VOGONS


First post, by schmatzler

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Hello Vogons,

I decided to build myself a retro PC to remind myself of the good old days once in a while.

Got a FIC PA-2012 Socket 7 motherboard, a Pentium MMX 233, SoundBlaster CT4760 (Live! Value) and a GeForce 2 MX (AGP) off eBay, put it all together and installed Windows 98SE.

DOS performance is great, but anything Direct3D related on Windows 98 is just a slideshow. Even Turok 2 runs at ~5fps and I remember playing that game on an AMD K5 90MHz and a Riva TNT2 back in the days, so it should probably run better, right?

I already tried:

- installing the VIA 4in1 drivers from philscomputerlab. Neither 435 nor 443 make any difference, even after manually installing the AGP bridge driver
- changing the AGP aperture size in BIOS and switching from AGP2x to AGP1x
- downgrading DirectX to 7.0a with Directx Buster
- older Detonator drivers for the GeForce (45.23 and 05.32)

Some games like I-War 2 (a DirectX 7 game) won't even run beyond the menu screen and a fairly simple Shadowman from Acclaim runs very slow, too.
I have 512MB RAM installed and downgraded that to one stick with 256MB, because I read of the uncached RAM problem here, but that still didn't make any difference.

I also installed Windows XP and the VIA 4in1 drivers (443) - the 3D performance is just as bad as on Windows 98.

Does anyone here have experience with the VP3 chipset? I'm out of ideas and I'd love to play a bit more than Commander Keen on this machine. 😎

"Windows 98's natural state is locked up"

Reply 1 of 3, by Koltoroc

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Turok 2, I-War 2 and Shadowman have rather steep hardware requirements (there is NO WAY turok 2 ran playable on a 90Mhz K5). All have Pentium 2 class CPUs as minimum requirements and the geforce 2 is near the minimum in the case of I-war2 and Shadowman.

None of these games will run well on a pentium 233MMX.

Reply 2 of 3, by feipoa

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Try using a Voodoo3. I've read on this forum that the Voodoo3 doesn't use any of the advanced AGP functions and that socket 7 motherboards have issues with AGP features. Back in the day, I ran into all sorts of problems with AGP cards and socket 7's. I was also using an FIC motherboard.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 3 of 3, by schmatzler

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Thanks for your answers.

I've switched to an Apollo Pro board now and all of my problems magically went away.

"Windows 98's natural state is locked up"