First post, by Zack1982
Hello to everyone.
I am building a system for my new brother's home to allow him to play games from 386 to PII eras. I would like to create a kind of "server" for old games to put in the cellar and connect to the TV in the living room.
In case you have suggestions on how to improve or you would like to do the same, specs are:
- Abit BE6 II (I wanted other HDDs ports)
- 2x256MB PC133 (7ns CL2 ECC)
- PII 400 from 24th week 1998 (unlocked multipliers, from 3.0 to 5.0 in steps of 0.5)
- Riva TNT2 M64 16 MB AGP (to be replaced with a S3 Virge DX 4 MB PCI)
- 2 Voodoo2 Game3D with 110MHz ram
- Awe 64 Gold + SimmConn module with 32 MB Simm + SPDIF module
- 6 x 120GB IDE UDMA133 7200 RPM hard drive (not RAID) - I would like to store all the ISOs of the games plus installing the games on the 2 hdds that are on the UDMA 33 controller.
- 1 x 40 GB IDE UDMA133 7200 RPM hard drive
- Generic USB 2.0 PCI card (better for moving files, I don't want to use network)
- Generic IDE CDRW
- Floppy 3.5"
- Windows 98 SE (without SP3)
I tested during Christmas and with the Riva AGP I was able to go from 3.0x66=200 MHz to 3.5*142= 497 MHz without any crash/instability. I set the CPU cache to 15 when setting the fsb to 142, but I think that with the S3 PCI I should have less issues in going up to 3.0x166 = 498 MHz. I tried on the BE6 II and also on a P3B-F to set the multipliers to 2.0 and 2.5 by switches, but it did not work, the pc was not posting. By deactivating the L1 and/or L2 cache it should be feasible to simulate the 386 and 486 when set to 3.0x66 MHz.
I read quite a lot and I still have two doubts:
- Is the S3 really so better for DOS games?
- Would a PCI SB Live! be beneficial for the Windows games? In the end the quality of the Awe 64 gold is not bad.