Desperados should be running pretty well on the lower resolutions. I've played the game on a K6-III+ 550 and it was pretty smooth at 640x480. I forget, did the game offer 800x600 - 1280x1024 ? I'd say, realistically, you should be able to play the game up to 800x600.

Socket 7 boards have horrible AGP implementations, so it's best to either use a PCI card or an AGP card that doesn't make use of any AGP features, such as 3dfx cards. If you can get a Voodoo 3 on the cheap, you'd be pretty much set.

F2bnp wrote:

Desperados should be running pretty well on the lower resolutions. I've played the game on a K6-III+ 550 and it was pretty smooth at 640x480. I forget, did the game offer 800x600 - 1280x1024 ? I'd say, realistically, you should be able to play the game up to 800x600.

Socket 7 boards have horrible AGP implementations, so it's best to either use a PCI card or an AGP card that doesn't make use of any AGP features, such as 3dfx cards. If you can get a Voodoo 3 on the cheap, you'd be pretty much set.

I am aware of the awfulness that is the 90's AGP. It's no suprise that there are so many PCI varients of graphics cards well up until and even past the millenium.

I do actually have a PCI Voodoo 3 for this very reason but that's being used on another system that I cannot just take from. It's perfect as it is and I don't want to change it at all.

http://www.zen26266.zen.co.uk/Ti5vg+2.htm try and flash the bios see if that fixes agp problems.

Even though these files locate to nowhere, It looks like I've got the latest according to this table:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020819004122/ht … T/BIOS/BIOS.htm

I'll have to just find a PCI gfx card.

hello
maybe you should move onto windows98. win95osr2 is the first version with agp support so its not that mature, especially when paired with with via chipset. also vp3 is via's first agp chipset so its not even in the support list of many versions of 4in1 drivers, maybe via has abandoned it.
i used a vp3 board, geforce2mx and windows98, and there is only one problem: agp rate has to be set to 1x then everything is ok, otherwise the graphics becomes distorted or even leads to bsod depending on nvidia driver versions. installing 4in1 doesn't seem to help.
when i tried to install win95osr2 on the same rig, i couldn't even get the nvidia driver control panel to show up... anyone seen the same problem? i didn't do a through test in win95 though, because the disk was soon moved to a 486 board.

There is no AGP options in the BIOS unfortunately. But it's such a mess up with this hardware conflicts and performance drop I have decided to do a wipe and install Win98se just to see what happens. Technically that would be more era specific again for such a rig, but Windows 98 is so compatable you can install it on everything, hence why I already have a few installations of it and wanted to have a proper Win95 machine instead (although i guess I'll just leave the only Win95 install being on the 486PC...)

This is actually a topic I have just remembered that I have previously visited. Indeed from memory, I bought the main board and CPU in order to do what I am doing now but was disapointed by the performance and instabilities/incompatabilities so I chucked the Voodoo3 I had bought for this build in another PC that won't get removed from it.

I do not think however that I ever tried Windows 98 at the time to see if there was a way around it.

Update will come concerning this issue.

A Via VP3 board should not be slow when everything is working, sure the memory performance isnt stellar but all in all the performance should be pretty much on pair with other socket 7 chipsets from the same time period. I have a Soyo board with Via VPX and I used it with a K6-2 450@6x83 and a Voodoo 2 to play through Unreal and some other pretty demanding games. Using the AGP port in 1X mode should not really affect performance in any noticeably way.

A little update. I installed Win98se, and successfully installed relevent devices with no issues (no conflicts either). Performance is exactly the same. I came to the point of lowering the graphics settings and resolutions to get to a usable state. Quake 2 is quite fine now in OpenGL mode of course, but the game that really gets me is Desperados.

I've noticed that it can be quite jittery moving around the screen, but it's acceptable. Where I was going slightly wrong was when I loaded a random save which happened to show the enemy's field of vision.... Having an emeny on the screen with their field of vision enabled makes the system absolutely craw, though like I saw it's not tooo bad with this disabledl!! Using default resolution in the case of Desperados (which I think is 640x480 which is the best overall for the user to see the best of the screen without squinting through lack of seeing enemies in my opinion). It's quite odd, I wonder what kind of process this field of vision puts onto the PC, would it utilise the CPU in this case I wonder.

I think it is quite obvious that I'm expecting too much of the system..? Just again, There is no option in the BIOS to use AGP 1X, on inspection of Everest it is using 2x, and also on closer inspection it is apparent I'm using PC66Mhz RAM, not 100 which I will look into.

Blurredman wrote:

I think it is quite obvious that I'm expecting too much of the system..? Just again, There is no option in the BIOS to use AGP 1X, on inspection of Everest it is using 2x, and also on closer inspection it is apparent I'm using PC66Mhz RAM, not 100 which I will look into.

if your board model is ti5vg+, it appears to be vp3 chipset with support up to only 66fsb, so there is no way to get sdram running at pc100. and what clock is your k6-2-500 running at?

as for desperados, it seems to be released in 2001 so maybe your radeon7000ve is a bit too slow for this game, what about trying a geforce2?

You've just reminded me (I guess this is the bad thing about leaving years between messing with a system you built...) is I believe clock is locked to the CPU and unavailable for memory to use 100mhz if that is what the cpu uses. My k6-2-500 is running at 500mhz.

The card is actually from 2000, revision codename being RV100. This graphics card was good enough to run Mafia back in the day acceptibly, so I should think that powering a non 3d-accelerated game should be no issues unless it's the CPU struggling.

I have recently noticed also that alot of HD data fetching is being done when new things happen in the game, and that is slow. Once I have scrolled the screen over specific areas it is in memory and little lag occurs. The HDD can't be that bad can it!? It is a 10gb quantum fireball cx10.2a @ udma 33.

What bus settings are you running to get 500mhz, 83mhz with a 2x multi set? It could be that like most Radeons it doesn't like the AGP bus running out of spec like this, as the board runs the AGP at a 1:1 so the AGP is also at 83mhz not 66mhz. That could cause some problems with the card like your seeing, and why no one else thought of this is beyond me.

candle_86 wrote:

What bus settings are you running to get 500mhz, 83mhz with a 2x multi set? It could be that like most Radeons it doesn't like the AGP bus running out of spec like this, as the board runs the AGP at a 1:1 so the AGP is also at 83mhz not 66mhz. That could cause some problems with the card like your seeing, and why no one else thought of this is beyond me.

For me setting the AGP speed too high seems to mostly result in freezes but anything is possible.
From what I can see the Ti5VG+ uses the MVP3 and not the VP3 chipset so I would guess he is using 100 MHz FSB.
Perhaps the issue is that the AGP speed is set to 1:1 = 100 MHz?

http://www.zen26266.zen.co.uk/Ti5vg+.htm

I think its mostly an issue with too new games.

Skyscraper wrote:

For me setting the AGP speed too high seems to mostly result in freezes but anything is possible. From what I can see the Ti5VG+ […]
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For me setting the AGP speed too high seems to mostly result in freezes but anything is possible.
From what I can see the Ti5VG+ uses the MVP3 and not the VP3 chipset so I would guess he is using 100 MHz FSB.
Perhaps the issue is that the AGP speed is set to 1:1 = 100 MHz?

http://www.zen26266.zen.co.uk/Ti5vg+.htm

I think its mostly an issue with too new games.

if agp is at 100mhz i guess it sould have hanged up.
if its mvp3 chipset, there should be a jumper on the board(usually near the dimm slots) selecting sdram frequency.

If you K6 is running at 500MHz (5x100) then you have an MVP3 board. The VP3 doesn't support 100MHz FSB, and as far as I know it has no AGP support. If you indeed have a VIA MVP3 and still have these performance issues, consider replacing the video card (for test purposes). If that still doesn't fix it, the MB is on it's last legs. My P5MVP3 runs everything I throw at it - Quake 2, Quake 3, Homeworld, Unreal, Unreal Tournament at up to 1024x768 depending on the game.

My configuration is simmilar: K6-2 450MHz@500MHz / 2x128MB SDR / Geforce 256 SDR (Creative Annihilator) / Creative AWE64 value. Running Win98SE.

P.S. - the Radeon 70000 (VE) is REALLY PICKY about AGP implementations and especially drivers. I suspect it as the primary culprit for your poor performance. I found the 7000 likes later chipsets like the Apollo PRO or KT133 or intel equivalents.

I agree with others - try another graphics card; maybe borrow that Voodoo3 PCI just for testing. Another question that I have: what about your hard-disk? Is it very slow/clunky?

I'm going to give Desperados a try on my own SS7 machine and tell you my experience with it. I don't have a K6-2 anymore, but I'll see if I can emulate one by disabling the L2 cache on the K6-III+.

I admittedly had not heard of this game Desperados before this thread, and looked it up on GOG to find out more about it. Assuming I found the right game, it not only looks fun, but also looks like a K6 may not be sufficient for it. Here's the GOG page I found: http://www.gog.com/game/desperados_wanted_dead_or_alive

And the system requirements from the same:
"Minimum system requirements - Windows: Windows XP, 1 GHz Processor (1.4 GHz recommended), 256MB RAM (512 recommended), 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7.1 (compatible with DirectX 9 recommended), Mouse, Keyboard. "

That looks pretty reasonable for a game released around 2001 (for example, look at Empire Earth (2001) and Morrowind (2002) which both have similar requirements), but it's probably a little bit beyond what a K6 can comfortably handle. OFC I've yet to play the game, and I don't have a K6 to test it with, so that could be entirely wrong. Just thought it may be pertinent.

GoG and Steam like to inflate system requirements. The idea behind it is that you'll be running these games on modern OSes, so definitely Windows XP and later. So, if the game's system requirements are lower than the OS you'll be using, it makes sense to use the system requirements of the OS.

Except it kinda doesn't 😜.

Desperados is a great game, it builds upon the idea of Commandos : Behind Enemy Lines. It's a rather simple, top-down, 2D strategy-tactic game. I think the minimum system requirements call for a Pentium II 233. I'm going to give it a shot on the K6 and report back later.

Turns out I was wrong on the performance side. Let's take a look at things one by one.

The official system requirements for the game are as follows:

Pentium II 233MHz
64MB RAM
Graphics Card with 4MB VRAM (The game does not make use of any 3D accelerators, manual states it doesn't support the Permedia 2)

The video options offer 3 resolutions, 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768. Personally, I find 640x480 kinda hard on the eye, even on a CRT monitor. I believe the game's graphics original resolution is either 800x600 or 1024x768. Other options include some "Special FX" boxes such as:

- Transparent View Range
- Realistic Shadows (lol)
- Animated Effects
- Animated Background

I believe the first option can hit performance pretty bad, although increasing the resolution is really far more stressing and demanding.

Anyways, I ran the game on a K6-III+ 550, 256MB RAM and a Voodoo3. Performance is okay at 640x480 with all Special FX enabled. Disabling the first two doesn't strike Image Quality much, but certainly improves performance. There are still some slowdowns which can be annoying for this type of game, since you'll be clinging on a lot of QuickSaves and Quickloads and fast reflexes. I guess it can be tolerable though.

800x600 and higher is unplayable for me, it's just way too slow.

I didn't try disabling caches and lowering my CPU speed to match yours, but I think the game's hitting your CPU even harder because of the lack of on-die L2 cache. So, not much you can really do about it other than maybe getting a K6-III+ that clocks really really well (FSB>100MHz, CPU clock>=600MHz) or just playing on a Pentium III 500 and upwards.

EDIT:

You should probably disregard this, I was running into some issues with my system at the time. More on that here:
K6-2+/III+ slowdown issues on ALi Aladdin V