sardaukar wrote on 2025-04-12, 16:34:

I'm going with a Radeon 9200 myself

Are you going to play games? That should be good for games from 1991-1997, yes?

Of course I'll be playing games 😃 and yeah, I hope it's good for all games the CPU can handle

I'm using a Radeon 9200 SE, and of the games I've tried so far, pretty much everything's running fine except for Age of Empires. (I've not tried too many 3D accelerated games yet, but LEGO Island and LEGO Racers both work fine, as do a smattering of other D3D and OpenGL titles.)

Age of Empires is crashing after the intro videos with some serious graphics corruption at the menu. Interestingly, it does work if DirectDraw or GDI acceleration is disabled (either in dxdiag or the system properties) ­— at which point the game runs playably, though not brilliantly (and no 3D titles can be run at all without a reboot) — or by using the undocumented SYSTEM_MEMORY command-line argument for the game, which lets the game run, but with a huge amount of latency. This happens both with Age of Empires I & II, with and without their expansion packs. Other DirectDraw games seem fine.

My assumption had been that this was to do with the Catalyst drivers, but I've tried several different versions of them, as well as DirectX 7, 8.1, and 9.0c, with the same outcome. And it looks like this affects Voodoo cards, too, if Phil's video is anything to go by.

Now, my best guess is that there's an issue with having GDI access a video-memory Primary Surface: Age of Empires does this for font rendering, which other, working games use their own bitmap fonts. _Maybe_ the whole PCIe→PCI→AGP thing is confusing drivers or common GDI/DirectDraw code?

Has anyone else encountered this / managed to get Age of Empires working (ideally without totally disabling acceleration)?

I have the weirdest issue with my board - the keyboard's shift key doesn't work? So it's hard to type `c:` because all I get out of it is `c;`. The keyboard (USB) works fine on my PC, and I've tried a second one now too, same issue. I suppose it's an issue with the boot disks in the bios, but you can't edit the `autoexec.bat` file in them because it's restored to the bios embedded version on boot, so I have to somehow install DOS or Windows on my PC and transfer over the files to the microSD card I'm using.

Gotta be honest, for what it costs, this issue plus the fact the BIOS version is newer than the ones on the Github page (https://github.com/eivindbohler/itxllama-bios/releases), the gamepad issue and the fact I have to cut a trace on the PCB to get stereo output working is giving me a little bit of buyer's remorse.

OK, so my USB Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000 v1.0 and my Rapoo E2700 (https://www.techspot.com/products/keyboards/r … oo-e2700.90712/) don't work but my ZSA Moonlander (https://www.zsa.io/moonlander) DOES let me input `:` with shift.

Man, this really is a product for rich people 😁

sardaukar wrote on 2025-04-19, 13:21:

Man, this really is a product for rich people 😁

You're right. This is a project for people rich with a love for tinkering and nostalgia as well as a positive spirit of community and understanding. The DOS / Win9x era was a wild time full of tricks and experiments to find your desired experience. 🫡

I meant it as a joke, but it's funny the more recent (and complex) keeb worked but not a bog standard one from 20 years ago

Wrote a blog post about my impressions with the Llama https://blog.nootch.net/post/the-promise-of-a … new-vintage-pc/