VOGONS

PCI + PCIe GPUs on same computer for retro gaming?

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First post, by Hamby

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I just discovered that you can, in fact, use a PCIe video card and a PCI video card in the same computer; the question seems to be driver support.

My question is, could it be used for emulation, or dual-booting?

For example, sticking a PCI voodoo or an nvidia fx5500 (I say this because I have one in PCI ) in a system that already has an Nvidia RTX card such as the 2060; could you use either use the legacy card with 86box or dosbox or virtualbox for emulation, and would it improve compatibility / performance? Or would it be possible to dual boot a current Linux distro with DOS or a vintage Linux distro, or Win10 with win98 or DOS?

I suppose it would take custom drivers to run modern / legacy OSes concurrently using the two GPUs...

Reply 1 of 1, by tauro

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You could use PCI passthrough with the old PCI card and run DOS/Win9x on a virtual machine. I'd use kvm/qemu, but I read that apparently 86Box supports it too!
Sounds like a nice challenge...

86Box can already emulate a Voodoo 1 or 2, but it's not as exciting...

You could also run Win9x natively on the machine, provided you apply the right patches.
But I'm not sure how you would select the legacy PCI card as the primary video card. Maybe there's a BIOS option?

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