For the 2D graphics, I would go for a S3 card. Pretty much compatible with a lot of DOS games. TNT2 is also great.

CPU doesn't really matter, but the faster the CPU, the hotter your Voodoos will going to get.

Go with PIII and Riva TNT 2/Geforce 256 up to FX series whatever you find cheap. Nvidia cards are very compatible with old DOS games. If you disable cache, you get about 386DX33 speed.

ATX boards for K6 are going to be extremely rare. Most of Socket 7 boards on sale are without AGP port as everyone keeps the best boards for themselves. 486 boards are just too old, too expensive for most people, are sold incomplete and often require fixing battery.

If you wanna tinker with 486, start with 86Box emulator first.

With those I would go Pentium II, S3 Trio64 + the Voodoos in SLI, and the PCI Sound Blaster although it would be nicer to get an ISA card. Some Slot 1 motherboards have very good built in sound from Yamaha.

Go for a S3 video card + Voodoo 2 combo and a ISA sound card if you value DOS compatibility. nVidia video cards are also a decent choice but be careful with the drivers on Windows since the more modern is the card, newer drivers are required and these may come with more CPU overhead.

Socket 7 (and Super Socket 7) CPUs are better for slowing down when disabling cache than the Pentium II/III since the speed gap is very large on the latter CPUs when the cache is disabled. Some Socket 7 Pentium MMX CPUs also supports the TR12 registers used by SetMul for additional slowdown. However for the games you said any CPU is fine.

Thanks for the replies.

I'll probably go for a Slot 1 Piii if that's suitable (since that can also be Socket 370 compatible via an adapter).

I will likely replace the sound card in time, it's just for the initial build since I already have it.

As for GPUs, I'll look around at the suggestions.

Beware, higher speed slot 1 cpus are more expensive and rarer. It's quite easy and cheap to get PIII 450-600Mhz though. Many come with a passive heatsink only and benefit from installation of a little fan. The black cartridge can be opened and thermal paste replaced. I ended up using bolts and nuts to secure heatsink to cartrige with CPU inside as that is a lot easier to disassemble than the original retention pins. I also put a little fan on it.

Avoid PII as the price difference is nonexistent and they lack SSE. Only useful for boards that don't support PIII.

I had PIII slot 1 600Mhz until I found 3x cheap 1Ghz socket 370 models and bought them all. One of them is now running downclocked to 750Mhz.

AlexZ wrote on 2021-08-19, 20:44:

Beware, higher speed slot 1 cpus are more expensive and rarer. It's quite easy and cheap to get PIII 450-600Mhz though. Many come with a passive heatsink only and benefit from installation of a little fan. The black cartridge can be opened and thermal paste replaced. I ended up using bolts and nuts to secure heatsink to cartrige with CPU inside as that is a lot easier to disassemble than the original retention pins. I also put a little fan on it.

Avoid PII as the price difference is nonexistent and they lack SSE. Only useful for boards that don't support PIII.

I had PIII slot 1 600Mhz until I found 3x cheap 1Ghz socket 370 models and bought them all.

Coppermine-based PIII CPUs (there are 500-650Mhz models around) runs the L2 cache at full speed instead of half-speed like the earlier ones so one has to keep an eye for this.

Earlier PII CPUs has unlocked multipliers for slowing down.

Ok so change of plans, the motherboard I wanted comes with a Pii including a cooler, so I might as well use that for the initial setup with plans to upgrade later.

All that's left is the GPU for this basic initial setup.

How problematic is something like the Riva TNT2 for DOS/W3.x? I like the idea of using AGP to save a PCI socket, but if it's too problematic I'll probably go for the S3 Trio64.

Some people sell motherboards with PII because they don't support later PIII coppermine. But they usually support at least PIII Katmai up to 600Mhz (which is not bad either).

TNT2 pro has such good DOS compatibility it would be a waste of slot to use S3 Trio. Vogons drivers also has drivers for Windows 3.1.

tech3475 wrote on 2021-08-20, 21:19:

All that's left is the GPU for this basic initial setup.

How problematic is something like the Riva TNT2 for DOS/W3.x? I like the idea of using AGP to save a PCI socket, but if it's too problematic I'll probably go for the S3 Trio64.

While I have a nVidia TNT2 card I can't tell about the experience on Windows 3.x since I don't run this on my machines but the compatibility with DOS games is quite decent. If you want to use this card I'd suggest to stay from the M64 and Vanta variants since these are slower for playing 3D games that uses Direct3D or OpenGL compared to the regular, Pro and Ultra variants. Also make sure that it comes with 32MB of memory.

You can also pair it with a Voodoo2 for Glide API support if you have any spare PCI socket there.

AlexZ wrote on 2021-08-20, 21:30:

Some people sell motherboards with PII because they don't support later PIII coppermine. But they usually support at least PIII Katmai up to 600Mhz (which is not bad either).

TNT2 pro has such good DOS compatibility it would be a waste of slot to use S3 Trio. Vogons drivers also has drivers for Windows 3.1.

The reason I went with this board (Gigabyte GA-6BXE V2) is because it’s the closest I could find to encompass most of what I’d want from the rig I/O wise….well hopefully.

I looked around, supposedly people got the board to work with Coppermine but worst case I’m not too bothered.

The TNT2 M64 seems to be the more common model where I live, which seems to have compatibility issues.

I’ll have a look at the Rage 128, any revisions I should be concerned about?

tech3475 wrote on 2021-08-20, 22:12:

The TNT2 M64 seems to be the more common model where I live, which seems to have compatibility issues.

Which compatibility issues?

The main difference is that the M64 and Vanta is that they use 64-bit of memory interface instead of 128-bit.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2021-08-20, 22:23:

tech3475 wrote on 2021-08-20, 22:12:

The TNT2 M64 seems to be the more common model where I live, which seems to have compatibility issues.

Which compatibility issues?

The main difference is that the M64 and Vanta is that they use 64-bit of memory interface instead of 128-bit.

It seems people have had problems with software requiring UNIVBE, although reading elsewhere even the TNT2 seems to have this issue.

edit:

I think I'll just go for the S3, it's cheap enough and I have enough PCI slots for now, especially if I shift the sound card over to ISA in the future.

Thank you for the advice.

tech3475 wrote on 2021-08-21, 07:40:

It seems people have had problems with software requiring UNIVBE, although reading elsewhere even the TNT2 seems to have this is […]
Show full quote

It seems people have had problems with software requiring UNIVBE, although reading elsewhere even the TNT2 seems to have this issue.

edit:

I think I'll just go for the S3, it's cheap enough and I have enough PCI slots for now, especially if I shift the sound card over to ISA in the future.

Thank you for the advice.

UniVBE 6.7 never worked for me with a TNT2 card and my TNT2 card is vanilla it still refuses to load. However they all VBE 3.0 compliant, the only thing that you will be missing are 15bpp (few games used this) and some low VESA resolutions such as 320x480, 400x300 and 512x384. There are workaround around these but they aren't perfect.

S3 cards are great for DOS and works with both UniVBE and S3VBE20. The latter one is a decent alternative to UniVBE and takes much less memory when loaded.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2021-08-21, 12:35:

tech3475 wrote on 2021-08-21, 07:40:

It seems people have had problems with software requiring UNIVBE, although reading elsewhere even the TNT2 seems to have this is […]
Show full quote

It seems people have had problems with software requiring UNIVBE, although reading elsewhere even the TNT2 seems to have this issue.

edit:

I think I'll just go for the S3, it's cheap enough and I have enough PCI slots for now, especially if I shift the sound card over to ISA in the future.

Thank you for the advice.

UniVBE 6.7 never worked for me with a TNT2 card and my TNT2 card is vanilla it still refuses to load. However they all VBE 3.0 compliant, the only thing that you will be missing are 15bpp (few games used this) and some low VESA resolutions such as 320x480, 400x300 and 512x384. There are workaround around these but they aren't perfect.

S3 cards are great for DOS and works with both UniVBE and S3VBE20. The latter one is a decent alternative to UniVBE and takes much less memory when loaded.

Ok thank you.

S3 is a great card for pure dos but will be a major bottleneck for a P2 and any Direct 3D games. Even the TNT2 will be a bottleneck if gaming at higher resolutions.

Pentium 2 or 3 you really want something around GeForce 2 performance levels. which have just as good compatibility as TNT.
This page will show any compatibly issues for a card. Remember your not after 100% compatibility, just checking against what games are important for you
https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS

chinny22 wrote on 2021-08-23, 09:18:

S3 is a great card for pure dos but will be a major bottleneck for a P2 and any Direct 3D games. Even the TNT2 will be a bottlen […]
Show full quote

S3 is a great card for pure dos but will be a major bottleneck for a P2 and any Direct 3D games. Even the TNT2 will be a bottleneck if gaming at higher resolutions.

Pentium 2 or 3 you really want something around GeForce 2 performance levels. which have just as good compatibility as TNT.
This page will show any compatibly issues for a card. Remember your not after 100% compatibility, just checking against what games are important for you
https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS

Thanks.

I actually found my old Geforce 6200 AGP card, needs a recap (have some on the way) but I might give that a shot to see how it goes even with it's (from what I've read) limited driver support.

Since I already have this and the S3/Voodoo 2 SLI, I'm going to experiment with these and then move forward from there depending on the results.

Funnily enough I did have a Geforce 2 once from an old PC I stripped, but it suffered from bad caps and I had zero solder skills back then.

Once I've settled the GPU situation my next plan is to look at ISA Sound cards (with OPL3?), perhaps also looking at the PI based MIDI options for Roland support.

Update:

Did a basic test yesterday with the motherboard and it's reporting CPU failure via BIOS beeps. Tried the usual things e.g. check the jumpers, clear CMOS, cleaning the connections with IPA but nothing.

Ordered a different cheap but 'tested' CPU to do diagnostics and hope it isn't the motherboard.

Update 2:

Managed to get it working (hopefully), I managed to get it to at least boot to DOS and ran a BIOS update which seems to have cleared the issue.

So I've made progress, although it seems the 6200 is too much of a PITA, either I'm getting Code 12 errors or Windows Protection Errors when I try manually selecting memory.

For now the S3 PCI card is working, although I'll look at an alternative AGP card since I'd like to free that slot if possible.