With dual Pentium II ODs and 512mb RAM, XP would run pretty decent on that machine; it'd boot up a lot faster too but the main advantage would be that XP has the best support of the three operating systems. NT4 would be the worst choice as hardware management isn't as refined, you'll have a lot less hardware support and USB support isn't going to be as good.

Whichever OS you choose, your machine isn't going to be stellar for DOS. Run it with just one CPU, however, and you'll have a pretty fine machine for Windows 98SE. However, I'm pretty sure that machine will be able to handle DOS Box.

I'm not so sure if a dual POD-333 with 2k is the best system for retro gaming.
You seem to have gotten the RAM area covered though 😉
512MB should be more then enough 😉
Personally I'd prefer a Voodoo 2 with such a setup, Voodoo 1 seems a bit underpowered for such a rig.

voodoo 2's were king of the hill during the early p3 era. (450-600mhz 100fsb) Meaning if I want to pus a pair of voodoo 2's as much as possible, I'd want a 1 ghz processor. and I have a slot A for just such a beast.

All told, If I ever found an p65up8 board... http://www.motherboard.cz/mb/asus/P65UP8.htm I would be so happy...

Its a confusing time for 3d cards. voodoo 1 came out in late 96 and in 98 the v2 was out. pentiums were 93-97. The 1meg p-pro came out in 97.

As for making a dual cpu system... I just like them too much. I refuse to use one processor when 2 are available. (i.e super 7,slot a) I have my 386 for true dos games. and anything that NEEDS a 486 should run like a champ on a pentium. I have my voodoo5 in a dual socket a setup for the late glide games (Quake 3, deus ex, homeworld)

For a voodoo 2 rig I was "planning" on first finding a supermicro p6dgh http://www.erimez.com/misc/p6dgh.jpg slap a pair of 850mhz p3's in it and put SIX voodoo 2's in it for a triple monitor setup.

My problem with dual ppros is that such a box uses a ton of power and makes a lot of heat. We're talking 75-100w just for the CPUs. And when the end result is slow as molasses it's not very enticing anymore to me.

luckybob wrote:

voodoo 2's were king of the hill during the early p3 era. (450-600mhz 100fsb)

That can't be right...
When I bought my P2-350, TNT was brand new and themost modern graphics card on the block and Voodoo 2's were already being sold. This was when P2-450 was king of the hill and Katmai wasn't even released.

And I was kinda suggesting using just 1 Voodoo 2, not SLI 😉
For me Voodoo 1 just seems a bit underpowered for a P2 core running @ 333Mhz, but in the end it's your choice of course 😉

^ yeah as Tetrium said, Voodoo 2's were the must-have card around 98ish, I remember getting a Pentium 2 266 and lusting over one... by the time the Pentium 3 was out the Voodoo 3 and TNT2 were out...

using a single voodoo 2? BLASPHEMY!! I've seen benchmarks of quake 1,2 that basically tell the story that the p2-300 is underpowered and needs more "oomph". And the voodoo 3 was only as powerful as a pair of 2's. just in one neat package.

swaaye, I can quote you from other posts claiming that you would do a 1ghz chip with a pair of 2's Voodoo 2 SLI and CPU bottlenecks

My problem still is, should I use NT4 or 2000? and to a lesser extent, the overdrives vs the regular chips. In the 6 or so service packs for NT4 did they make directx viable for game that dont use glide? I'm still 50/50 split between the two. 2000 is going to be easier to setup and has incredible usb support compared to the NT4 but NT4 should be a lot more compatible with programs of the era. directx being my unknown.

What's wrong with W98SE? I thought this was the gaming OS of choice, until XP.

Sure a pair of V2s would be well utilized by a 1ghz CPU. A pair of PPros wouldn't come close to saturating a single V2 though.

I did have a dual PPro 1mb setup years ago. I had it loaded with 128mb edo and overclocked to 233. Win2k was very sluggish and really quite undesirable. It was hot. For games the second CPU is essentially useless. And 9x is definitely the best game OS for that kind of hardware and the games were designed for it.

I use my VS440FX with a single 1mb ppro when I'm feeling the socket 8 urge. 😉 I usually run a Voodoo3 for simplicity.

DOS based versions of Windows don't have multi processor support so one of his CPUs would be going to waste.

The general idea is the 2nd cpu will take care of overhead, background tasks, etc. while not 100% utilized, it will help to some extent, even more so if the ide raid card i have needs some cpu cycles.

Btw it's also fairly likely that 3dfx's NT5 drivers are considerably slower than their 9x code. This was a problem with early NV and ATI drivers too but they were of course improved over time. I'm not sure if 3dfx drivers or the third party releases are that good.

Maybe instead of 2k, you should use a tweaked XP? After all, there isn't really much reason to get 2k over XP these days. I wouldn't use NT4 for games, unless you have some very particular and special purpose for it.

@Maulwurf:9x is definitely the better gaming OS but he wants to use a dual CPU, and 9x will only ever see and use 1 CPU at all times 😉

Oh right, that makes sense!

I agree with others who recommend XP over 2k. The compatibility layer it has is your best bet.

There will be titles that just plain won't run on 2k, although judging from your other posts and the equipment I know you've already got, you could always play them on at least one more box (if not two more boxes 😀). The non titanium version of Mechwarror 2 Mercenaries comes to mind. It will not install no matter how hard you try, as soon as it sees anything NT kernel related it freaks out. Fallout 1 also comes to mind as it's 16 bit only (so out of the three OS'es being tossed around, only XP even has a chance of running it).

Until windows XP (and to a lesser extent 2k), game developers didn't put a lot of effort into ensuring compatibility with anything other than a Win9x platform as home users weren't using anything else, and how many people get to play games at work 😵.

Twin 333mhz cpu's should be more than enough for XP if you can keep the number of processes down, especially given the fact that one cpu could be completely saturated and it wouldn't matter as none of the games from that era were multi threaded.

Mechwarrior 2 Mercs and Fallout 1 work fine on Windows 2000.

The only 16bit ver of Fallout 1 is the DOS ver....and no one in there right mind would run that. Windows ver works fine.

Windows 2000 is just as compatible as Windows XP. See compatibility list in my signature.

DosFreak wrote:

Mechwarrior 2 Mercs and Fallout 1 work fine on Windows 2000.

The only 16bit ver of Fallout 1 is the DOS ver....and no one in there right mind would run that. Windows ver works fine.

Windows 2000 is just as compatible as Windows XP. See compatibility list in my signature.

*scratches head*

Then why did I suffer so trying to install Mercs on XP. I tracked down info too and still had trouble. Oh well, no matter.

I stand corrected. Win2k works fine.

You probably meant the Windows vers of Mercs.

You could try this: http://www.warp13.co.uk/mech2

But it's best to use the DOS version in DOSBox.