500MHz celerons start to feel really obsolete by 2002 (*cough*Morrowind*cough*UT2003*cough*Warcraft III*cough*). You might squeeze in a little more with a Radeon7500 or a Geforce2 MX (fine for that 800x600 target) on texture compression and hardware T&L, but no miracles.

Within those terms, no need to worry about any games in the DOS era because any AGP card will support SVGA. Many first-generation AGP cards are the same as their PCI counterparts with a different connector: not using AGP features (not that any of the games you list need it; few, if any, games prior to 2002 took advantage of GPUs that used the AGP bus to its potential). I have a spare Voodoo Banshee that meets the criteria (with the bonus of supporting 3dfx Glide), but your TNT2 is technically more powerful so I wonder what games it is you are having issues with.

This has a pretty good table https://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html
Anything that isn't "Universal 1.5V AGP 3.0 Card" (better described as 1.5/0.8 ) should work, the next thing is where Win98 driver support ends
Support, seems it's good up to Geforce 6 (81.98 driver) in Nvidia (but the 6 series is very inconsistent on 3.3V capability) , while Detonator 45.23 drivers are better for for the 2/3/4 family
In AMD, seems that the 9000 series is the last with 98 support, and also the last to be mostly universal

BaronSFel001 wrote on 2025-08-29, 18:59:

Within those terms, no need to worry about any games in the DOS era because any AGP card will support SVGA. Many first-generation AGP cards are the same as their PCI counterparts with a different connector: not using AGP features (not that any of the games you list need it; few, if any, games prior to 2002 took advantage of GPUs that used the AGP bus to its potential). I have a spare Voodoo Banshee that meets the criteria (with the bonus of supporting 3dfx Glide), but your TNT2 is technically more powerful so I wonder what games it is you are having issues with.

I didn't even think of using a PCI video card, I assumed using the AGP would just be better overall. So maybe it's an option I should look into. Would love to have a Voodoo card so I can play some of those earlier glide games without having to use patches or fixes, but its hard to find a cheap one and I wouldn't expect you to sell it for less. I just got everything running so I haven't tried a lot yet, but for example, Age of Mythology runs pretty slowly. Kings Quest Mask of Eternity oddly runs kind of slow though that could be because I'm using Direct3d and not Glide. Homeworld seems to run fine, but the FPS feels off for some reason. Could just be me forgetting how frame rates from that era felt vs games now, or just the how the game runs, because it plays fine otherwise. Hexen II ran slow in 800x600, but when I turned it down to 640x480 it was fine then. I do realize there is a limit to what I'll be able to run so if Age of Mythology, for example, will never run well for me that's okay.

leileilol wrote on 2025-08-29, 18:49:

500MHz celerons start to feel really obsolete by 2002 (*cough*Morrowind*cough*UT2003*cough*Warcraft III*cough*). You might squeeze in a little more with a Radeon7500 or a Geforce2 MX (fine for that 800x600 target) on texture compression and hardware T&L, but no miracles.

Thanks, I'll look those up on Ebay.

Matth79 wrote on 2025-08-29, 19:14:

This has a pretty good table https://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html
Anything that isn't "Universal 1.5V AGP 3.0 Card" (better described as 1.5/0.😎 should work, the next thing is where Win98 driver support ends

Thank you for the information.

It seems that Asus MEB-VM does not support Pentium processors, so you will be disappointed with the performance of some games.

You need at least Celeron Mendocino at 550Mhz (100mhz bus) for anything after 2000. Grab a few 366 and OC to 550. As for GPU I would use GeForce 4 MX 400.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-08-30, 13:38:

You need at least Celeron Mendocino at 550Mhz (100mhz bus) for anything after 2000. Grab a few 366 and OC to 550. As for GPU I would use GeForce 4 MX 400.

I happen to have a 366 Mendocino CPU so I'll give that a shot and thank you for the recommendation.

Without voltage settings you will need a few 366 Celerons. When I tested them, 2 out of 3 worked at 550 without voltage bump in DOS (benchmarks, games). They should be cheap to buy as nobody wants them.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-08-30, 17:08:

Without voltage settings you will need a few 366 Celerons. When I tested them, 2 out of 3 worked at 550 without voltage bump in DOS (benchmarks, games). They should be cheap to buy as nobody wants them.

I might be out of luck because my bios doesn't have an option to change the multiplier and the pins to change multiplier and frequency were taken off the motherboard by HP (I imagine).

Isstanar wrote on 2025-08-30, 17:50:

AlexZ wrote on 2025-08-30, 17:08:

Without voltage settings you will need a few 366 Celerons. When I tested them, 2 out of 3 worked at 550 without voltage bump in DOS (benchmarks, games). They should be cheap to buy as nobody wants them.

I might be out of luck because my bios doesn't have an option to change the multiplier and the pins to change multiplier and frequency were taken off the motherboard by HP (I imagine).

This overclocking is performed by changing the bus speed from 66.6 MHz to 100 MHz.

Does that board support Coppermine celerons? If so, grab a Celeron 533a, and it should run at 800mhz on a 100mhz bus without a sweat.

For cheap universal AGP cards, a GeForce 2mx or 4mx is a good fit for that CPU and resolution.

pixel_workbench wrote on 2025-08-30, 21:00:

Grab a Celeron 533a, and it should run at 800mhz on a 100mhz bus without a sweat.

I have not seen Celeron 533a, but it exist for sure, most of the time slowest Celeron that i see is Celeron 566.

Unless there is something I'm missing I don't think I can overclock my motherboard or change the bus speed. The jumpers to do that were removed on my revision plus the bios has no options at all to adjust voltage or bus speed.

I made sure I have the latest BIOS (1.11) which mentions in an earlier version this:
6. Added CPU strings to support the newly christened Intel Pentium III
CPU (formerly Katmai and Tanner).

When I put in the 733MHZ Coppermine Pentium III I have I wasn't getting any video.

Here's a picture of my exact board:

As far as CPU support it looks like only Celerons will work.
https://www.asus.com/us/supportonly/meb-vm/helpdesk_cpu/

Thanks for the tips though, it looks like a geforce4 MX400 would be a good choice.

Most likely VRM does not support voltages lower than 1.8v. You can still use Coppermine but need to modify VID pins so it supplies 1.8v.

That board has up to 133Mhz FSB printed on it. What other CPUs was it meant to support if not Pentium III Coppermine? Try Coppermine Celeron and if it works then get a Pentium III Coppermine with 100Mhz bus. Also reset CMOS with PSU being disconnected and battery removed.

AlexZ wrote on Yesterday, 21:43:

That board has up to 133Mhz FSB printed on it. What other CPUs was it meant to support if not Pentium III Coppermine? Try Coppermine Celeron and if it works then get a Pentium III Coppermine with 100Mhz bus. Also reset CMOS with PSU being disconnected and battery removed.

It does, but the problem I've learned about recently is that the chip packaging for my motherboard is PPGA and the Coppermine CPUs seem to be mostly FC-PGA. I did search for the coppermine celerons and it looks like the 800mhz Celeron is the slowest chip that supports a 100mhz bus, but the multiplier for that was 8x and the highest my board lists is 5.5x. I'm not an expert, but it seems like I'll have to find a better micro ATX board if I want better performance. Thank you though I'm enjoying researching for this project of mine.

There exists a Coppermine Celeron that is PPGA compatible. I think it is early revision of 566 (probably SL3**). It would work in PPGA only motherboards. It should be very cheap as it's the slowest Coppermine Celeron and few people know that it is PPGA compatible. See Re: Celeron, the good bad and ugly.

I had Coppermine Celeron 566 SL4PC but don't remember if it worked in PPGA socket.

It seems you need SL3W7 or SL46T. See Related S-Spec numbers in https://www.cpu-world.com/sspec/SL/SL4PC.html

Having owned and modded the HP version of this motherboard, I can tell you that if you solder in the jumper block pins where Asus omitted them for HP, and flash the Asus BIOS (using an external burner), then this board will behave just like a regular Asus board with jumper based overclocking. I found a very late production Mendocino Celeron 366 on ebay and ran it at 103MHz FSB as I recall (I don't own this motherboard anymore) for a CPU speed of 566MHz. Using a single 256MB PC100 CL2 DIMM, a Geforce 4 MX440 64MB 128-bit bus card in there and an ISA SoundBlaster AWE64, the system ran quite a few things well including the original Max Payne! It pretty much chewed through late DOS games effortlessly.

I would suggest attaching a heatsink to the northbridge chip if you end up at 100MHz FSB or better! I'm also pretty sure only Mendocino Celerons will work on this board as I recall. I think I tried a Coppermine with both the HP BIOS and the ASUS BIOS and there was no POST. These boards also have all Japanese capacitors so even with all original capacitors board should still run stable. I never recapped mine when I had it five+ years ago.

386DX40 wrote on Today, 14:49:

Having owned and modded the HP version of this motherboard, I can tell you that if you solder in the jumper block pins where Asus omitted them for HP, and flash the Asus BIOS (using an external burner), then this board will behave just like a regular Asus board with jumper based overclocking. I found a very late production Mendocino Celeron 366 on ebay and ran it at 103MHz FSB as I recall (I don't own this motherboard anymore) for a CPU speed of 566MHz. Using a single 256MB PC100 CL2 DIMM, a Geforce 4 MX440 64MB 128-bit bus card in there and an ISA SoundBlaster AWE64, the system ran quite a few things well including the original Max Payne! It pretty much chewed through late DOS games effortlessly.

I would suggest attaching a heatsink to the northbridge chip if you end up at 100MHz FSB or better! I'm also pretty sure only Mendocino Celerons will work on this board as I recall. I think I tried a Coppermine with both the HP BIOS and the ASUS BIOS and there was no POST. These boards also have all Japanese capacitors so even with all original capacitors board should still run stable. I never recapped mine when I had it five+ years ago.

I like what you are thinking, but I tried soldering in the past and I just never got good at it. For me, it would be better to find a slightly newer micro ATX board with Pentium III Coppermine support. Might just have to get a bigger ATX case and board though, being on microATX is limiting.