VOGONS


First post, by audiocrush

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Hello Forum,
I was just wondering (I know it was never meant to run like that), but is there a chance to tweak GTA I as well as Windows 95 a little to get it to run smooth(er) on my system, preferably in 3dfx mode?

I got the following config:
AMD 5x86 133MHz 256k L2 cache (I could upgrade to 512k if I can get hold of 4 128k cache chips, but I doubt that'll do enough of a difference?)
64MB of ram
S4 Virge DX with 4MB
Voodoo Dragon 2 with 12MB
OS installed on IDE (ISA Controller) HDD
Game installed on SCSI HDD on the PCI BUS
Soundblaster 16 Soundcard
Windows 95 C with Active Desktop turned off

Greetings
audiocrush

https://www.nerdsh.org/ - my blog, a bit neglected though
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChsU6woi3lhLhtT_ILbSCCw - Some videos of mine

Reply 1 of 8, by rmay635703

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Your near the bottom of the requirements

More Cache is only good for 1fps unless your board isn’t caching all your ram

There should be a voodoo version, but honestly no idea

Grand Theft Auto 1997 don't run in 3DFX mode in DOS

Reply 2 of 8, by creepingnet

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You'd be better off running the DOS version, I run it on my two main 486 DX4 systems with little to no problem....

NEC VERSA M/75 (laptop)
- i486 DX4-75Mhz
- 40MB RAM
- 80GB HDD
- C&T 65545 1MB SVGA
- Crystal CS-4231-KQ WSS compatible Chipset
- UniVBE Loaded
-FreeDOS 2.1

Creeping Net 486 DX4-100
- AMD Am486 Dx4-100
- 64MB of RAM
- ridiculous sized, very fast HDD
- S3 805 2MB VESA Local Bus graphics
- SoundBlaster AWE 64 (no wavetable)
- UniVBE Loaded
- FreeDOS 2.1 or MS-DOS (any version 5.00 and up)

I get full frame rate out of it at times on both. I also get full audio on the Versa with the WSS chipset after hacking in the WSS drivers from another game.

~The Creeping Network~
My Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/creepingnet
Creepingnet's World - https://creepingnet.neocities.org/
The Creeping Network Repo - https://www.geocities.ws/creepingnet2019/

Reply 3 of 8, by The Serpent Rider

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but is there a chance to tweak GTA I as well as Windows 95 a little to get it to run smooth(er)

Welcome to 486 overclocking club: Re: The World's Fastest 486

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 4 of 8, by audiocrush

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Hi @rmay635703
when I select 3dfx in the game menu to start the game, it of course runs in 3dfx mode.
What I noticed is that certain things in the game lag a bit, such as control input and for instance when I enter a car the door stays open for a second and then closes for example.
These lags and hangs are identical to when I start the game in non-3dfx-mode.
So I assume the limiting factor is either CPU, RAM, Cache, ISA/PCI Bus congestion or a mix of the 4.

@Creepingnet
Running on DOS is a good suggestion.
I just prepared the system with a Windows 95 IDE boot drive.
Over the course of the week I wanted to build a DOS IDE boot drive with SCSI drivers and then I might be able to run the game in DOS and see how it goes.
Do you by any chance know how to install the Voodoo 2 drivers in DOS so the game can take advantage of it?

*edit*
@Serpent Rider
That's pretty cool but not really my intention.
Since this hardware seems to become increasingly rare and expensive, I do not wish to fry (or risk to fry) the stuff I kind of inherited from my dad.
I mean I literally have a shoebox full of regular intel DX2 and DX4 CPUs but the AMD and Cyrix 5x86s I only have one each and I'm kind of attached to them as they run in my regular day to day use battlestation.
I'd more like to preserve it in a fully functional state.
But it is nice to see these things happening 25 years later 😁

https://www.nerdsh.org/ - my blog, a bit neglected though
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChsU6woi3lhLhtT_ILbSCCw - Some videos of mine

Reply 5 of 8, by leileilol

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audiocrush wrote on 2022-01-12, 08:48:

These lags and hangs are identical to when I start the game in non-3dfx-mode.
So I assume the limiting factor is either CPU, RAM, Cache, ISA/PCI Bus congestion or a mix of the 4.

Running SMARTDRV?

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 6 of 8, by audiocrush

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@leileileilol
would I need that?
my scsi hard drive is pretty damn fast

https://www.nerdsh.org/ - my blog, a bit neglected though
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChsU6woi3lhLhtT_ILbSCCw - Some videos of mine

Reply 7 of 8, by Gmlb256

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audiocrush wrote on 2022-01-12, 08:48:

Do you by any chance know how to install the Voodoo 2 drivers in DOS so the game can take advantage of it?

Just download a Voodoo2 Windows 9x driver and extract the GLIDE2X.OVL file that comes with it into the game directory. The environment variables used to configure the gamma and refresh rate in DOS are slightly different compared to Voodoo Graphics.

VIA C3 Nehemiah 1.2A @ 1.46 GHz | ASUS P2-99 | 256 MB PC133 SDRAM | GeForce3 Ti 200 64 MB | Voodoo2 12 MB | SBLive! | AWE64 | SBPro2 | GUS

Reply 8 of 8, by audiocrush

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Hi,

I seem to have a much bigger Problem with my setup.
The performance is really poor.
I ran a benchmark and the values are atrocious. img6338
It even got stuck at the hdd benchmark and I have no clue why that is.
Can anyone maybe make a guess what the cause of such poor performance might be?
I'm quite baffled...
(scsi hdd doesn't show up in dos because I didn't load a driver for it in dos yet)
Also I noticed that hdd sometimes takes quite long "thinking" pauses when I try to navigate through folders and also sometimes the soundblaster 16 stutters quite a bit during playback.
But scandisk for example runs fine....

*edit*
the IDE Harddrive indeed had bad sectors. The scandisk went fine before but the surface scan took ages and it had to "fix" a lot of problems.
I'm for now going to reinstall everything to the scsi disk and then I'll have a look on the benchmark again.

*edit2*
well I reinstalled everything on the scsi disk and now the benchmark looks a biiiit better. img6345
Unfortunately the cpu is still slower than I somehow expected and also the cache reads seem very bad to me.

*edit3*
success!
I altered a load of settings in the bios (first time after removing the IDE drive with bad sectors)
When I enabled these before while I had the IDE drive still in, the computer became unusably slow, but now only on scsi it gave a significant performance improvement img6350
The following changes were made in bios:
DRAM Refresh Mode: Normal -> hidden
DRAM Write Page Mode
DRAM Code Read Page Mode
CPU to DRAM Write Buffer
CPU To PCI write buffer
PCI to DRAM write buffer
PCI Memory burst write
all from disabled to enabled

DRAM Wair State and External cache wait state changed from 1 to 0

Cache is still set to write through cause I only got 256k for 64mb of memory so that wouldn't make much sense I guess

DMA line buffer mode and ISA master buffer mode changed from standard to enhanced

Now GTA 1997 runs smooth as a babys butt with glide mode on the voodoo 2 😀
I'm happy as I could ever be.
Even Hexen 2 runs now mostly "playable" on that machine. Waving between 7 and 28FPS

Hope this helps someone else 😀

@Mod
you can mark this thread as solved now 😀

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https://www.nerdsh.org/ - my blog, a bit neglected though
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChsU6woi3lhLhtT_ILbSCCw - Some videos of mine