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A perfect place for the retro pc gamers and retro hardware nuts!

I had a very similar system back in 98, PII 400 with a matrox g200 + Voodoo1
But i had an awe64 instead of the SB PCI.

What kind of games do you plan to play on this machine?

Filosofia wrote:

Just back from a nostalgic driven trip to my parents house and with me the very first PC I built when I was 16yo back in 1998, ( […]
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Just back from a nostalgic driven trip to my parents house and with me the very first PC I built when I was 16yo back in 1998, (wow I now have double that age 😅 , oh well ). I know the specs from memory, as I spent about 3 months researching, going to PC stores asking newbie questions and reading PC magazines until dawn. Don't even have to open the beige ATX case: (With dubious branded 250W PSU), but overall I'm pretty proud of my 16yo me!

DFI P2XBL (note to self: open the case to see revision 😒 )
Pentium II 350MHz
64MB SRDRAM PC100
Matrox Millenium G200 8MB AGP with 15'' CRT Sony
Soundblaster PCI 64V with TEAC PowerMax 240/2
Quantum Fireball 6,4GB 5400rpm UDMA33

Could not find my PS/1 😳 wich I managed to have as my only PC from 1992 (I was eleven years old I think) until 1998, a 25MHz 386 with 2MB RAM and 1MB video, 40MB HDD and a floppy and PC speaker.

However there was a stranger in the attic, an AT case marked "Pentium inside" (no mmx) with a x12 CD-ROM. I brought it too as a vendeta for not being able to find my very first PC (if you don't count ZX Spectrum 48k prior to teenager).

And for now that is it, just new to retro gaming. BTW found out about about this awesome forum watching one of LGR videos.

Bela máquina! Tive umas parecidas.
I had a PII 300 with 64MB RAM, Riva 128, Voodoo1 and SB32 from 97 to 98. Later I got a PII450 with 128MB RAM, Riva TNT, 2xVoodoo2 and SBLive until 2001.

@MaxWar

Thanks 😀
I've allready been surfing the PII underclocking posts, sound cards recomendation posts and graphic cards compatibility posts and was counting on playing , say, like close to two hundred games from the very late 80's to the late 90's , even some of the new millenium... the same ones I played on my vanished 386, plus the ones I missed for loosing the pentium craze, and plus the ones I played on the PII until the Deschutes 350 can't handle it no more!

A few come to mind like Wolfenstein 3D , sharewared the year I got my 386 iirc, Prince of Persia, Sim City, Stunts, California Games, Commander Keen, Doom, Dynablaster, Titus the Fox, GTA, Outrun, Lotus Ultimate Chalenge, Cisco Heat, Dune, Comand and Conquer, Scorched Earth, Lemmings, Cannon Foder, Duke Nukem, Worms, Wings of Fury, First Samurai, Body Blows, , Tomb Raider, Rise of the Triad,but also Quake, Unreal, Colin McRae , Pod, Revolt, Thief, even try Deux Ex.

Was on a budget, so no 400MHz (this was 1998!, it's like an i7 today), and no Voodoo2, and hence too the PCI Soundblaster 64 Value, etc...
One thing I'm still very happy with is the G200 Trinitron combo, and the TEAC speakers, never regreted it.

Will definitly also emulate some 8 bit and 16 bit consoles.

@filipetolhuizen

Obrigado! O meu Pentium II estendeu-se bem pelo milénio mas acabou por desistir (DVD decoding, mp3 riping, USB 2.0, discos rígidos de 80GB , Windows XP, etc foi demais para ele 🙁 ). Nice to see a fellow portuguese speaker. Aquele abraço 😀

If you want to do both Older DOS games and late 90's Windows 9x 3d accelerated games on the same machine, I would recommend a Good ISA sound card and a Voodoo 1 or 2 accelerator. The Matrox G200 is a good 2d card.

A SB PCI is a good sound card for the Win9x era, not so for the old Dos era. Compatibility and stability problems are to be expected with it, as well as sub par FM emulation.

Back in the days i had an AWE64 and it turns out to be a nice middle ground card. Has good windows and dos compatibility, great sound output quality, a very decent onboard wavetable, MPU-401 support without the dreaded Hanging notes bug (not sure if this apply to both regular and gold version). It is quite good compatibility wise for DOS games.
Where i (personally) think it falls short is with FM (Adlib) sound.

Its got a high and dry aliased sound to it. Its not too terrible, but when you compare it with a good quality OPL3 or OPL2 based sound card, you go OMG.

Many here actually choose to have more that one retro computer :p

Usually at least one for the Older dos stuff and one for the Late dos stuff and 90s windows stuff. You can make do with a single machine but there will be trade offs 😜

I guess you could make a decent two machine setup using that other mysterious Pentium machine for older dos games 😁
Its still gonna be too fast sometimes but you can use tricks such as disabling external cache and (if it has it ) Turbo switch.

One great thing about the hardware part of retrogaming , I'm starting to realize , is you can upgrade the heck of your PC for allmost no money at all, and sometimes for free too. My plan is to start with the original configuration, and as things go along, upgrading as necessary, or downgrading... I have some spare parts, mainly from old PC people throw away, so its going to be fun! I actualy was more curious of the other passenger and left my PII rig uninstalled and went investigating...

About the pentium, it has only 32MB RAM and 133MHz, the bios is from 1996. Has no turbo button , and besides the "pentium inside" sticker it has another one stating "made for win95" or something like that. The monitor is a 14" CRT SyncMaster 3ne with a accentuated curved glass, the mouse has a serial connection and the keyboard is a Cherry with AT connection and the "windows keys". The case is small, only two external CD-ROM bays and one for the floppy. The Mitsai CD-ROM makes a very distinct noise when opening or closing the tray. The sound card is a very large soundblaster ISA and the graphic card is a PCI Trio64. The hard drive states 2GB I think (tried to read without removing) the Mboard reads P/I-P55T2P4 and the four memory slots are full. It has no SDRAM slots and no AGP slot.
And in deed has win95 installed.

It is very cute, but I think I prefer to have one PC that I can rely on to do it all! So my attention is going to the ATX area...i think?

I had similar Pentiums as well (along with the same Syncmaster 3ne). A P100 in 1995 and a P200 in 1996. Great machines back in the ol' days. The P200 is with my aunt and still lives, except for the HD that cannot boot, probably due to the time it spent idle and won't spin anymore. Right now I'm about to fiddle with a P3, but its mobo doesn't seem to like the VGA I'm trying (a Geforce 2MX). The one that was on it is terrible for gaming (a Diamond Speedstar A90) and doesn't have TV out. I'm also trying to get a Radeon 9200 to work on my Mac without much success. Please post some screenshots of your retro rigs if you can. Bom divertimento com as máquinas!

Filosofia wrote:

One great thing about the hardware part of retrogaming , I'm starting to realize , is you can upgrade the heck of your PC for allmost no money at all, and sometimes for free too.

This is at least Partly true, you can often max out early ATX systems fairly easily but there are some items that are getting more and more valuable, such as the 3dfx cards.

When it comes to the AT days of lore, the hardware is starting to get somewhat rare now. You can still find this stuff for cheap and free if you search a bit around but when you want to get that "specific" piece of hardware, you may end up needing to wait a while and pay quite a bit for it. For exemple, try to find an original pro audio spectrum sound card, good luck! 🤣

This being said, most of the time this is a hobby that you can enjoy without being forced to drain your wallet. Most of the time. :p

Imagine a country with the same population as NY City, but a hundred times bigger. A country that was under strict dictatorship right into the mid 70's. Here in Portugal things tend to have a slow pace. Nonetheless it's true that very recently, interest in old hardware is picking up the pace (and price), but still its relatively easy to find people that are "just selling an old computer" not a vintage one 😉 and some just dump entire systems.

For the past 10 years I've been casually collecting some hardware, mainly because I wanted to try them out, out of academic curiosity, and because it was for free or next to nothing. And now that I do have a purpose to it I'm really glad I didn't throw away some of the stuff I thought I didn't have any use for, except for learning about hardware.

For instance the PCI Yamaha sound card was just another one to me, with no particular interest, but now it is already in my PII as is supposed to be a very decent retrogamming card for what I've been reading (and I've been reading a lot). So , removed the Soundblaster 64 PCI (actually it marks ES1371 ) and replaced it by the YMF724E-V.
Or the 3Dfx cards, yeah I knew they were kind of special because they only do 3D and need a suplementary cable, and they are one of the most interesting part of hardware history concerning graphic cards, but now I have one Voodoo2 on the PII (not sure yet how this glide thing works though).
I allways was a Matrox fan since the G200 suited me very well, and so I went ahead and swop it for the big brother, the G400. Also have some other around to test: Geforce2 GTS (don't know what this is),Savage4, Ati RageII, TNT2,S3Virge, Trio64, even a Mach64 🤣, the two voodoo2 are both Diamond Monster 3D II, but one has 8MB and the other 12MB, so I'm out of luck for SLI I guess 🙁

Other upgrades: the DFI P2XBL was reluctant to recognize HDD bigger than 32GB, so instead of flashing BIOS or firmware for the 40GB and 80GB I stuck with a 30GB, problem solved. Not only has 5 times the space of the old Fireball, it's also much faster (7200rpm and UDMA100) , did noticed a big improvement, but not as big as when I installed 256MB SDRAM instead of 64MB!

Fiddling with the Deschutes while writting this rply and was able to push it to 133FSB (the board goes up to 150MHz, waht the heck?!) (467MHz!) seems stable, but I'm keeping to a more conservative overclocking if I ever need it at about 124MHz FSB. Some minutes ago the minimum was 233MHz, wich is great because Lotus: The Ultimate Challenge finally started and no divide overflow error! The softbios doesn't seem to have multiplier settings, most probably locked anyway: searching for SL2S7 has started...

Will post some shots as soon as I can 😀

You can use them in sli but effective memory will only be the same as two 8mb cards in sli. The vram scales but texture memory mirrors between both cards so there is no scaling memory wise.

Filosofia wrote:

For instance the PCI Yamaha sound card was just another one to me, with no particular interest, but now it is already in my PII as is supposed to be a very decent retrogamming card for what I've been reading (and I've been reading a lot). So , removed the Soundblaster 64 PCI (actually it marks ES1371 ) and replaced it by the YMF724E-V.

This is great:
If you want to go for a PCI sound card for a DOS-compatible games machine, then the Yamaha YMF7xx based cards are among the very few good options.
AFIK, they're the only ones with good OPL3 compatibility (real Yamaha OPL3 circuitry) compared to the awful Soundblaster Live! OPL emulation or, for that matter, the mediocre CQM based OPL3 clones used in the AWE64 and late generation SB-16 and AWE32 cards.

The sound quality for windows stuff (and general midi) is pretty good too on those Yamaha cards. The midi instruments are up to personal taste, but some people prefer them to the standard Roland ones. (there's also support for upgrade instrument patches in software iirc, since it stores samples in system RAM)

One of the few other good PCI sound cards (for OPL compatibility) is the Realtek ALS4000.
There's also some cards with good OPL support, but no sound blaster PCM (digital, sampled) sound support, which obviously limits their usefulness.

If you brows through Ace's x-wing sound test recordings, you can hear how nasty most of those PCI cards get for FM (or some ISA cards too, for that matter).
http://www.youtube.com/user/Ace9921/videos?qu … y=sounds+x-wing

Here's the particularly awful example of the SB Live! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYsQbD33vtg&feature=plcp

Also note that the CQM based creative cards (like AWE64) sometimes sound pretty close to a real OPL or OPL3 based card, but certain examples will sound pretty far off. (albeit still not horrible like some of the others)

Fiddling with the Deschutes while writting this rply and was able to push it to 133FSB (the board goes up to 150MHz, waht the heck?!) (467MHz!) seems stable, but I'm keeping to a more conservative overclocking if I ever need it at about 124MHz FSB. Some minutes ago the minimum was 233MHz, wich is great because Lotus: The Ultimate Challenge finally started and no divide overflow error! The softbios doesn't seem to have multiplier settings, most probably locked anyway: searching for SL2S7 has started...

Be careful with overclocking those Slot 1 CPUs with external cache. Some tend to be deceptively stable but eventually burn out the cache.

OTOH, with up to 150 MHz FSB support, that leaves some interesting possibilities for coppermine based slot 1 parts (or using slocket adapters)

MaxWar wrote:

Filosofia wrote:

One great thing about the hardware part of retrogaming , I'm starting to realize , is you can upgrade the heck of your PC for allmost no money at all, and sometimes for free too.

This is at least Partly true, you can often max out early ATX systems fairly easily but there are some items that are getting more and more valuable, such as the 3dfx cards.

When it comes to the AT days of lore, the hardware is starting to get somewhat rare now. You can still find this stuff for cheap and free if you search a bit around but when you want to get that "specific" piece of hardware, you may end up needing to wait a while and pay quite a bit for it. For exemple, try to find an original pro audio spectrum sound card, good luck! 🤣

In terms of AT form factor boards, it seems like socket 7 (and Super 7) boards are still fairly easy to find (in used parts warehouses, scrap/recycling centers, certain flea markets or swap meets, and on ebay). It actually seems like AT form factor socket 7 boards are a lot easier to find than ATX S7/SS7 boards.

Older boards (pre socket 5) are another story though . . . 486 stuff seems relatively uncommon, and worse for 386 and 286 stuff. (or old XT era clones)
And some of those have fallen into the more collectable category . . . or are being sold at inflated prices by people who think they're that desirable.

An addition to the previous comments on YMF7xx PCI cards:
You need to have an SB-link connector on your motherboard for these to work in DOS, and if your YMF7xx lacks an SB-link port, then it can't be used for that either.

kool kitty89 wrote:

An addition to the previous comments on YMF7xx PCI cards:
You need to have an SB-link connector on your motherboard for these to work in DOS, and if your YMF7xx lacks an SB-link port, then it can't be used for that either.

The SB-Link is not always required : http://queststudios.com/smf/index.php/topic,3041.0.html

I want to try some surround on my retroPC so I have a Maxi Sound Fortissimo on the way (for less than 10bucks) but only now I read this 🤑
My 440BX DFI P2XBL as one of those SB-link connectors, so I think I'll try the easy way first 😉

The SB-Link is not always required : http://queststudios.com/smf/index.php/topic,3041.0.html

Excellent info here, already got me some XG drivers for DOS and Win98SE alike, Thanks!