senrew wrote:

Very nice. […]
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Very nice.

So, Vortex 2 with the daughterboard, or my SB Live!?

Will the SB take the daughterboard, or is that connector just for the midi daughter card that the original gold version came with?

I know I'll get good use out of either for the later windows games I may use this machine for, but at the start it'll be primarily a dos machine. Worst case, I've got the SB16 at the very least.

You can't connect a MIDI daughterboard to the SB Live! as it does not have a wavetable connector. If you want good quality MIDI music for DOS on the SB Live! you will then need to connect a external MIDI synthesizer and those are alot more expensive. Also I personally prefer the Aureal Vortex2 over the SB Live as the Windows software is better (creative love to bloat the software), digital out, A3D 2.0 support (along with EAX 1.0), and it has a wavetable connector for a daughterboard.

Your DOS games are mostly later ones, and those tend to have little to no problems with cards that emulates the Soundblaster. I personally have not yet come across a game that the Vortex2 didn't work with.

The SB16 you have incoming is also a good candidate for your system. It has a wavetable connector so you can connect a daughtercard to it, but unless you have some very specific versions you can experience the hanging note bug on it. I do not own a SB16 myself, so I do not know how often this bug occurs when playing MIDI with a daughterboard (or external device) or how noticeable it is. The plus side with the SB16 is the theoretical better DOS compatibility.

All in all atleast get a MIDI synthesizer device/daughtercard. The card you use it on is of less practical importance, but you will hear the difference on MIDI music quite clearly.

After pouring through the pile of games on my list, I think the most demanding game I'd want to play is Klingon Honor Guard. Assuming I go with a K6-2/3, will I be able to go dual V2s in SLI and get any kind of decent performance with this game? How would this handle Unreal engine stuff?

A 450mhz K6 with V2 in SLI should be good for Unreal engine stuff and you can most likely run it in 1024x768 😀

I went ahead and bought that Techworks card you recommended. Came out to a whopping $13.82 shipped from the UK. Once all the parts I've ordered get here, I can test out the board. Just need to get that daughtercard and some V2s, but those will have to wait till next payday...

I haven't ordered the heatsink/fan yet, but I can run the chip on the board without it at least long enough to just plug stuff in to see if the board boots or not. Further building/testing can wait.

Incidentally, this setup is actually meant as a replacement for the p3/933 rig I have mentioned in other posts. The games I want to play just don't want to run on that thing for some reason. The DOS stuff for the most part startup and run just fine, but 90% of the windows games just refuse to run, or crash to desktop after intro movies, etc. Honestly, that other board really is overkill for the games I want to play. I may consider selling it once I get this thing up and running.

Getting 2 V2's and the SLI cable can be a bit expensive unless you have some patience and luck. Your TNT2 card can run Klingon Honor Guard, so just getting a Voodoo 1 or a single Voodoo 2 is enough for the other Glide games you intend to play.

More like money and impatience. There are several matched V2s on ebay right now, and some guy has the SLI cable for like $7 too. That...is going to have to wait though.

Next couple questions:

Will I be able to run Q3 engine games? Elite Force comes to mind. (I have a thing for Star Trek games...)

What kind of power requirements am I going to need for this? I've got a 350w ATX supply in the p3 case right now that I was planning to migrate over to this build.

For reference, with a k6-3+ @ 600, Quake 3 engine (Elite Force) and Unreal behave as if you have a P2 ~350.

Also, Voodoo2 (& SLI) barely has enough texture memory for that generation of games. I've seen stuttering occasionally, and you can't max out the visuals.

I've got another machine I'll be putting XP on just for those inbetween games I can't run on my 7 64bit machine.

Compaq ASUS proprietary board, Athlon XP 2800+, and I'm looking at getting a 7800GS for it. Can't go beyond 1g ram in it though, that may hamper me a bit.

If you get Voodoo2 and put it in a K6-2/3 platform, the game to play is Quake 2 with the AMD 3DNow patch. It was written by AMD and is probably the most comprehensive 3DNow effort. It includes optimized game engine files and a optimized Voodoo2 OpenGL ICD.

Pentium MMX limits you more to 1996/7 games similar to GLQuake and Jedi Knight.

swaaye wrote:

If you get Voodoo2 and put it in a K6-2/3 platform, the game to play is Quake 2 with the AMD 3DNow patch. It was written by AMD and is probably the most comprehensive 3DNow effort. It includes optimized game engine files and a optimized Voodoo2 OpenGL ICD.

The performance increase I got on the system in my signature was a FPS increase from 40 fps to 56.9 just by enabling the 3DNow patch!

Regarding Quake3 it won't be unplayable if you get a K6-III. A user called mwdmeyer reported the following with a single Voodoo 2 12MB card:

K6-2/350MHz
Quake 3 Demo - 3DFX Mode - 640x480 (with default graphics settings). 22.5FPS.

K6-3/400MHz
Quake 3 Demo - 3DFX Mode - 640x480 (with default graphics settings). 35FPS.

If you plan to get a 500-550 MHZ version along with some Voodoo 2 in SLI I would expect even greater frame rates. It won't be 60 fps as we today almost require for a game and you won't be able to run perfectly in the best resolutions with the best settings, but it will be playable (given your preferences for that word match ofc). I also think the TNT2 will give better performance in Quake3 mainly because of the increased memory.

For Unreal, I'm playing it in 1024x768 with everything set to maximum on my system. I do experience some annoying low FPS drops at times, but my K6-II is running at 66mhz bus and in a cpu upgradeadapter so it is slower than normal.

What kind of power requirements am I going to need for this? I've got a 350w ATX supply in the p3 case right now that I was planning to migrate over to this build.

Should be more than enough.

vetz wrote:

Regarding Quake3 ... Unreal

K6-2 scales really poorly so don't count on a 500-550 being much faster than a 400. It's too bottlenecked by the bus even if you crank it to 112-124 MHz.

I've done some experimentation with a K6-3+ @ 616 (112x5.5) and a PIII Katmai @ 450 with a Voodoo5 and the P3 450 is noticeably faster with UT and Q3. The FPU and memory performance of K6 are too weak even with the screaming fast on-die L2 cache.

Never really been a Quake guy so not really worried about that.

The most intensive game I can think of right now that I'd likely want to play is Klingon Honor Gaurd so as long as I can pull 30fps at either 800x600 or hopefully 1024x768, then I'm happy.

Like I said, this will be mostly for later DOS games with maybe some racers being the most 3D I'll likely play.

KHG is an early version of the Unreal Engine. I recall the maps / environments being similar to or simpler than Unreal. It'll be interesting to hear how that runs. I originally played it on a P2 with Voodoo1. There's a patch with D3D support but it's not very good so you're best off with Glide.

senrew wrote:

What do you mean by better board though? From what I can tell, this has everything I'd need in a board for the vintage I'm looking at, plus tom's hardware reviews at the time seemed to love it.

Well, i really like the Asus P5A, never let me down. Worked rock solid, great FSB options.

I definitely want to run benchmarks on this once its done.

I looked for a P5 first actually, but all I saw on ebay were the stupidly priced ones.

senrew wrote:

I definitely want to run benchmarks on this once its done.

The funny thing about P5A and K6/3 @600Mhz is that it owns synthetic benchmarks like sandra, especially with bus ~120 Mhz. The sad part is, the dream is over once you load up any 3D game 🙄

FWIW, I played through KHG last year on my P2-266 with V2 SLI. It was OK, but still got a little choppy at times. I wouldn't expect a great experience with a 233MMX.

I would keep the 233MMX for DOS games and 2d windows 9x games. Play 3d games on the P3. I plan on moving my V2 SLI setup to a P3 eventually.

A 233MMX is very cool for all the first games in 3D, games from around 1996, 1997 will be fine with it mostly.

Yeah, that's pretty much the high end of range of the games I want to play with this machine. I started a spreadsheet to track the games I want to play, I've linked it below. It's very incomplete still, but you can extrapolate what else would be added to the list by what's on there now.

For the more demanding stuff, I may eventually swap out for a k6-2/450 or something, maybe OC to 500mhz.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0 … NjNjd1lKbVZjc3c

What kind of performance will I get out of this for Dark engine games?

The only time I've ever played Thief was the demo off of some magazine companion disc in Feb 1999 on my dad's then NEC P2-300. Performance was alright, but I really didn't have much to compare it to outside of my (nostalgia filtered) awesome Compaq Presario with a 200mmx and some kind of S3 card in it.

I had that machine from 1997 till sometime in 2001 when I moved out of my mom's place. I had a P75 packard Bell before that and all of my PC gaming was done in those two machines, so this build is kind of a way to recapture those years.

senrew wrote:

but I really didn't have much to compare it to outside of my (nostalgia filtered) awesome Compaq Presario with a 200mmx and some kind of S3 card in it..

Do you remember which model number? My 4766 originally had a 166mhz MMX and an integrated S3 Trio64+ 2MB chip. It is my main DOS and early Win9x computer (click link in my sig to see pictures).