Nicolas 2000 wrote on 2025-05-16, 09:10:

If I would go the heatsink route, what IC's/RAM need to have a heatsink on a Voodoo2 card? I read everything from just the middle 3DFX IC over all three 3DFX IC's upto all IC's and all RAM.

IMO the processors themselves are the biggest concern. It would not hurt for all of them. RAM should not get too hot as is, would probably be an overkill. May be voltage regulator if you want to prevent it from cooking the stuff around, the regulator itself is fine as is.

Any good sources of stick-on heatsinks? Ali has great heatsinks but they're provided with basically heat-resistant double sided tape, which is not the same as heat-transfer tape and if you're really unlucky might make things worse instead of better. I haven't decided yet whether or not to go down this heatsink route, perhaps first simply monitor temperatures with just my armada of big old fans.

If you do not trust ali sellers to actually use thermal transfer tape and not just regular tape you can buy it separately and but heatsinks with no tape from ali. It'll probably be the simplest way.

Or you can just buy some thermal adhesive and glue the heatsinks to the chips.

The SLI cable has been made, slightly longer than original to be able to skip 1 slot, but not so long that it will cause issues I think. I can't really test it before trying it in the actual setup, but it looks like everything is in the right spot.

Update!

-My fans are 80mm, the case is designed for 70mm. So I'll order two nice 70mm fans for case front-to-back, and then create a wall of 3x80mm fans to gently whisper over the voodoo's.
-my version of the motherboard apparently is the "no options" one: it doesn't have onboard sound even though it has the connectors at the back.
-that Philips Soundblaster turned out to be a dial up modem. Thanks, seller!

So...I only have the SB Live for sound instead of the apparent 3 options. And cherry on top: I was exploring driver CD's and clicked too fast "no" when he asked me to *keep* the current driver instead of *copy* the current driver (why does he ask the opposite action of what you requested affirmatively? Sorry, HMI major here, pet peeve!) so now my SB drivers are messed up. It's an SB Live with colourful sockets, so an OEM one. Don't ask which one exactly. Apparently these are very driver picky. What should I do now? I read about using Audigy drivers...

In other, more positive news:
-the SLI cable is done
-The CPU has fresh paste (but boy do those heatsinks on bare Coppermines sit loose!)
-I'm now running 384MB RAM
-I have managed to not only make the USB optical mouse work, but also USB flash drives! That makes life SO much easier when transfering files between the new internet PC and ye olde beige.

So what I'm doing is getting everything else on point before going Voodoo. And the big one now is getting the Live going again. I can have some sounds such as the onboard MIDI/SF keyboard, but during boot he now says the SB16 emulator isn't loading and I get a blue screen error whenever Windows tries to play a system sound. Removing all hardware related to the SB and letting the W98SE CD install stuff again didn't solve it; I feel like that emulator he has in C:\program files\Creative is not compatible with the drivers I now have or something.

I could see me messing up the Live! drivers as a sign to buy that shiny Audigy 2 ZS gold locally...

But perhaps I should try to get things right with the Live! first.

Yeah, that issue with drivers is why i like to image hard drives before i mess with stuff. This way i can screw up and restore everything into its original state as much as i want. And after getting used to modern, much more foolproof, software it is really easy to screw up 😀

Given how easy it is to do having modern fast and large thumb drives it is generally a good idea to make backups from time to time IMO, saves a lot of frustration.

Can not really give any useful advice regarding audio driver issues though...

I did get audigy 2 zs recently myself because i wanted to install win98 on otherwise compatible (but quite overkill) system and audigy4 it had, while it was fine on xp, did not work well with 98. So far 2zs has worked well for me, no issues.

And nice progress, apart from inevitable difficulties it seems to be going well...

The USB flash drive is unimaginably slow running at V1.1, but I'm not complaining as the alternative was burning CD's.

Sb Live works again! I did the Audigy driver dance, which I now recognize was the way this card was made to work in this PC before I ruined it.
Patched Cyberdogs (error 200). Now both Cyberdogs and SicksNSlide work straight from W98, so it looks like there will be no need for me to keep my older PC.

OK, time for bed. Tomorrow I'll try to order a pair of fans and further clean up the hard drive. All in prep for project Voodoo.

By the way, it has a 20GB hard drive which is nice. However it's 60% full so I must look into that. For starters, quite some games installed so everything that I don't care for or don't have the necessary disk for has to go.

I stumbled upon a cheap "gold" Audigy 2 with the beige bay panel locally, so I had to buy it to complete my anno 2000 beige baller build (it's a full size ATX case so 3 large bays in front).

But at least, with the Live working, I bought it out of choice instead of necessity.

And I already have the Audigy drivers installed anyway. 😁

BIOS battery replaced.

While waiting for the fans etc to arrive, I'm trying DOS games. Everything works, so the older PC can be sold.

One exception: Worms. In W98 it freezes and in DOS no mouse is detected. I have a PS/2 and USB mouse, working fine in Windows. Do I need some autoexec magic or something to make mice work in DOS?

For clarity: I have two mice, one PS/2 and one (old) USB, and neither are detected by Worms in DOS.

I also saw some mouse.exe errors or something when restarting to DOS, but I have not yet been able to write them down.

CTMOUSE is the DOS mouse driver to rule them all, think it has to be PS/2 or serial though

Thanks, I'll look into it.

Placed CTmouse.exe in C:\. Ran it in DOS, it recognizes the PS/2 mouse and Worms works.

Now the finetuning part:

-where do I have to put the command "ctmouse" to run it automatically when rebooting to DOS? I tried autoexec.bat but it doesn't seem to do anything.

-My Logitech USB mouse software tries to launch its own mouse.exe when rebooting to DOS, which doesn't work. The thing is: I can't find this command anywhere in autoexec.bat or config.sys. Any idea?

After a full reboot, ctmouse in autoexec.bat now works. Apparently, reboot to dos right after changing the bat wasn't enough.

Worms remains an unstable mess though in dos and w98, sometimes it works but often it crashes in the main menu. Perhaps PC too fast for running the game stable, any easy tool for that? Anyway, less important.

So what remains is logitech mouse.exe launching itself when rebooting to dos. I don't want that, but can't find the file containing this command.

Nicolas 2000 wrote on 2025-05-17, 17:59:

I stumbled upon a cheap "gold" Audigy 2 with the beige bay panel locally, so I had to buy it to complete my anno 2000 beige baller build (it's a full size ATX case so 3 large bays in front).

I'm Jealous! Wanted one for years to fill a slot in a beige case that I'm missing the cover. Black is far more common.
Also think the lack of onboard sound is a good thing. it offers nothing that the Live/Audigy cant do.

It's common for some dos games simply hate dos and wont work with windows in the background.
How do you boot into dos? Boot disk, from the shutdown menu, etc?

I go into dos from the shutdown menu.

user33331 wrote on 2025-05-16, 04:41:

Why people believe this myth about digital SSDs being better than physical real HDD disc drives ? - The fact is if SSDs are not […]
Show full quote

Archer57 wrote on 2025-05-15, 15:22:

It may also be worth replacing the HDD with small SSD right away, unless you specifically want period-correct slow as hxxl experience. It is also a likely failure point - old HDDs are not very reliable at this point. Getting rid of it right away may save a lot of frustration later...

Why people believe this myth about digital SSDs being better than physical real HDD disc drives ?
- The fact is if SSDs are not powered for decades (10 years+) it erases itself when unpowered.
When no power is left in SSD to retain it's bits and bytes then it empties itself.
Then all your hard earned data is gone.

Only trustworthy are HDD disc drives.
- I myself even make sure that my modern PCs have large HDD disc drives.
- I have 30-40 years old disc HDDs still working in storage.
- I love my data and want to preserve it. Only HDDs offer this longtime reliability.

I agree 100% with all of the above. Add to that - vintage computers and more importantly the software they run are not designed to work with solid state media, and might actually provide a poor experience compared to using a spinning disk. I've personally had issues with anything older then 775/939 PCs and SSDs. That includes socket A and 478 stuff (but only when win9x and DOS is involved).

My guess is people run away from HDDs in vintage computers because of how physically fragile they can be. Getting one shipped from across the world might turn an otherwise working vintage HDD into a paperweight.

Socket3 wrote on 2025-05-22, 07:39:

user33331 wrote on 2025-05-16, 04:41:

Why people believe this myth about digital SSDs being better than physical real HDD disc drives ? - The fact is if SSDs are not […]
Show full quote

Archer57 wrote on 2025-05-15, 15:22:

It may also be worth replacing the HDD with small SSD right away, unless you specifically want period-correct slow as hxxl experience. It is also a likely failure point - old HDDs are not very reliable at this point. Getting rid of it right away may save a lot of frustration later...

Why people believe this myth about digital SSDs being better than physical real HDD disc drives ?
- The fact is if SSDs are not powered for decades (10 years+) it erases itself when unpowered.
When no power is left in SSD to retain it's bits and bytes then it empties itself.
Then all your hard earned data is gone.

Only trustworthy are HDD disc drives.
- I myself even make sure that my modern PCs have large HDD disc drives.
- I have 30-40 years old disc HDDs still working in storage.
- I love my data and want to preserve it. Only HDDs offer this longtime reliability.

I agree 100% with all of the above. Add to that - vintage computers and more importantly the software they run are not designed to work with solid state media, and might actually provide a poor experience compared to using a spinning disk. I've personally had issues with anything older then 775/939 PCs and SSDs. That includes socket A and 478 stuff (but only when win9x and DOS is involved).

My guess is people run away from HDDs in vintage computers because of how physically fragile they can be. Getting one shipped from across the world might turn an otherwise working vintage HDD into a paperweight.

Statments on these posts are outrageously wrong or at the least misleading and no one who cares about their data should follow what is written there.

First, thinking that data is somehow more secure in HDD is blatantly wrong. MTBF of SSD is far superior compared to HDDs. As they represent very different kinds of technology, the factors affecting SSD reliability are very different from HDDs. For example, the technology used in SSD is a factor in itself and if you have a system with lots of writes, MLC or TLC are generally considered better solutions, although denser (and faster) technologies can be used at the same level as long as you don’t fill the SSDs and leave some capacity on the drives.

Most data centers use both kind of drives nowadays. SSDs are used in applications where storage throughput matters. HDDs are used in applications where it doesn’t matter as HDD capacity is still cheaper. It is a cost, not a reliability issue.

Saying that HDDs don’t go bad just over time is plainly wrong. They do. Magnetic fields on the discs degrade over time causing data corruption. Also, lubrication in the bearings dry out. I’ve seen multiple HDDs that have been ultimately ruined by sticking bearings.

If you claim that you love your data and thus use HDDs, you are doing it wrong. If you love your data, you keep it on redundant (RAID) storage as much as possible and even more importantly, take backups. Whether you use SSD or HDD for this is meaningless, it is most likely a cost issue depending on how much you need storage. I have been running file servers for ages now and all the NAS rated HDDs I’ve used have lasted almost exactly the same time: 4-5 years. Incidentally, this is pretty much on par how long SSDs last in constant use. Both fail in use pretty similarly, just in a different way. I also have one 15 year old SSD running ESXi on one of my servers. It doesn’t get that much writes, but it is relatively good example of how long they can last if you don’t hammer them with huge number of write cycles.

As far as retro systems go, I have currently SSDs on three of my units because they are convenient and more reliable than old used HDDs of similar size. Around 120GB SSDs cost next to nothing and offer plenty of space for win98 systems and they are direct fit without any size issues. With XP era system you can throw in something like few hundred gigs, you again have plenty of space and drives are still cheap as dirt. I have one Slot A and two Socket A systems equipped with SSDs, two with win98 and one with XP. They work perfectly, but then again I don’t use the cheapest possible IDE/SATA adapter junk which I bet is the main reason behind people experiencing problems.

And if they fail? Same as with HDDs, I couldn’t care less, because I have all my important data backed up and especially don’t rely these old systems as reliable storage no matter what storage they have. If SSDs fail on my retro systems, I just purchase new ones, which again cost next to nothing. I don’t see this likely any time soon, as since the late 2000s I’ve been using SSDs, exactly zero have failed on me and I’ve just retired most of them after years of use. Second, the actual hours and write cycles they get on these systems is ridicilously low compared to pretty much any use case for any modern computers used pretty much daily.