Hi!

I think it is possible, but you may have more (driver related) trouble in Win98 than benefit.
Which games do you want to play?
If you don't need a fast Win98-machine, a Matrox 400 or 450 based card should do the job - also with most Dos games. I have a Matrox 450 OEM card - 1€ at ebay - and connected its DVI output directly with the Voodoo2-SLI combination by using a leftover DVI-VGA-adapter. Works great, as the typical quality loss caused by the loop-cables is reduced. And all Matrox cards have very good 2D-signal quality. Works also with all my dos games so far.
The only situation where you need a special vga card for dos could be a very old or exotic game - but in this case a non PnP-ISA-VGA card would be better (as WIN98 won't discover it).
Yet I wonder how to force the bios to boot from this device first, or if there will be a VGA signal on both devices?

Very good comments. I must admit that in my ignorance I didn't appreciate that there might be some kind of driver conflict inside Windows 98 if two PnP graphics cards (one AGP and one PCI) are installed. In other words, two graphics cards may not live in harmony with Windows 98. (Although I appreciate and understand your comment about the non-PnP ISA card.)

The retro games I want to play on this rig are from approx 1991 to 1996. I was just going to put Win98 on this rig for the convenience of being able to use the "windows GUI front-end".

Best regards, Robert.

Windows 98 shouldn't have much trouble with multiple video cards. For a short time I had a Voodoo5, a GeForce2 MX (with 2 VGA outputs) and a S3 card running in the same system. The purpose of this was a multi-monitor setup (4 screens), and it worked quite well.

There are a few things to be aware of:

• Install certified WDM drivers for your cards, otherwise they might not cooperate.
• Always select the same card as your primary card when you're booting into Windows. Booting with a different primary card each time might cause trouble, such as lost configuration settings, swapped resources, unexpected crashes, etc...
• Some games might behave strangely when confronted with more than one card installed

retro games wrote:

AGP slot: Typical Windows 98-based 3D card PCI slot: Typical DOS-based 2D card PCI slot: Voodoo2 PCI slot: Voodoo2 (SLI) […]
Show full quote

AGP slot: Typical Windows 98-based 3D card
PCI slot: Typical DOS-based 2D card
PCI slot: Voodoo2
PCI slot: Voodoo2 (SLI)

Looks like a very sensible approach. If you don't have a use for the "DOS/2D" card when running Windows, simply deactivate it in the device manager.

Silent Loon wrote:

Yet I wonder how to force the bios to boot from this device first, or if there will be a VGA signal on both devices?

An ISA VGA card overrules all other installed cards and will always become the primary display.
In case of multiple PCI cards the primary display is determined by slot order.
AGP cards usually take precedence over PCI cards, unless overrruled by a setting in the BIOS.
Only the primary display will deliver a VGA signal, at least until Windows drivers for the other cards have been loaded.

5u3 wrote:

If you don't have a use for the "DOS/2D" card when running Windows, simply deactivate it in the device manager.

That's right, how careless of me to forget that!
But which "Dos"-PCI card could be of advantage in such an assembly? An early S3 based one? One with Cirrus Logic chipset? Matrox Mystique? Tseng?
I would presume that the signal quality of most of those cards is far below a later midrange d3d card. So the reason to use it would be compability issues with early games (or vesa modes?). I've heard that those problems exist, but perhaps for ignorance never stumbled over it.
5u3, could you give an example where a Geforce 2 or a Matrox G450 will not work or have problems with, whereas the pci card will do the job?

I just ask because the idea doesn't seem bad, but still a little bit inconvenient to me...

Another point is which display(s) retro games wants to use. Two displays or one display with two inputs? CRT or LCD / TFT? Or a switch? Or simply plugging/unplugging the cables?
I don't think that it is possible to loop one signal through the voodoo2 that is not connected to the display and get the same signal at the output of the other V2, right?

To "5u3" -

Simply awesome!

Re the "2D/DOS/PCI" card - as I don't need it for Win98 per se, I'll deactivate it inside Control Panel. And when I do need it, I can select "PCI display" in BIOS and boot straight to DOS without going near Win98. (At this point in time, I'm assuming one can boot-up Win98 and not actually enter "GUI Win98" but simply go straight to "DOS 7")

To "Silent Loon" -

You've raised some more good comments here! I didn't realise that the signal quality of early "DOS-based cards" was inferior to a mid-range 3d3 card. Perhaps at this point it would be better if I tried to explain what I want to achieve -

To Set up a rig to play DOS games circa 91-97, DOS and Windows 3dfx games, and I have a number of LCD displays available for a multiple monitor scenario. Currently my rig has an AGP ATI Radeon 9250.
I believe it has VESA issues because it doesn't run Shadow Warrior (a VESA 2.0 game) properly. Therefore I was thinking of swapping it out for a mid-range "Windows 98 card" which has better VESA support, and is also reasonably fast.

However, I have heard rumours that cards such as mid-range GeForce's have slightly inferior display quality compared to older "DOS based" cards. This is my reason for considering installing a second graphics card, in addition to the "Windows card". However, it may be unnecessary if the "Windows card" will do everything for me, including providing a good quality display.

retro games wrote:

To Set up a rig to play DOS games circa 91-97, DOS and Windows 3dfx games, and I have a number of LCD displays available for a multiple monitor scenario.

Mhmm... that's an important point, as LCDs generally interpolate the image which will nearly allways result in a quality loss. One reason is interpolation itself, the other the way interpoltation / expansion is done. Did you allready play some games on those LCDs?
I suppose 5u3 can tell you a lot about that, but perhaps my personal experience is of some use:

I have a Samsung 203b LCD that has an aspect ratio of 4:3 natively (1400x1050) which is also the "natural" aspect ratio of most dos vga games I suppose (there was a very vivid discussion about this topic here: True aspect ratio of VGA mode 13h (320x200)? ).

Still the display interpolates the (dos) image and - like most others - expands it over the whole screen, but the aspect ratio is allright and the image not compressed or streched (as with 19" or widescreen monitors).
Some people don't bother about that, so it might not be a problem for you at all. There are also highend LCDs where you can choose the way interpoltation is done in hardware (i.E. NEC LCD1990sxi).

The 203b turns out to do interpolation quite well (in my eyes) but I discovered that the graphics card is more important even with dos games than it was with my old CRT. So here's what I found out (out of my memory):

Current machine (Athlon64):

- Nvidia based PCIex card / DVI output:
Sharp, very good image in native resolution, good to very good interpolation / signal quality at every resolution that has 4:3 aspet ratio. The nvidia drivers let you choose the way interpolation is done (in windows / using the digital signal), the Ati ones don't. I didn't test the card in pure DOS, but it does a very good job in dosbox.

- Ati Radeon 9600 Pro AGP / Analog output:
Very good image quality in native resolution, good to very good signal quality. Driver does not allow to choose the way interpolation is done. Didn't test the card in pure DOS, only in dosbox.

Retro machine 1 (Socket 370, with VoodooSLI)

- Ati Radeon 7000 AGP / Analog / Digital output:
Good to very good image / signal quality. Yet it has the vesa issues you mentioned and I got several problems in dos, i.e. with WCIII, but also with standard vga modes so I do not use it, and didn't install it under win98.

- Diamond Viper II Ultra (TNT2 Ultra) AGP Analog:
Good to very good image / signal quality. Good dos and vesa support, but for an unknown reason this card forced my rig to crash constantly in Win98, and so I didn't use it either.

- Diamond Stealth III S540 ( S3 Savage4 pro) AGP Analog
Good to very good signal quality. But the image wasn't as good as with the TNT2, especially when I installed the Voodoo2 SLI. Very good dos and vesa support, the card still seems to have the "old S3 dos-core" that made former S3 models so compatible.

- Matrox Millenium G200 AGP Analog:
Good signal / image quality. Good dos & vesa support, but relatively slow in D3D. Don't know if it is able to display the 1400x1050 resolution properly.

- Voodoo5 5500 AGP Analog
Sharp image, very good signal, good to very good interpolation at every resolution that has 4:3 aspect ratio. Playing early Windows games with 4x AA is simply marvelous. Good dos and vesa support. Makes the Voodoo SLI obsolete. The downside is that I could not play my favorite dos based 3dfx game (Archimedean Dynasty) with it, so I put it aside for the time being

- Matrox G450 AGP Analog / Digital
This is an OEM low profile card that has the Matrox dual-head function, but only one DVI output, that could also be used as an analog one by the allready mentioned adapter. This card delivers the best image and signal quality with my retro machine, even with the Voodoo SLI installed. It is also the only card whose Matrox drivers came with a tool that allows me to use the native resolution of my LCD, the uncommon 1400x1050, right from the start without driver tweaking, registry hack or special shareware programs. Not the fastest card for D3D (OpenGL?) Good dos and vesa support, no problems so far.

Generally it seems to me that a Voodoo add-on card affects the image quality of the LCD display more than it did on my CRT. So I sometimes saw interferences, especially when using a Voodoo1 (maybe this has something to do with the RAMDAC?)
Only the G450 (apart of the V5 of course) had no problems with it.
I also have to mention that I use a KVM switch.

I also tested a few PCI cards, but only with standard vga modes, here's a brief summary:

- Matrox Millenium II / Mystique
Good image quality, nearly ahead with the newer AGP models. Should have good dos support, might need some software fix for Vesa 2.0

- NoName S3 Virge DX:
Is supposed to have good dos and vesa compability, but has only mediocre image / signal quality with the LCD display. Sometime the image shows interferences.

- Hercules S3 Virge DX
Slightly better than the above, but still not good

And finally - planning to build a third machine that has only ISA slots - I tested the LCD with some really old ISA VGA cards (dos only):

- Western Digital based SPEA V7 EGA/VGA card:
Surprisingly good image, but only 256k video memory, so it has no SVGA support I guess.

-Tseng Labs ET4000ax
Very common chipset for ISA cards. Tseng had or has also a good reputation among retro gamers, I suppose because of its compability. Nevertheless I tested two different models with this chipset, and the image quality was poor.

- Diamond Speedstar Pro 1MB (!)
Surprisingly good signal quality, even in SVGA. This is a CL GD5426 based card, which is not supposed to be the fastest, but creates the best
image of an ISA card on my LCD so far...

To "Silent Loon" -

Thanks a lot for sharing your observations!

Re: my LCD monitors set-up, I'm afraid this is an area where I have made
another mistake. I recently bought a 19" non-widescreen monitor, but luckily I can use this for my up-to-date XP rig. I *was* going to buy a second 19" LCD for my retro rig, but having read your post, I may need to think again!

Re: Samsung 203b - I've just checked the price for this monitor, and I can
afford it! Would you recommend it for general DOS/Win98 gaming?

Re: Voodoo 5500 - I was put off this card because it had 2 fans on the card! I dislike PC-based noise, but perhaps they are not too loud?

I am in the process of building 2 retro rigs -

Rig 1 DOS (Win98), ISA-based

ATM - Voodoo2 SLI
To do - GeForce FX (to replace Radeon 9250)
PCI 2D card (may be unnecessary!)

Rig 2 Win98, no ISAs

ATM - Radeon 9250

Silent Loon wrote:

5u3, could you give an example where a Geforce 2 or a Matrox G450 will not work or have problems with, whereas the pci card will do the job?
I just ask because the idea doesn't seem bad, but still a little bit inconvenient to me...

You're right, a second video card is inconvenient indeed, especially when it is only installed to make up for the errors of the primary card.
A GeForce 2 is actually a rather good retro gaming card, apart from some unsupported VESA modes (which are rarely used in games) you shouldn't have much trouble. If you don't care for maximum 3D speed, I recommend a Geforce 2 MX model, it is cheap, easily available, doesn't need a fan and often comes with two VGA outputs.
A Matrox G450 offers brilliant picture quality and is not too shabby in the 3D department, but for many old DOS games you'd need a second card, because the Matrox doesn't support CGA, EGA and VGA ModeX properly.
However, if you didn't encounter problems with your games yet, consider yourself lucky 😉

retro games wrote:

At this point in time, I'm assuming one can boot-up Win98 and not actually enter "GUI Win98" but simply go straight to "DOS 7"

Yes, this is possible, either by pressing F8 at boot time or more comfortably by editing MSDOS.SYS and CONFIG.SYS, setting up a nice boot menu.

Silent Loon wrote:

I suppose 5u3 can tell you a lot about that,...

Nope, actually I can't, because I've avoided LCDs so far. 🤣
Mostly because I still have a good 21" CRT, but also because I hate the way modern LCDs handle smaller resolutions.

About those problems with old video cards and modern LCDs: It is true that old cards often come with crappy RAMDACs, but the analogue inputs of LCD screens also play a role in this. It seems manufacturers don't deem good VGA inputs worthy any more.

retro games wrote:

Re: Voodoo 5500 - I was put off this card because it had 2 fans on the card! I dislike PC-based noise, but perhaps they are not too loud?

On new cards the fans are not really loud, but they will be after some some months of use. We've talked about replacing those fans recently... Here is the thread.

retro games wrote:

Re: Samsung 203b - I've just checked the price for this monitor, and I can
afford it! Would you recommend it for general DOS/Win98 gaming?

This is a very difficult question to answer, as everybody has his personal preferences and subjective sensation.

The Samsung 203B is a standard LCD display for the consumers market, not less, not more. With 8ms (gray to gray!) response time it is not the fastest model available, and people who are disturbed by motion bluring might be more comfortable with a faster model. Also lighting seems to be uneven to me, and there is certainly the problem of backlight leaking, that every LCD display in this price range seems to have.

On the other hand you won't notice those drawbacks unless you're doing business in the graphic department or watch DVDs in a completely dark room.

The 8ms response time (which is infact something around 20ms rise-and-fall), turned out to be fast enough for me.
By the way: in many LCD display reviews you might find a sentence like "we tested the display with the latest 3d-games, and couldn't notice any ghosting..."

What does the publishing year of a game has to do with the response time of a LCD display?

If there is ghosting or not could allready be visual by using microsofts dxdiag (you remember that white, jumping square?). I faced no problems playing STALKER with the 203B, but got some strange (maybe driver related) tearing effects with Neverwinter Nights (one!).

What I like with the 203B is the sharpness, the good interpolation, the 4:3 aspect ratio (which is usefull for dos and old windows games that do not support high resolutions), the native resolution itself, and the one-touch-button to change between analog and digital input. The pivot function is useless to me (because of uneven lighting and different vertical viewing angles), the response time is average, the colours and contrast are good.
In some forums people are complaining that the display emits a wining noise (which originally comes from the pulse wide modulation of the backlight) but this seems to change with the manufacturing country / month, and I didn't get such a model.

Well, that's of course my personal opinion... so don't blame me. Some people seem to spent years on choosing "the right LCD"... There is a very informative site about lcds: www.prad.de It's mainly in german, but they have an english section.

5u3 wrote:

However, if you didn't encounter problems with your games yet, consider yourself lucky Wink

Well, maybe I just didn't dig deep enough for the real treasures... 😉

Great post, as usual!

Please forgive my ignorance, but if an LCD monitor has resolution of 1600x1200, is this "xvga 4:3"? The reason I ask is that I went on to Samsung's website, and found this monitor: 204BM. Looking at the numbers - 204 - it *seems* like an update on the monitor that you have, the 203. This is a rather thoughtless assumption on my part, but there may be some validity in it! The response time is 6ms, which seems fairly quick. Perhaps it's a monitor that is worth considering?

Best regards, Robert.

retro games wrote:

Re: Voodoo 5500 - I was put off this card because it had 2 fans on the card! I dislike PC-based noise, but perhaps they are not too loud?

I was using one in my machine until the other day when I switched it out to do some testing, and to me it's never been loud enough to be particularly noticeable - which I would expect to if it were loud, given I have a near-silent CPU fan. In any event, if you're of an experimental bent you could always just fit souped-up heatsinks like some of the peeps over at the 3dfxzone.it forum and cool the chips passively, which it is entirely okay with provided you don't get too ambitious with the heatsink, as it'll pull the chips off eventually.

Funnily enough I was considering selling one of my V5's because I'm having to clear out ahead of a move, but I'm a bit loathe to since they're not all that easy to pick up these days. PM me if you are interested and I'll give you an idea of what I'm looking for.

Heh, just looking back I see 5u3 already did the passive cooling thing.

Seriously, it is possible, just don't go overboard.

retro games wrote:

Please forgive my ignorance, but if an LCD monitor has resolution of 1600x1200, is this "xvga 4:3"?

Yeah, of course it is 4:3 - just use the little calculator program of ol' windows:
4:3 = 1,333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
1600:1200=1,3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333

About the 204BM - I just don't know. To me it seems like a 204B with speakers. But the 204B has 5ms response time, the 204BM 6ms, so they might use a different panel. Panel technology is the same:TN. (There are also displays with 4:3 ratio and a different panel technology, i.e.:
http://www.iiyama.com/ms_GL/Product/category/2/product/24
- PVA is generally slower than TN, but is said to have better image quality)

The 204B or BM is not really a successor to the 203B, it's more that Samsung wants to cover the whole market. The 203B is a 20" with 1400x1050 resolution, so its pixel size should be similar to a 19" display. The 204B/BM has a higher resolution (1600x1200) but the same physical size (20"). So pixels are smaller, which should result in a sharper image. But only in native resolution - you don't know how it behaves in lower resolutions. Should be sharper as well, but not for sure... The higher resolution has its price: you need better hardware to play your games (in native res) and for some people letters and numbers just might appear to small.
I don't know if you will really see the difference in response time, but of course - the faster, the better.... As I've said, to me the 203B is o.k.
I'm sorry that I can't give you a more profound advice, but I think the rest is up to you. If you have the option to buy a display and send it back in case you don't like it, just try!

Yeah, of course it is 4:3

This doesn't follow out of 4:3==1600:1200 as this would assume they have the same pixel ratio.

wd wrote:

Yeah, of course it is 4:3

This doesn't follow out of 4:3==1600:1200 as this would assume they have the same pixel ratio.

... I'm confused.. 🙄 What do you mean with pixel ratio in this particular case? TFT pixels should be squared (not like in the old days... the 320x200... 😉 )

So a 1600 to 1200 resolution is 4:3, isn't it?

He means what you think he means, and they are square, he just likes to be as precise as possible, and he's ancient, so he's got things like "320x200 pixels are not square" floating around in his head.
correct, wd?
at any rate, AFAIK, anything that reduces to 4/3 as a fraction, like 640/480, 800/600, and 1600/1200, are 4:3 square pixel resolutions, anything that reduces to 16/9 is a 16:9 square pixel resolution, AKA letterbox or widescreen, and anything else means non-square pixels or a non-standard display

TFT pixels should be squared

Some devices handle it different. That's why the original question was interesting
and would have deserved more than a rough hint at the calculator.

So a 1600 to 1200 resolution is 4:3, isn't it?

Some 16:9 (uh calculator damnit no 4:3) allow setting 1600:1200, what about those?

No idea what general_vagueness is talking about.

wd wrote:

Some devices handle it different. That's why the original question was interesting
and would have deserved more than a rough hint at the calculator.

Maybe you're right, but your post didn't help him either. Why don't you provide us with an example?

wd wrote:

Some 16:9 (uh calculator damnit no 4:3) allow setting 1600:1200, what about those?

I can only guess what you mean: Those widescreens should have a native pixel height of 1200. I just found models with 1920x1200, which should be 16:10 (uh, Silent used his evil calculator again!) i.e. this one:
http://www.iiyama.com/ms_GL/Product/category/ … uct/27#showtab2

According to the manual you can choose how the display handles lower resolutions (I allready mentioned such monitors, see above).
When you choose "aspect" (in this case you could also choose 1:1) the display simply does the same as when you choose "expand / scale but keep aspect ratio" with your nVidia drivers, but this time its done by hardware. So you might get a black column at each side, but the image is not interpolated.

The point is, that you never know how such a (huge) screen behaves with lower resolutions that it has to interpolate. Of course you could select the 1:1 option again, but a 800x600 resolution would give you a centered image of 21.6x16.2cm size (when we take the 0.27mm pixel pitch of the iiyma), 320x240 would be 8.64x6.48cm.

Retro games, I didn't want to be too rude. I just thought it would be that easy, and that you could find it out by yourself. Well it seems it isn't.
E.g. the US website of Samsung says that the 204B has a 5:4 aspect ratio. I don't know why, maybe that's just an error in the datasheet:
http://www.samsung.com/us/system/consumer/pro … B_DataSheet.pdf

I would guess the best way to find out if the display reflects the aspect ratio of its stated resolution (apart of asking the manufacturer directly) could be to look up the pixel pitch. If it is squared, I suppose the aspect ratio of the stated resolution should be the same like the one of the physical display.

Hope that helps and does not confuse you even more.

Special thanks go to my TI-30, nice to have you around again, old chap!