VOGONS


First post, by Flock

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Hello everyone,

I want to build up an Retro PC with Win 98SE this winter. But I need help, late 90s wastn my time with PCs, was to young, only played games by older friends and family.
I would like playing games from the late 90s, early 2000s. Also using 3dfx features, this would be the most expensive part.
Games, I would like to play:
-Hugo the troll series
-NFS 2, 3, 4, Porsche
- Highway Racer series (german Autobahn Raser)
- Hard Truck 2
- 18 Wheels of Steel series
- Test Drive 5
- Sega Rally Championship
- Network Q/ International Rally Championship (1996 DOS/1997 Win)
- V Rally 2

My idea about the hardware:

-As a basic I would buy an ASUS A7S333, seems a solid board, many NOS. AMD 462 socket.
-CPU is a big question, many Ahlton Xps 2200+ and 2400+ on ebay. Slowers model are rare and expensive. Slowest I found for cheap, was XP1600+ and Duron 600/700.
-256MB DDR RAM
-IDE HDD <80GB
-CD/ Floppy Drive
-separate soundcard (creative, TerraTec?)
- GPU is a big question, only 3dfx Voodoo3 2000/3000. Seems the best Glide support over all. I knew nearly nothing about the 3dfx`s :I
ATI/Nvidia + 3dfx?
I found informations that the Mainbiard doesnt like graphic cards with DDR Ram.
PSU ATX 1.x 200Watts+

Any suggestion, improvings?

grettings

Reply 1 of 6, by chinny22

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Quick look at the list and one of the most demanding is V Rally 2 with system requirements of a PII 300
With that and not seeing any games that have speed issues I see no reason to waste money on slower CPU's, much better getting a faster CPU your budget allows.

GPU is tricky. for Glide a 3Dfx card is best but this will hurt D3D games.
If possible if you can pair a PCI 3DFX card with a AGP card from ATI or Nvidia which will look after the D3D games.
Either Voodoo 1 or 2 which need pairing with another graphics card anyway.
Or a Voodoo 3 PCI as a second card. bit messy as you need a second screen or manually switch your screens input from either card.
The other common option is as long as you have a fast CPU and Video card you can get away with a software solution like nglide.

Sound I would recommend either a SB Live!, Audigy 1, Audigy 2 as this gives you EAX which most games will support.
Or bit more rare/expensive Aureal Vortex 2 which will give you A3D 2.0 the other widely supported sound API of the era.

Reply 2 of 6, by dionb

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Definitely don't go for a slower CPU - these are AthlonXP CPUs, they can be multiplier unlocked and/or manually changed (with a pencil 😉 ) to clock down to whatever you want, minimum multiplier is 5x; if you also lower FSB you can hit 500MHz. A slower CPU will only limit the max speed, it won't change the bottom end.

I found informations that the Mainbiard doesnt like graphic cards with DDR Ram.

That doesn't make sense, as the interface between RAM on the video card and GPU has nothing to do with the motherboard. Most likely someone had an issue with a specific card that happened to have DDR-SDRAM on it then they (or you?) incorrectly generalized that to all cards with DDR. When you refer to this kind of info, please give a link. The board has a universal AGP 4x slot that should be able to work with all AGP cards; if it has an issue it will probably be related to power delivery (i.e. being limited in how much current it can supply at a given voltage).

However given the games you want to run it's not too relevant.They are late 1990s games. The cheapest option would be a simple GeForce2MX as that would give you D3D and OpenGL and performance would be way better than anything period-correct. If you have money to splurge, by all means go for a Voodoo. I second the point that a Voodoo 1 or 2 would be best as these games are older than V3 and compatibility. That also allows you to choose a primary card with a different API if one of your games has specific support for it (S3TC / MeTaL on S3 Savage cards for example, or EMBM on Matrox G4xx)

Reply 3 of 6, by uniQ

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If you're planning to build a Socket A system with an AthlonXP, I’d recommend going with a GeForce 4 Ti,
since older graphics cards tend to bottleneck the CPU unnecessarily.
The Ti 4200 models are fairly easy to find on eBay and usually not too expensive.

For the 3Dfx part, I’d suggest adding a Voodoo 2 with 12MB of memory for high compatibility.
You could even consider adding a second 12MB Voodoo 2 in the future for SLI.
That would essentially bring you up to the performance level of a Voodoo 3. 😀

As for the sound card, I’d go with either a Sound Blaster Live 5.1 or a Sound Blaster Audigy.

My Retro Systems

Reply 5 of 6, by Flock

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@ dionb
Yes maybe it doenst make sense, but in the end it more about the user experiences. Sorry I didtn safed the post from the german forum.
I could also tell my odyssee with a Gigabyte GA-8I945P Dual Graphic-R. When the ITE ITIT8212F chipset is active, its needed for the primary IDE channel or SATA, in comibation with most of my graphic card (NV 6200 turbo, 6610XL, 7600GT changed the FSB to opping 294MHZ, 7950GT, ATI x740XL, ATI x1950pro, Only a ATI X1900XT is allowing OC) there is no overclocking of the CPU possible. Also the Intel 945P chipset is doing some wierd stuff.
Its seem the 945P chipset doesnt lik some FSB and Ram ratio speed settings. I had also a similiar problem with it.
Review of an ASUS Board with 945P.
https://www.au-ja.de/review-socket775-12.phtml

My idea was also a Nvidia Geforce 2 MX400, got one at the weekend f0r 5€
The Ti4 series is quit expensive here in germany for such an old card, many available. Then I would go for a Voodoo2.
By this game tests
https://www.voodooalert.de/board/forum/index. … r-glide-spiele/
it should be a good allround choice.

Yes I knew nglide is also a solution, but as of the moment I wanst able to get it runing with NFS 3 and Win XP Core 2 Duo and NV9600GT, I didnt knew what I had done wrong. So I wanted a native support of Glide, the real experience from the past.