Ordered Carmageddon and waiting for it to arrive. IIRC that game doesn't run properly without a speed cap. I'm pretty sure I tried it via virtualbox and it ran too fast or the physics weren't right in hires mode. Alien Trilogy also doesn't run right unless it's speed capped. So just consider that if you think more speed is going to do you good.

I'm well aware of the speed issues I may face with certain games on this rig. Fortunately, I've found in the past that MySlow works quite nicely. I've used it on a few fast P3 systems, and even a Pentium 4 to take Warcraft II down a few notches. It should do just fine for putting a cap on Carmageddon's physics calculations. And if I ever get the urge to play older 286/386-era DOS games, I can cheat and use DosBox, as I know it'll run those games just fine on a fast P3. 😉

Holering wrote:

Ordered Carmageddon and waiting for it to arrive. IIRC that game doesn't run properly without a speed cap. I'm pretty sure I tried it via virtualbox and it ran too fast or the physics weren't right in hires mode. Alien Trilogy also doesn't run right unless it's speed capped. So just consider that if you think more speed is going to do you good.

I'll start by sharing some of my findings and responding to the above post, but I wanted to contribute a little bit to this thread.

I've been on a quest myself to build an ultimate SVGA dos gaming machine that could maintain full OPL3 sound support via an ISA sound card in dos. What I've come up with is an EpoX motherboard for AMD Socket-A/462 based on the KT-133A chipset, flashed the bios and loaded in a AthlonXP chip based on Palomino core, then overclocked the FSB up to 150 Mhz for about 1800 Mhz, and loaded in a voodoo3 3000 AGP card, and a sound blaster AWE64, and just recently maxed it out with 512 MB of ram. It has two hard drives, one for pure-mode dos, and the other has Win98se on it to run Win9x GLIDE/3DFX games. When I want to change OS's I just swap the boot order in bios and boot to either one. Also the Win98se side has the network connectivity, so for loading in new dos games, I just boot to 98se and network copy in the game, move it to the dos hard drive, reboot, select dos hard drive, boot to it and enjoy.

Now.. performance. Some of you might think this is an insane system for SVGA, but it sort of is, sort of isn't. Some games it's great on, some games it's not so great. Mainly duke3D at 800x600 is obviously well past 60 FPS in PureDos mode. And Descent II @ 1280x1024 is above 60 FPS at all times on this system too (I know this because in both games I can see visual "tearing" when turning around). However quake in DOS.. elludes even this machine. 800x600 is about 55-60 FPS in most places, but 1024x768 goes down to the 30-35 range (I've seen it with the benchmark), and is still playable, but 1280x1024 crawls at nearly 10-12 FPS. So.. even this isn't quite fast enough.

BLOOD is another story. Blood has it's own built in FPS counter you can see in real time via a cheat code (I don't remember off hand, I'd have to google it), but at 800x600 it's mid-30's everywhere and 1024x768 is.. weird. Some places indoors it's 60-90 FPS, but some places outdoors and it crawls in to the 20's and low teens. I think BLOOD some how was coded to render the entire level at once when you're outside as it seems to be the most punishing in SVGA modes.

The only other thing I've been able to come up with that would ever be any faster than this system and maintain native ISA/OPL3 support (I'd largely perfer to completely leave out PCI sound cards, they're a pain to get working in DOS and even when they work they don't sound nearly as good as a real ISA card) would be the Advantech socket 478 board I've seen on ebay, which will accept up to the 800 Mhz FSB Prescott chips and still maintain a native ISA slot. But.. they're like $250.

Also I've found ram that will let my AthlonXP system run up at 160 Mhz FSB, but my power supply shuts down when I try and do that, I still need to source a better PSU for it some day. It's not easy finding a PSU these days with 40+ amps on +5v.

Anyway, I haven't tested any other SVGA-mode games, if someone would like me to try something on this rig and then write back, just say so and I'll try to source the game somewhere and give it a try.

Also if any of you want info on getting some of your older systems overclocked, I can list all the hardware I have used with exact part #'s that work well with overclocking in these older systems.

And finally, to the above post. Running Carmageddon in Win98se on this machine, even as fast as it is, with no limiters and in Voodoo3/GLIDE mode, it has no physics problems what so ever, and no timer problems and just runs great. The problems I think you're seeing is running the game in "standard resolution mode" (not Voodoo/GLIDE) lets it run too fast and starts getting weird issues. FYI you can change the configuration thing in start menu and get the GOG version of Carmageddon to run in voodoo mode (simulated with the glide wrappers) on a modern machine, I've done it on my i7 with a 560ti and it works. And no speed issues.

^^ These results seem rather slow for an overclocked KT133A+Palomino rig. Did you enable write combining for the LFB range?

5u3 wrote:

^^ These results seem rather slow for an overclocked KT133A+Palomino rig. Did you enable write combining for the LFB range?

Yes I've tried, there are none that will enable it for AMD's AthlonXP range of chips, there's an AMD one and I've tried it and it said that system was not supported in PureDos mode. FastPCI I think is the other one only works for Intel / Pentium systems, and I've tried MTRR and it made no difference faster or slower on that system, I've tried almost everything I can find to make it any faster. If anyone knows of anything else, I'd be happy to give it a whirl.

Yea I found sticking with Intel is the easiest way to get fast SVGA going.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Yea I found sticking with Intel is the easiest way to get fast SVGA going.

The other odd thing I've found when exploring MS-DOS and SVGA modes is I have a 1133 Mhz Coppermine P3 system here, and with fastvid and a Geforce2 Ultra AGP card (The fastest card I've yet to find in AGP for DOS SVGA, even faster than my voodoo3 3000!), actually runs like 30-35 FPS in quake in PureDOS @ 1024x768, the fastest I've ever seen any system do quake. But.. it's quite slow at other games like descent 2 and blood, so it's real weird there how quake runs fast on it but nothing else does. I think quake was optimized for intel/P3 some how.

Only in VGA but still fun to watch 😀

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lozF7Nx97j8

kithylin wrote:

If anyone knows of anything else, I'd be happy to give it a whirl.

I use MTRRLFBE on my Athlon Thunderbird 1400. At 1024x768 the Quake timedemo yields 46.4 FPS with write combining enabled, versus 16.1 FPS without. With fast machines and high resolutions, write combining is a huge factor.

5u3 wrote:

I use MTRRLFBE on my Athlon Thunderbird 1400. At 1024x768 the Quake timedemo yields 46.4 FPS with write combining enabled, versus 16.1 FPS without. With fast machines and high resolutions, write combining is a huge factor.

EDIT: I set up the system and it's running again, using Phil's latest 'bench' set the default settings for MTRRLFBE yeild no performance increase in -ANY- of the benchmarks listed, it's the exact same speed with MTRRLFBE either on or off. I've tried every possible MTRRLFBE setting and it's the same result every time. This program what ever it does doesn't boost some of the faster machines on different chipsets, it's mainly for the older systems.

Edit2: I'll change the quake benchmark to different SVGA settings and re-run benchmark and post results here in a bit (and edit it in to this post).

EDIT3: Quake benchmarks on this overclocked AthlonXP rig.

640x480 = 36.1 FPS
800x600 = 23.9 FPS
1024x768 = 14.9 FPS

And 1280x1024 will just be worse and I'm not even bothering, I picked up a copy of Starcraft the original game and disc and cd key today for $1.51 finally after years of hunting thrift stores, so on to gaming on this old machine 😄

@ leileilol: I didn't know that about Quake 3.

Well this may or may not matter but here's my results with Carmageddon in HIRES mode. Had to manually enter 65535 for dpmi and other memory settings for file properties BTW (98se); was running in low memory mode otherwise. I'm not using a vintage CPU either so consider that; it's piledriver baby, for 98se yeah!

Carmageddon doesn't seem to fast forward in hires mode with Geforce 8400gs, but controls are too fast and unplayable IMO (analog joystick might alleviate this). Only a quick tap to the NumLock arrow keys cause wheels to instantly steer to the max, and it just sucks IMO.

Rage128 vr OTOH throttles the game to be perfectly playable and still smooth (can hold NumLock arrow keys to steer naturally and actually enjoy it using skillz). I really like the rage128 on my current modern system (see sig); it throttles all the DOS games I've thrown at it, and it's still smooth up to 640x480 (doesn't glitch up Blood cutscenes @640x480 in Windows either). It's definitely a cpu bottleneck and moslow is probably a better option for vintage systems.

Carmageddon still makes me lmfao when I see the guys mug getting pissed. Man this game would be so great to play while working at a Bank or an office. It's still more gorey than the sequels (you can literally see the chunks with eyes and intestines). It's funny they used the Woman scream from Evil Dead 2 (Annie escaping evil Ash); she should've done screams for Mortal Kombat.

So yeah I guess you should have moslow as a backup in case you have certain svga titles that can run too fast. You knew that already!

Lately, I've been thinking that this may be a pointless endeavor unless I can somehow manage to build a system with ISA support, so that I can run a DOS-compatible sound card. Would a slocket-ed 1GHz Coppermine work in a 440BX board? I have a pair of 1GHz Coppemines in a server build I'm not using.

All these late games work fine with PCI Sound Blaster compatible cards. I recommend the Vortex 2 as you can use a wavetable board or external Sound Canvas.

It's really only some of the very old DOS games that are best played on a 386 that cause issues with PCI Sound Blaster compatible card. The drivers these late DOS games are a lot better.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

All these late games work fine with PCI Sound Blaster compatible cards. I recommend the Vortex 2 as you can use a wavetable board or external Sound Canvas.

It's really only some of the very old DOS games that are best played on a 386 that cause issues with PCI Sound Blaster compatible card. The drivers these late DOS games are a lot better.

I've tried every PCI sound blaster card I can get my paws on.. Audigy, audigy 2, 5 different kinds of original audigy, 3 different kinds of 'live', and I can't seem to ever get any of them to ever work in dos, the only ones I got working were uh.. I can't remember the name now, some crappy little thing based on an ESS chip. And when it did work it sounded -horrible- and made the cpu run at 1/8th of it's normal speed due to some crap the drivers did. In general I don't understand how anyone could get any pci card to work as well in dos (and not slow down the cpu) as well as a native ISA card does.

Edit: Remembered name, Esoniq AudioPCI is the only one I've ever been able to get to work in dos with both sound and wavetable.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

All these late games work fine with PCI Sound Blaster compatible cards. I recommend the Vortex 2 as you can use a wavetable board or external Sound Canvas.

It's really only some of the very old DOS games that are best played on a 386 that cause issues with PCI Sound Blaster compatible card. The drivers these late DOS games are a lot better.

True, but I know other people have had issues getting PCI sound cards to work in DOS, and I'd rather avoid the hassle. Besides, I like the sound of an OPL3 on certain later games (namely Blood and other Build engine games), and I want to play around with the direct OPL3 passthrough certain versions of DosBox offer for 286/386-era games.

Man, this build is going in all sorts of different directions, and I haven't even started working on it. 🤣

EDIT: I was just reading this thread, and someone mentioned that a Tualeron would be a decent fit for a 440BX board. I actually have a 1.3GHz Tualeron kicking around somewhere, how would this perform compared to the higher-clocked Coppermines I have (namely the 866MHz and the 1GHz)?

Yamaha ymf soundcards seem to have a real genuine opl3. ESS solo sound cards are probably the next best from what I heard (heard mention they emulate opl3 very good). If you have a mobo with nmi-ddma issues, you should get the ESS solo just in case (Yamaha ymf's must have nmi-ddma in realmode DOS like Live! and Vortex2 unfortunately; from what I heard anyway).

Do Intel i815e chipsets have problems with nmi-ddma?

It might change from motherboard to motherboard, but I can definitely use my SB Live in DOS on my i815e-based TUSL2-C.

Jorpho wrote:

It might change from motherboard to motherboard, but I can definitely use my SB Live in DOS on my i815e-based TUSL2-C.

Cool, so my Dell should be a decent pick then.

I'm completely astonished to see that my old system cannot run smoothly Quake on 800x600.

I have a Pentium 200MMX overclocked to 233, 96MB of RAM, and a Nvidia TNT2 M64.

Why Quake through real dos estate (Windows 98SE, DOS 7,.10) cannot run smoothly? I have to set something on my Nvidia video card? I don't think so, cause on DOS there are no driver to load.

So where is the problem? The CPU?