Spent a little bit of cash to start an ultimate Win98/Xp Pentium 4 build.

Motherboard: Supermicro P4SCA (A Socket 478 mobo with 2x SATA, 2xIDE, and 3x ISA!)

CPU: Pentium 4 3.0Ghz SL8JZ (800mhz FSB)
RAM: 512 of DDR400
and 2x 2.5" 120GB SATA SLC SSDs.

I'm guessing DOS compatibility might be a bit of an issue, but I did buy MoSlo, which will help in deactivating some caches and slowing things down. Hoping to get 30+ year compatibility from one machine!

Next up is some peripherals, a case, and a power supply <3 can't wait.

Nice, a P4 motherboard with ISA slots. Are there motherboards like that with also an AGP slot?

Yes, but they're dreadfully expensive. I looked for like 20 hours for the perfect combination of at least 2 SATA, P4, ISA, at least 1 IDE and an AGP and... they're like 500+ USD.

I can imagine. Looks like the Holy Grail (:

On Ali there are new motherboards with socket 478, AGP and ISA slots. No SATA as far as I can tell. Based on the 845GV chipset. Like this one:

I did look into those! But I wanted to be able to quickly swap SSDs for different OSes and IDE makes that a bit difficult/clunky. Plus, Ali Express is a little daunting and not my favorite to deal with.

I'll likely make a full post once the build is complete to analyze things.

dumpsterac1d wrote:

Spent a little bit of cash to start an ultimate Win98/Xp Pentium 4 build. […]
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Spent a little bit of cash to start an ultimate Win98/Xp Pentium 4 build.

Motherboard: Supermicro P4SCA (A Socket 478 mobo with 2x SATA, 2xIDE, and 3x ISA!)
CPU: Pentium 4 3.0Ghz SL8JZ (800mhz FSB)
RAM: 512 of DDR400
and 2x 2.5" 120GB SATA SLC SSDs.

I'm guessing DOS compatibility might be a bit of an issue, but I did buy MoSlo, which will help in deactivating some caches and slowing things down. Hoping to get 30+ year compatibility from one machine!

Next up is some peripherals, a case, and a power supply <3 can't wait.

That board is almost perfect. I could live with PCI for video only, I would try to find a Geforce 6200 PCI which is fast enough for W98 games.

Anterag wrote:

liqmat wrote:

Agree with everything you say, BUT this little guy is a very nice Windows 98SE box to mess around with. The integrated Rage Pro […]
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CkRtech wrote:

So I helped out friends quite a bit back in the day when desktops reigned supreme. Packard Bell, Hewlett Packard, etc... had their quirks. But by far the worst machine I ever worked on was an eMachines system that I tried to fix/improve/service for this one girl. I swear those things were the absolute answer to the "modern yet cheap?" question posed at the time.

What Donald Duck game is that?

Agree with everything you say, BUT this little guy is a very nice Windows 98SE box to mess around with. The integrated Rage Pro works extremely well with the early 3D games. I actually really like the system for early Windows 9x games. The fact it was in such nice condition was a plus. The factory 4GB hard drive had massively failed, but with the BIOS update and 40GB hard drive replacement it is actually a rather zippy little machine.

I was wondering if anyone would catch that. haha That is a demo/prototype version of Donald Duck Goin Quackers (went by Quack Attack in Europe) (called Donald Duck Demo in this early release) and was released on a Mickey Mouse magazine demo disc. It had quite a few differences from the later commercial release. You can download this demo prototype from the link at the bottom of this post. (It only runs in Windows 9x. I could not get it running in Windows 7 64 at all even with dgVoodoo). Make sure to go to the options screen right after you load the game and turn up the sound effects volume which is turned all the way down by default for some reason. Also increase the graphic sharpness as well in the options.

http://kuribo64.net/board/thread.php?id=3352

Hello! Could you please upload the demo somewhere so we can download it? The link on kuribo64 is dead and I can't find any other sources. I also asked to the creator of the thread but he didn't respond. Thank you in advance!

You know you can find the final commercial release of that game fairly cheap on Ebay or do you just want the prototype demo because it's different from the final release?

SpectriaForce wrote:

That board is almost perfect. I could live with PCI for video only, I would try to find a Geforce 6200 PCI which is fast enough for W98 games.

Thankfully, my entire stock of higher-end video cards from the era are all PCI since my other PC doesn't have AGP either. And I have a 6200 PCI coming in the mail tomorrow 😀 will need to find Win98 drivers though.

dumpsterac1d wrote:

SpectriaForce wrote:

That board is almost perfect. I could live with PCI for video only, I would try to find a Geforce 6200 PCI which is fast enough for W98 games.

Thankfully, my entire stock of higher-end video cards from the era are all PCI since my other PC doesn't have AGP either. And I have a 6200 PCI coming in the mail tomorrow 😀 will need to find Win98 drivers though.

Almost all NVIDIA drivers can still be found on their website. A couple links of NVIDIA might not work (might not apply to Geforce 6 Forceware driver), but you should be able to find a FTP server with the right drivers using a search engine.

Anyway, is that board ATX? It looks like it. An I/O shield would also be handy.

SpectriaForce wrote:

Almost all NVIDIA drivers can still be found on their website. A couple links of NVIDIA might not work (might not apply to Geforce 6 Forceware driver), but you should be able to find a FTP server with the right drivers using a search engine.

Anyway, is that board ATX? It looks like it. An I/O shield would also be handy.

I think the latest nVidia drivers for 98 do show support for this card, but my concern is that the vram on the card is roughly equal to the max ram Win98 can take without getting strange. It will be an interesting experiment regardless, and I have a Radeon 9250 PCI 256 and a Geforce FX 5200 PCI 256, so if I encounter any issues, I'll live 😉

It is good ole ATX. I have my eye on an HTPC ATX case with 4 5.25 bays... pretty excited all around to put this together.

Muppets4 wrote:

I can imagine. Looks like the Holy Grail (:

On Ali there are new motherboards with socket 478, AGP and ISA slots. No SATA as far as I can tell. Based on the 845GV chipset. Like this one:

845GV-motherboard-with-3IAS-Slot-478PIN-845-ISA-motherboard-Well-Tested-Working.jpg_640x640.jpg

I might be misinformed, but I think I once read that those 'modern' board with ISA slots use a PCI to ISA bridge that takes away some of ISA's key benefits?

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Muppets4 wrote:

I can imagine. Looks like the Holy Grail (:

On Ali there are new motherboards with socket 478, AGP and ISA slots. No SATA as far as I can tell. Based on the 845GV chipset. Like this one:

845GV-motherboard-with-3IAS-Slot-478PIN-845-ISA-motherboard-Well-Tested-Working.jpg_640x640.jpg

I might be misinformed, but I think I once read that those 'modern' board with ISA slots use a PCI to ISA bridge that takes away some of ISA's key benefits?

Depends in the bridge chip. The ITE8888 bridge should effectively give you a standard ISA bus and I have some industrial systems that use them and so far this has been the case.

Some of the others don't support DMA.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Muppets4 wrote:

I can imagine. Looks like the Holy Grail (:

On Ali there are new motherboards with socket 478, AGP and ISA slots. No SATA as far as I can tell. Based on the 845GV chipset. Like this one:

845GV-motherboard-with-3IAS-Slot-478PIN-845-ISA-motherboard-Well-Tested-Working.jpg_640x640.jpg

I might be misinformed, but I think I once read that those 'modern' board with ISA slots use a PCI to ISA bridge that takes away some of ISA's key benefits?

What might those be? Mine does this... 🙁

The PCI bus is not just a faster version of ISA, it is completely different and has significant changes to address shortcomings in the ISA bus. For example the ISA bus has dedicated lines for each supported IRQ number, but the PCI bus only has four interrupts called A, B, C and D. The motherboard routes these to actual IRQ numbers, usually with each slot using a different IRQ. This is why IRQ conflicts with PCI cards can often be solved by moving them to a different slot. The card might still use interrupt B, but that will be routed to a different IRQ in a different slot. If your ISA card uses IRQ 5, you might not even have that available on your PCI slot.
The PCI bus also does not support DMA in the same way that ISA does, and this is why early PCI sound cards used the SB-Link cable. It was a way of routing a tiny part of the ISA bus onto the PCI card, so that the card could still respond to ISA DMA requests required for Sound Blaster compatibility. After the Pentium 4, the DMA facility was completely removed from hardware so Sound Blaster compatibility is not electrically possible after this point and must be emulated via software.

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Muppets4 wrote:

I can imagine. Looks like the Holy Grail (:

On Ali there are new motherboards with socket 478, AGP and ISA slots. No SATA as far as I can tell. Based on the 845GV chipset. Like this one:

845GV-motherboard-with-3IAS-Slot-478PIN-845-ISA-motherboard-Well-Tested-Working.jpg_640x640.jpg

I might be misinformed, but I think I once read that those 'modern' board with ISA slots use a PCI to ISA bridge that takes away some of ISA's key benefits?

Well, when I bought this still manufactured Socket 370 board off of Alibaba with one ISA slot, that ISA slot had pretty bad performance. I stuck an ISA video card into it and even in DOS it had pretty bad performance compared to the same video card plugged into a vintage Socket 5 board's ISA slot. So I think there might be some truth to that. Someone suggested I try flashing the BIOS with a Gigabyte BIOS since this board is basically a copy of a certain Gigabyte model. Haven't tried that yet.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Wholes … .172f3e5fYRWMIX

My original post about it:

Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

The Gigabyte board it seems to be duplicating:

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-6VTXE-rev-10#ov

Just purchased this nifty doodaad on ebay, and its on the way..... gimmicky or does it perform correctly, and with what games?

I had a similar pair and they work just as advertised. You'll see bright colors from opposing frames as ghosts on the other frames cause the glasses dont block out all light but it will be enough for you to overlook that. It works with a lot of things but you will have to find those settings online or tweak yourself usually to compensate for the UI overlays.

You should have fun if you've not used modern 3D before.

Got a Clock Port adapter for my GBA1000 Amiga! This is also compat with an A500 side port. On the GBA1000 it goes on the front expansion port, and I'll add a RapidRoad USB adapter to it!

3dfx Voodoo5 5500 PCI

Today's catch: ATA IDE HDD 80GB and 13 x 30-pin SIMM EDO RAM. Cost me 5 EUR on a local auction site.