Not sure about Dungeon Keeper, is this a newer DOS game?

I can tell you that having an ISA cards for late DOS games isn't needed. The drivers that these games use work extremely well with PCI sound cards.

What sound card do I recommend? Any card with the Vortex 2 chip. Even has a wavetable header.

For S-VGA you can't have enough performance. An Intel chipset based Tualatin build should work well. Slot 1 might be ok, but might run out of steam at higher resolutions.

Pentium 4 is even faster but I haven't tried the Vortex 2 on such a machine, it might now work.

Make sure you load these tools that speed up graphics performance. There is one included in the VGA benchmark project.

EF 2000, F22 Lightning II, Screamer 2, Screamer Rally come to mind - but there are other 1995-96 SVGA flight/space sims out there which are not 3dfx exclusive.
and yes, the power of an A64 or P4 processor is showing when everything is maxed out 😀

You can usually get away with Windows 9x and PCI sound cards, in most cases the speed drop is not radical compared to pure DOS.

I don't think going P4 is a good idea. Generally speaking, a P3 1GHz is more than good enough for most of those games. A 1.4GHz Tualatin is even better.
I guess you could go the Athlon way, a lot of people have talked about the Athlon XP-M and how it can scale thanks to its unlocked multiplier from 600MHz all the way to 2GHz+.

I can't think of any DOS game even at 1024x768 that would be slow on a Tualatin 1.4 though... I guess Mechwarrior 2 might have some slowdowns on the P3 1GHz.

you will do much better with a PIII board with ISA , very few DOS games , including the later SVGA ones will have any issues on it, with the exception of some having speed issues due to CPU sensitivity, but that will affect a P4 even more so.

to put things into perspective, my 700Mhz Coppermine machine runs Duke Nukem 3D at 800X600 smoothly , as it does every other SVGA game I throw at it. heck it will even run DOS Quake at 800X600 decently (though at 1024X768 it does lag quite a bit).

so like others have said a 1Ghz or Tualatin will have no trouble at all.

ISA isn't a must but its obviously much better than having to try and get a PCI card to run in DOS (especially some of the very late Win9X era cards like the Live) , not to mention the flexability and option to run a card that isn't a Sound Blaster 16. quite a few of the later gamest support the Gravis Ultrasound or an AWE32/64 .

of course you could run two sound cards as well.

I think it's time for a high resolution benchmark thread?

My LCD is 1280 x 1024 so it would have be smooth at that resolution.

do eeeeeet

Even if you don't want to use DOSBox for some reason, there are Windows ports of Dungeon Keeper, Descent II, and Duke Nukem 3D.

Redguard and Battlespire are often cited as the most demanding DOS games.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I can tell you that having an ISA cards for late DOS games isn't needed. The drivers that these games use work extremely well with PCI sound cards.

Except you probably won't get a PCI sound card working in DOS on a Pentium 4 motherboard.

Jorpho wrote:

Even if you don't want to use DOSBox for some reason, there are Windows ports of Dungeon Keeper, Descent II, and Duke Nukem 3D. […]
Show full quote

Even if you don't want to use DOSBox for some reason, there are Windows ports of Dungeon Keeper, Descent II, and Duke Nukem 3D.

Redguard and Battlespire are often cited as the most demanding DOS games.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I can tell you that having an ISA cards for late DOS games isn't needed. The drivers that these games use work extremely well with PCI sound cards.

Except you probably won't get a PCI sound card working in DOS on a Pentium 4 motherboard.

I'm doing this specifically BECAUSE I started playing Dungeon Keeper and Descent II in DosBox, and after seeing how awesome they look in high-res, I want to see what it'll take to play them at the same resolutions on actual hardware. 😉

Jorpho wrote:

Except you probably won't get a PCI sound card working in DOS on a Pentium 4 motherboard.

Oh I see. Well that's depressing 😒

Jorpho wrote:

Except you probably won't get a PCI sound card working in DOS on a Pentium 4 motherboard.

SB PCI 128 works on mine, terrible sounding "FM" and all.

With PCI soundcard compatibility in DOS, I think it just varies from chipset to chipset, though running DOS games through Win9x certainly seems to help, at least from my experience.

I'll report on my findings. Got a few P4 S478 boards coming with various chipsets. Intel, VIA and SIS.

leileilol wrote:

SB PCI 128 works on mine, terrible sounding "FM" and all.

Interesting. What's the board?

Ok so I tried the Vortex 2 card in a S478 board (Intel chipset) and the driver complains:

Your Vortex adaoter is not plugged into the primary PCI bus. The MPU401, joystick, modem and Sound Blaster capabilities may not work when on the secondary PCI bus.

Is this the issue?

Update:

Ok so the Vortex 2 issue seems to be a driver bug with the SuperQuad card. The Turtle Beach card works fine.

For some reason the Voodoo doesn't seem to work, but likely also a driver issue. When launching GLQuake I get some checkboard pattern in green colour. The Voodoo also doesn't show up via DXdiag.exe.

Good news however regarding Sound Blaster Pro compatibility.

Confirmed working on this motherboard: http://www.asrock.com/mb/intel/p4i65g/

So this means it will work on a TON of P4 boards.

Tested with Quake Shareware version from within Windows.

Have you tried the Voodoo in a different PCI slot? Could be IRQ problems.

NitroX infinity wrote:

Have you tried the Voodoo in a different PCI slot? Could be IRQ problems.

Yea tried all that. They get detected by the driver, install fine, show up in device manager, but can't be used by games.

Could be anything, I installed quite a few drivers, so will play with this another day.

But the good news is:

Vortex 2 Sound Blaster Pro works in DOS on a Intel 865 chipset Pentium 4 board 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

So this means it will work on a TON of P4 boards.

It is good to know that a Pentium 4 motherboard does not necessarily lack PCI soundcard capability, but last time this came up it was suggested that a particular chipset alone is not necessarily an indication of compatibility.
PCI sound cards and Chipsets from various manufacturers...

I really wish this sort of thing wasn't so shrouded in mystery.

wow....Pentium III and 4? my "fast" DOS machine is a 200mhz mmx Pentium with a awe32 and a PCI s3 trio 64v2/GX and it plays games like Duke3d maxed silky smooth. had no idea you needed that much power for some of those titles.