I will say that these boards are best suited for a fast Win98 machine, being somewhat compatible with Dos. I am afraid that you will have a hard time installing and running pure Dos, and an Win98/ME installation is a way better option in this case. The Live card is no good in pure dos aimed at 386 era gaming. The system is too fast for speed sensitive games, and the Live can not be used with XMS games. Another big drawback with the Live, is a really bad Adlib compatibility. It sounds horribly, compared to the midi part, wich is actually pretty good on a Live.

All in all. A system based on that Gigabyte board, and a Live installed, will be good for those late era Dos games. Games such as Duke3D or Doom-II. If you want to have good Adlib (OPL) support in those Dos games that can be launched through Win98/ME, then I will strongly recommend an YMF-724. It has an awesomme midi compatible chip, plus that chip actually have an OPL core build into it.

Just don't expect all 386-era games to work 100% with this setup, even with an YMF-724 (or 744 for that matter) However... Win9x games will work perfectly.

Thanks 😀 would you recommend finding a different motherboard then to improve compatibility with older games? Like a P3 with ISA slots as well as PCI and AGP?

gladders wrote:

Thanks 😀 would you recommend finding a different motherboard then to improve compatibility with older games? Like a P3 with ISA slots as well as PCI and AGP?

Most DOS titles run better with ISA sound cards as opposed to PCI ones, so if you really want to play DOS games, a motherboard with an ISA slot is your best bet.

Pentium 4 motherboards with ISA do exist, but depending on the chipset, they might not work properly with sound cards, you'd need to be looking for a motherboard with an ICH5 or older southbridge for proper ISA support (so you'd be better off avoiding ISA P4 boards with Intel 9xx chipsets). Since ISA fell out of use in the consumer PC market during the late-P3 and P4 eras, these motherboards can be a little tricky to find at an affordable price range.

Another cheaper and easy to find alternative could be an Athlon XP motherboard with ISA (particularly KT7A motherboards which seem to be the most popular choice for that platform).

Or simply build an high performance Win98 machine from what you got, and then build a 386/486 system. As the Win98 can do Doom/Duke3D, you really do not need a high performance 486. Keep to something like an 386dx40 or 486dx33. Or if you by some lucky chance, manage to get a SS7 system, with an K6-III+ CPU. That can "emulate" old 386 to Pentium systems, by using the cache trick. Then you will only need a P4 system for late era/high performance Win98 gaming. Throw a GF4-ti4200 or Radeon-9800 in any socket 478, and you have a Win98 machine on steroids.

brostenen wrote:

I will say that these boards are best suited for a fast Win98 machine, being somewhat compatible with Dos. I am afraid that you will have a hard time installing and running pure Dos, and an Win98/ME installation is a way better option in this case. The Live card is no good in pure dos aimed at 386 era gaming. The system is too fast for speed sensitive games, and the Live can not be used with XMS games. Another big drawback with the Live, is a really bad Adlib compatibility. It sounds horribly, compared to the midi part, wich is actually pretty good on a Live.

All in all. A system based on that Gigabyte board, and a Live installed, will be good for those late era Dos games. Games such as Duke3D or Doom-II. If you want to have good Adlib (OPL) support in those Dos games that can be launched through Win98/ME, then I will strongly recommend an YMF-724. It has an awesomme midi compatible chip, plus that chip actually have an OPL core build into it.

Just don't expect all 386-era games to work 100% with this setup, even with an YMF-724 (or 744 for that matter) However... Win9x games will work perfectly.

Since i fallen into the SB Live OEM trap, i have my windows 98 pentium 4 with dosbox installed, works for older games and newer games.

.legaCy wrote:

brostenen wrote:

I will say that these boards are best suited for a fast Win98 machine, being somewhat compatible with Dos. I am afraid that you will have a hard time installing and running pure Dos, and an Win98/ME installation is a way better option in this case. The Live card is no good in pure dos aimed at 386 era gaming. The system is too fast for speed sensitive games, and the Live can not be used with XMS games. Another big drawback with the Live, is a really bad Adlib compatibility. It sounds horribly, compared to the midi part, wich is actually pretty good on a Live.

All in all. A system based on that Gigabyte board, and a Live installed, will be good for those late era Dos games. Games such as Duke3D or Doom-II. If you want to have good Adlib (OPL) support in those Dos games that can be launched through Win98/ME, then I will strongly recommend an YMF-724. It has an awesomme midi compatible chip, plus that chip actually have an OPL core build into it.

Just don't expect all 386-era games to work 100% with this setup, even with an YMF-724 (or 744 for that matter) However... Win9x games will work perfectly.

Since i fallen into the SB Live OEM trap, i have my windows 98 pentium 4 with dosbox installed, works for older games and newer games.

Yup... That is indeed another way to go. Personally I like to do it on real hardware and not through emulation.

The Epox board uses the 865 chipset which is known to work well in DOS with either Vortex 2 sound or YMF-PCI sound (using PC/PCI or the DSDMA TSR). The SIS chipset on the Gigabyte board is an unknown quantity to me in this regard.

brostenen wrote:

.legaCy wrote:

brostenen wrote:

I will say that these boards are best suited for a fast Win98 machine, being somewhat compatible with Dos. I am afraid that you will have a hard time installing and running pure Dos, and an Win98/ME installation is a way better option in this case. The Live card is no good in pure dos aimed at 386 era gaming. The system is too fast for speed sensitive games, and the Live can not be used with XMS games. Another big drawback with the Live, is a really bad Adlib compatibility. It sounds horribly, compared to the midi part, wich is actually pretty good on a Live.

All in all. A system based on that Gigabyte board, and a Live installed, will be good for those late era Dos games. Games such as Duke3D or Doom-II. If you want to have good Adlib (OPL) support in those Dos games that can be launched through Win98/ME, then I will strongly recommend an YMF-724. It has an awesomme midi compatible chip, plus that chip actually have an OPL core build into it.

Just don't expect all 386-era games to work 100% with this setup, even with an YMF-724 (or 744 for that matter) However... Win9x games will work perfectly.

Since i fallen into the SB Live OEM trap, i have my windows 98 pentium 4 with dosbox installed, works for older games and newer games.

Yup... That is indeed another way to go. Personally I like to do it on real hardware and not through emulation.

I agree with you, i really like doing the real hardware way, but on my case(space constraints) i can't have lots of builds and 8086 and 286 prices are insanely high where i live so dosbox is the way to go on my case to play frogger.
And since podracer is finicky with the O.S, my Pentium 4 with Windows 98 and dosbox became my "ultimate" cheap retro gaming system.
In my main language(portuguese) there is a saying that directly translated is: who don't have a dog, hunt with an cat.

I'm an idiot. It's not an Epox 4PDA5+' it's a 4PDA3i.

Still the i865PE chipset, but can you good fellows double check?

I'm getting a Pentium MMX board from a friend but would like to keep one of these two for a pure W9x machine.

Fundamentally the same board as far as compatibility is concerned. I rather like the SiS P4 chipsets as compared to the early, brain-dead Intel ones with bad memory (i845) and PCI (both i845 and i850) performance, but the 865P(E) is pretty much the ultimate P4 AGP chipset, both in terms of performance and compatibility. But that means it'll run Win98 without issues. DOS wil run fine on the board itself, but drivers for cards are the issue, as well as raw speed (far, far too much of that).

Big "but" though on the Epox: Epox boards are notorious (even by the standards of the time) for awful capacitor quality. Be prepared to replace pretty much every cap on the board if that hasn't already been done. Fortunately they were also pretty much the best enthusiast boards at the time, so it's worth it - although Gigabyte boards are generally also well supported, fully featured and stable, so If the Epox is in the state I'd expect it to be in and you can't (be bothered to) replace the caps, it's a perfectly good second choice. Check its caps too, Gigabyte tended to use better ones, but after 15 year's that's no guarantee.

If you have a P4 system and a P166MMX and want to use one for pure Win9x and the other for Win9x and DOS it's a no-brainer: the P4 865PE system is the ultimate Win98SE system (er, barring some AMD stuff 😉 ), the P166MMX is far better suited to running DOS stuff, both in terms of speed and availability of ISA slots. It can also run Win98SE if needed, but will give you more of a "period" experience there 😜

Note: in both cases, take it easy on the RAM. The P4 (or rather: the 865PE) can handle 4GB, but Win98SE doesn't like more than 512MB (yes, there are patches, but unless you're doing stuff you could better do on a modern build, there's no reason for anywhere near so much). In the case of the P166MMX, the chipset and motherboard cache config determine the optimal amount of RAM. Most CPUs like that will be paired with a board that can only cache 64MB. Anything over that will incur you a big performance hit (unless you are actively using more memory, in which case it's always faster than thrashing). Check which motherboard that CPU comes with to be sure, as there are exceptions. If you're lucky it could be something like an Asus P55T2P4 rev 3.1 with second tag RAM installed. In that case it can cache 512MB - if you can find the 128MB 72p SIMMs you need to get there 😉

Hmm, I've spotted a bent set of pins on the Epox, the System fan power supply. That and what you say about caps make me lean to the gigabyte despite the chipset.

Else.... There is a ton of cheap 865 based socket 478 boards on eBay. 😉 (even with cpu)
As an example, there is an "Abit is7-e2" for cheap from France at this moment.
However, it is with 865pe chipset, and I have no idea if there is a difference on PE and other versions.

The 865 PE supports faster bus clocks than the 865 P. Both do not feature GMA video onboard.

gladders wrote:

I realise these components may be somewhat excessively overpowered for a DOS machine!

Not necessarily: If you can disable L1 cache, you get speeds around a fast 486 for some speed-sensitive games.

Your main issue without ISA or SB-Link is getting sound to work in DOS. Some PCI sound cards, like YM7x4 or Solo-1 can work though, but compatibility can vary with chipsets.