Okay, the Rialto stuff is taking more and more shape.

I was able today to take the bare PCIe BIOS and put the rialto config block + data into it, no other motifications. The card boots, comes up as the X700SE it was flashed with and even reports a VIVO card (though the Rage Theater is not present).
This is just awesome. The config blocks from my HD3450 and X1950GT work on the X700 as well.

So I'm pretty certain now about Rialto being pretty universal.

So today I started going further and started to rip apart the sacrificial HD3450 AGP. Goal is to remove the GPU and memory and maintain the Rialto on it. Record behavior. Then I'll add a PCIe slot and put an HD3450 PCIe into it..

Long way to go, but I'm very excited..

I can see the rialto chip alone enumerating in windows without the GPU - so the bridge is alive and well. Tomorrow there will be some annoying handwiring.

To be honest it took me more than today, but it's done. Modded the FIC 386-VC-H bios by integrating an XTIDE inside it, so bigger than 504MB drives can be used and a working shadowing can be leveraged. Found a chunk of 3 consecutive 2KB blocks that hosted the 6KB XTIDE custom build. Linked the address in place of the E000h window in bios.

Even went to the extend to match the Award bios color scheme.

And the cherry on top, a working 8.4G drive that will be the storage for the build.

Trying to get a Samsung SD-606F drive working. Opened it up, cleaned lens and regreased with lithium. Still not working. Trying to get a low noise ide drive for dos as a spare

More Rialto.. but gotta wait with testing till monday..

Faceplate swapped an AT AMD K6-2 machine. Now to get it to overclock past 400MHz.

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-09-19, 02:29:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2026-09-18, 17:16:

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-09-14, 13:47:

Even AWE32/AWE64 cards seem horrendously expensive. I'm not sure I'll even be able to get one.

AWE cards are, IMO, comically overrated. The native AWE64 MIDI mode doesn't really sound that good, and the full length AWE32s are comically unreliable.

Get any random SB Pro clone that has a waveblaster header, and a real OPL synth and then get a cheap general MIDI module (LittleDreamer by TexElec for US or Dreamblaster S2 by Serdaco for EU region).

Would there be a list of SB Pro clones somewhere?

Clone wasn't really the right word here, I meant SB Pro compatible with true OPL3 onboard.

The Yamaha Audician 32 (and the Labway board thats basically the exact same design) are extremely common and well regarded, thats what I have in my Windows 98 PC actually.

Running SPECViewPerf 6.1.2 on a Pentium 133 running Windows 95 as part of my massive benchmarking project.

It's been running for more than 3 hours, so far.

edit: 14 hours and still going...

edit: completed after 18 hours:

AWadvs-04: 0.6801
DRV-07: [fail]
DX-06: 0.2577
Light-04: 0.1284
MedCAD-01: 0.3345
ProCDRS-03: 0.1380

Currently working at Ultima VI Web Companion and updated realtime map - then, maybe an adaption for U6-engine spinoff games Worlds of Ultima.

Brawndo wrote on 2026-09-11, 23:17:

zuldan wrote on 2026-09-10, 04:44:

Brawndo wrote on 2026-09-10, 04:18:

I have a Google sheet I created to keep track of my inventory of PCs, the components in them, and the myriad of parts I have acquired waiting for a purpose. I spent some tonight and the past few days going through my boxes of video and sound cards to add them to the list. Still have a lot to go.

Have you got a list of your fully built machines with specs available for viewing? 😀

I actually do have tabs for that, but they're not finished yet. That's part of the inventory I need to finish, and how I plan to keep track of what components are in what PC.

I would love to see the list when it's finished 😀

Welp, I finally got home after a trip to a brand new Sapphire HD 3650 AGP 128bit version waiting for me. After getting terrible performance in doom 3 (like 12 FPS at default settings in the first room) I went on a grand adventure messing with settings, drivers, ect, finding out my AGP bus was only running at 1x (riva tuner can get it up to 4x thankfully) but that still only got me up to 18 fps in the first scene. It shoots up to 40+ if I look away away from the space ship, but it starts to chug again on any complicated scene. This was still way below what I had expected and nothing really seemed to improve the situation.

Well, somehow I had punked myself into believing that Athlon XP was 2000-2003, when it was infact 1999. I'm for sure just CPU bound and nothing I do with the gpu is going to help the situation much. Aside from feeling very stupid, I'm going to have to choose between spending half the amount to get an athlon 2400 that actually works, or just gun for an Athlon 64 setup. I might even be able to jump to PCI-E if the local tech recyclers still has the HD 2900 they've had for a while and I don't choose to re-use the agp HD 3650 I have atm. Either way this Athlon 1800+ isn't going to cut it.

You could call me a complete masochist, but I decided to install Windows Vista SP2 on my 1 GHz Pentium 3 (Coppermine) with my Radeon 9600 TX (a factory overclocked 9500 Pro with only 128MB of VRAM). In a word, it's kind of slow.

The other day I reread PC Magazine's full review of Windows Vista in early 2007, and I recalled that I tried to run a beta of the OS in mid-2006 on my then computer: a Tualatin Celeron 1.3 GHz with a Radeon 7500. I recall feeling quite disappointed at the time that I couldn't get Aero Glass effects on my Radeon 7500 because Aero required a DX9 compatible card. I ultimately never upgraded to Windows Vista despite building a fully capable computer just after Vista's initial retail release. I was so put off from the beta and negative word-of-mouth that I waited until Windows 7 to upgrade from Windows XP.

So, I wondered what I would have thought of Vista if I had a proper DX9 card back in the day. This computer should meet the minimum specs for Aero and general Vista compatibility (barely). I can report that the Radeon 9600 TX does indeed support Aero Glass effects. Still, this computer only has an "Experience Rating" of 1.0. I wouldn't recommend running Vista on a computer like this. This build is much better suited for Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP.

Cyfrifiadur wrote on 2026-09-24, 23:55:

Running SPECViewPerf 6.1.2 on a Pentium 133 running Windows 95 as part of my massive benchmarking project. […]
Show full quote

Running SPECViewPerf 6.1.2 on a Pentium 133 running Windows 95 as part of my massive benchmarking project.

It's been running for more than 3 hours, so far.

edit: 14 hours and still going...

edit: completed after 18 hours:

AWadvs-04: 0.6801
DRV-07: [fail]
DX-06: 0.2577
Light-04: 0.1284
MedCAD-01: 0.3345
ProCDRS-03: 0.1380

Setup looks amazing with that crt and speakers.

Alesia wrote on Today, 08:23:

Welp, I finally got home after a trip to a brand new Sapphire HD 3650 AGP 128bit version waiting for me. After getting terrible performance in doom 3 (like 12 FPS at default settings in the first room) I went on a grand adventure messing with settings, drivers, ect, finding out my AGP bus was only running at 1x (riva tuner can get it up to 4x thankfully) but that still only got me up to 18 fps in the first scene. It shoots up to 40+ if I look away away from the space ship, but it starts to chug again on any complicated scene. This was still way below what I had expected and nothing really seemed to improve the situation.

Well, somehow I had punked myself into believing that Athlon XP was 2000-2003, when it was infact 1999. I'm for sure just CPU bound and nothing I do with the gpu is going to help the situation much. Aside from feeling very stupid, I'm going to have to choose between spending half the amount to get an athlon 2400 that actually works, or just gun for an Athlon 64 setup. I might even be able to jump to PCI-E if the local tech recyclers still has the HD 2900 they've had for a while and I don't choose to re-use the agp HD 3650 I have atm. Either way this Athlon 1800+ isn't going to cut it.

I can reply with my experiences with HD3650, Back in the day, I purchased 3 of these, two PCIe and AGP. To be realistic, these are really low end and cannot handle that well, even it is touted as mid range. Best to pick up something better like real mid range or high end video card.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on Today, 21:06:

Alesia wrote on Today, 08:23:

Welp, I finally got home after a trip to a brand new Sapphire HD 3650 AGP 128bit version waiting for me. After getting terrible performance in doom 3 (like 12 FPS at default settings in the first room) I went on a grand adventure messing with settings, drivers, ect, finding out my AGP bus was only running at 1x (riva tuner can get it up to 4x thankfully) but that still only got me up to 18 fps in the first scene. It shoots up to 40+ if I look away away from the space ship, but it starts to chug again on any complicated scene. This was still way below what I had expected and nothing really seemed to improve the situation.

Well, somehow I had punked myself into believing that Athlon XP was 2000-2003, when it was infact 1999. I'm for sure just CPU bound and nothing I do with the gpu is going to help the situation much. Aside from feeling very stupid, I'm going to have to choose between spending half the amount to get an athlon 2400 that actually works, or just gun for an Athlon 64 setup. I might even be able to jump to PCI-E if the local tech recyclers still has the HD 2900 they've had for a while and I don't choose to re-use the agp HD 3650 I have atm. Either way this Athlon 1800+ isn't going to cut it.

I can reply with my experiences with HD3650, Back in the day, I purchased 3 of these, two PCIe and AGP. To be realistic, these are really low end and cannot handle that well, even it is touted as mid range. Best to pick up something better like real mid range or high end video card.

Cheers,

Agreed.

I tested HL2 performance in XP with some of my cards and the 7950gt demolished an HD6670 and a GT240, as soon as you moved around the frame rate would tank. The only spec the cards were lacking in was ROPs, now that's what I use to define performance characteristics. Weirdly I was only testing up to 1280x1024 so it shouldn't really have made that much of a difference.

pentiumspeed wrote on Today, 21:06:

Alesia wrote on Today, 08:23:

Welp, I finally got home after a trip to a brand new Sapphire HD 3650 AGP 128bit version waiting for me. After getting terrible performance in doom 3 (like 12 FPS at default settings in the first room) I went on a grand adventure messing with settings, drivers, ect, finding out my AGP bus was only running at 1x (riva tuner can get it up to 4x thankfully) but that still only got me up to 18 fps in the first scene. It shoots up to 40+ if I look away away from the space ship, but it starts to chug again on any complicated scene. This was still way below what I had expected and nothing really seemed to improve the situation.

Well, somehow I had punked myself into believing that Athlon XP was 2000-2003, when it was infact 1999. I'm for sure just CPU bound and nothing I do with the gpu is going to help the situation much. Aside from feeling very stupid, I'm going to have to choose between spending half the amount to get an athlon 2400 that actually works, or just gun for an Athlon 64 setup. I might even be able to jump to PCI-E if the local tech recyclers still has the HD 2900 they've had for a while and I don't choose to re-use the agp HD 3650 I have atm. Either way this Athlon 1800+ isn't going to cut it.

I can reply with my experiences with HD3650, Back in the day, I purchased 3 of these, two PCIe and AGP. To be realistic, these are really low end and cannot handle that well, even it is touted as mid range. Best to pick up something better like real mid range or high end video card.

Cheers,

It's not top of the line for sure, but there is performance being left on the table in my case due to the CPU situation. Looking at the old benchmarks, the HD 3650 should be able to push 50-80 FPS depending on the resolution (I found examples for 1600x1200 and 1240x1024 in doom 3) but those benchmarks are using Core2duos, Phenoms, ect. So if I solve the CPU issue, then I should get more out of the card. That's more then enough performance for the 2000-2005 gaming range I'm looking at. Realistically I'll probably end up with an AM2 system with a PCI-E GPU simply due to cost and steering away from the cap plague issues the socket 939 boards have. I can just swap in an older PCI-E GPU and a lower end Athlon 64/64x2 cpu to get the performance down a bit and not stepping on the toes of my Phenom II x2 550 + 9600GT system. My partner has a Pentium 4 system with an AGP slot that could use with a backup HD 3650 anyways, just in case the 9700 pro (want to take this gpu out of service for obvious reasons) or Geforce 8600 for it die.