn't install, FAT32 access to the HDD resulted in random corruption of the files. It only allowed a grand total of 20K upper memory (still can't figure that one out.) Every last bit of it was reserved no matter what I did. **shudder** that MB actually went into the trash. I'm not even tempted to inflict it on my worst enemy.

So, I'm slightly loathe to leap back into the MB search 🙁 I'll probably end up doing it, but going to see how close I can get this one first. That way, I can have it up and running while I search. It will allow me to be a little more picky on my choices.

I just tested my Intel 440BX setup with a Tualatin 1.4Ghz (downclocked to 1050mhz). Using Diamond Monster II 12MB in SLI. No problems running Tomb Raider with 3DFX patch (with batch file). Remember, if you're running with the Voodoo Rush patch you either need the glide2x.ovl file in the game directory or have the Windows drivers installed (or use PATH lines in autoexec.bat).

Since this is a Glide DOS game I have to move back the FSB to 100mhz (known problem with Voodoo 1 and 2), else I just get a black screen (I still hear the game starting up though with sound). Also the main card being used is the one furthest away from the AGP slot.

Sounds this could be incompatibilities with your motherboard. Try the cards in another system if you're able just to check if you'd like 😀

vetz wrote:

I just tested my Intel 440BX setup with a Tualatin 1.4Ghz (downclocked to 1050mhz). Using Diamond Monster II 12MB in SLI. No problems running Tomb Raider with 3DFX patch (with batch file). Remember, if you're running with the Voodoo Rush patch you either need the glide2x.ovl file in the game directory or have the Windows drivers installed (or use PATH lines in autoexec.bat).

Since this is a Glide DOS game I have to move back the FSB to 100mhz (known problem with Voodoo 1 and 2), else I just get a black screen (I still hear the game starting up though with sound). Also the main card being used is the one furthest away from the AGP slot.

Sounds this could be incompatibilities with your motherboard. Try the cards in another system if you're able just to check if you'd like 😀

I don't actually have access to another system right now 🙁 Except for the Intel 440BX board I do "not" want to use. That's the board where Intel decided that not only do I never want more than one floppy, but I couldn't possibly want a 5.25" floppy. If you know a fix for the 440BX that would allow 2 floppies, I'm all ears. Though it also had problems with FAT32 drives, I never checked the BIOS to see if there was a fix for that problem (I gave up when it dawned on me that it was only ever detecting one drive.)

If there is a problem with the floppy drives I think that is due to the motherboard manufacturer than the chipset. I've been using two floppy drives (3.5" as A: and 5.25" as B:) in my 440BX setup previously (ASUS P3B-F v1.03). No issues.

Problem with FAT32 drives? FAT32 is a partition system. Where there problem detecting IDE drives, is that what you mean? Or that you just could make one FAT32 partition?

2 Motherboards I tried had problems with 32 bit drive access (Windows 9x.) I was in the middle of researching it on the 440BX I have (manufacturer is Intel,) when I discovered that Windows 98 wouldn't install right. Files were becoming corrupted on the drive. Through testing, this only happened when I worked with a FAT32 partition. It installed fine on a FAT16 partition. When I discovered the floppy issue, the MB went back into the box and I moved on. The other MB that had the problem (only worse,) would recognize 2 floppies just fine. It was during this that I read somewhere that a PCI read ahead or write ahead feature in BIOS could cause the issue. Only to discover that this MB had an extremely stripped down BIOS. It wouldn't even let me adjust the AGP aperture size. I could set the clock, "auto detect" the HDD's, set the Floppies, and set a password... PERIOD. It also ate up 90% of the upper memory. That MB went in the trash. Ok, I admit it, it also got smashed up a bit first. It may not have cost much, but I was still a little ticked off. If I could have, I would have smashed it up over the head of the idiot that designed the blasted thing. I could eat a bunch of transistors and puke a better MB than that 😠 Sorry, still ticks me off a bit I guess.

The Asus p3b is one MB I had looked at prior to getting this one. I seem to recall that it did allow multiple floppies (even with the 440 chipset.) I just avoid the Intel makes. They're not as bad as Microshaft, but they still seem to believe they know better than anyone else what a person wants or needs.

Well, I give up. Setting it to 416Mhz for now, and starting to look for a replacement MB.

While researching replacements, came across something interesting. The P3V133 is PCI 2.2, while the P2B-F is PCI 2.1. Is it possible that "That" is what is causing all my problems? Anyone out there with PCI 2.2 and Voodoo 2 cards?

Still doesn't answer why Shadow Warrior doesn't like 800Mhz 🙁 Can't see that as the PCI standard, as it wasn't (at that time,) using a PCI card. Except that the AGP counts as a PCI in BIOS. But I thought it used a totally different communications protocol. And I did try lowering it down to AGP 1x during testing. I thought that PCI & AGP used different bridges, but I guess I could be mistaken. During testing I removed everything except the Vid card and a single stick of RAM (which reminds me,) need to put the rest back in before I close my box back up.

Got a list of Intel chipset boards with the minimal ISA/PCI slots or more. Going to go back through them and mark the ones that are PCI 2.2. There are a couple that are actually looking rather tasty to me (in a manner of speaking.) Will probably go with the least expensive of the 2.1 lot. The ISA/PCI slot count (3 PCI, 2 ISA, 1 Shared,) along with the price is what decided me on the P3V133 in the first place. I've had a lot of good experiences with Gigabyte, and they have a couple of well balanced boards that could work very well (if the price is right.) A couple of Asus boards that are practically identical to the P2B-F (only an extra ISA slot,) would probably be at the top of the list though. As I'm more confident they will work.

Maybe your memory modules don't like a 800MHz system?. And it is a VIA mainboard; anything can happen. 🤣

Though there are certainly many games with speed related issues. For example: lucasarts sound setups do not detect the MPU midi interface above 500MHz. I common mistake is to then blame the soundcard for being incompatible, while it is actually the system speed causing it.
If you are serious about DOS stuff it is very practical to have a means to revert to a much safer 150..200MHz. Most DOS software was never tested on anything above 300MHz.

Maybe you can try the Throttle.exe slowdown tool with shadow warrior. Don't let it disable you L1 cache though. that would be too much.

Don't bother with the PCI 2.1 vs 2.2 stuff, in my experience it is not an issue.

I never tried Shadow Warrior 3dfx above 500MHz, but on all 3 setups I tried, it worked perfectly with 2 voodoo2s in SLI: Pentium II 450MHz, PowerMac G3 450 @ 500MHz and G4 400 @ 450MHz.

The more I think about it, the more I think maybe this MB isn't all that great 🙁 I've already purchased a replacement (with an Intel 440BX chipset.) The exact same one as mentioned above. So, hopefully, that fixes the SLI issue.

As for Shadow Warrior, I didn't think about disabling the cache for testing.... I tried it with Wing Commander (just out of curiosity,) and it didn't seem to make a difference on game speed. Also tried a version of MoSlo4Biz I purchased in the early 90's, and all it did was lock up my system. At the time I chalked it up to a P3 with a utility written during the 486 era. I'm wondering if it's another case of this MB being too persnickety 🙁 It seemed so solid and stable until now, though. Windows 3.1 runs great, Windows 98 runs great, and all the games I tried until Shadow Warrior run great. Even the other game I mentioned in passing (somewhere,) runs great after all. It just has a problem with AdLIb (and I read that's a common problem with older AdLib games/drivers on faster systems.) Disable AdLib and it runs great. Going to have to research that some time and see if there's a fix I can use or something.

The MB is "scheduled" to arrive Monday, so I guess I'll know more by Tuesday 😀 I'm also going to try out some of these vid cards that ended up not working for me. It's possible that was another case of the MB causing problems. A couple of them were just bad research on my part (they don't have drivers for Windows 3.1,) but the others were "supposed" to work, but didn't. The Savage 4 (for example,) worked great except for needing the 8x15(??) font fix. But crapped out in Windows 3.1. Not sure about the TNT2, though. It has Windows 3.1 drivers, but everything I've been reading says they are very buggy. More research time 😀

Well, it turns out that "part" of my SLI problem was a bad SLI cable. Just built a new one. Not going to do any testing as I have a replacement MB on its way anywayat.

Well, replacement MB is DOA unless there's some trick I can't find to get the bloody thing to post 🙁 I don't even get an error beep. I've quadruple checked the dip switch settings. I've tried it with the jumper on & off the case intrusion sensor. I've tried it with 2 different CPU's. I gave up switching ram sticks/vid cards 2 hours ago (6 hours after I started.) Right now, I just want an error beep, any error beep, I don't care, just something besides the fans turning on 🙁 It didn't have a battery when it arrived, so I put one in, but CMOS should be pretty well cleared (can't find the stupid clear CMOS "solder points".) Already e-mailed the seller, maybe he has another one??

Well, the second P3B-F motherboard just went up in smoke. Everything seemed to be going well. I installed my HW, booted up and it looked good. I loaded Shadow Warrior (non-3dfx) at 800Mhz, and played for half an hour without locking up. Cool. <CTRL><ALT><DEL> no longer locked up the system (it only did it on the P3V board when my KVM was attached so I blamed that on an incompatibility with the board/KVM.) But when I loaded Shadow Warrior 3DFX, and Tomb Raider, they both locked up the system. Ok, lets play musical PCI slots with the Voodoo cards. Power down, move the cards, turn the system on, and it won't post. No beep, the CPU fan doesn't come on, the power/reset buttons don't work. I flip the switch on the back, the Power Supply fan starts, the PCI power LED lights up and that's it. Turn it off, move the cards back, same thing. Turn it off, remove the Voodoo cards, same thing. Remove everything except 1 stick of ram (and I rotated through all 5 stick I have, and both CPU's) and the same thing. I also rotated through the 4 AGP VGA cards I have (even though none of them except the Rage Pro work in Win3.1 for some reason.) Eventually, I even remove the CPU, RAM and VGA card. The only thing attached to the MB now is the speaker and the Power Supply (even disconnected the power/reset buttons.) Same thing.

I'm giving up for now.... Going to have to start all over it seems. There is something wrong with the PV3 (Shadow Warrior, 2 Graphics cards that should work but don't.) Both P3B boards I got failed on me. One was DOA, this one was DSAA (Dead Soon "After" Arrival.) I smell a bit of ozone from the case, so I imagine "something" blew on the board, but I can't "see" anything. And I didn't hear anything (like a cap going.) I think the system I want to build is just cursed... And I have commitments and won't have any more cash for stuff for a few months 🙁