Similar to what I have ended up with, ie. 4 machines, though differing in detail.

I used k6/x's for my glide/98 box for a long time but it was always too slow for later glide games. Now I use an xp2000+ which seems able to cover an awful lot of ground [especially if I swap the voodoo5 for a ti4], and the 95 box covers earlier stuff when I want to play it on vintage hardware.

Are there some games that play on the fx-55 system but not on the core2duo?

obviously the ti4 is for dx/opengl games not glide.

I'm considering replacing the k6-2 with an athlon t-bird at 700mhz or so for late -99, early -00 gaming but I'm worried about breaking compability with ca -96, -97 titles.

About the FX-55; yeah, quite a few early win xp games wont play nice with a dualcore machine. "Beyond good and evil" and "Psychonauts" come to mind.

Thirst wrote:

... quite a few early win xp games wont play nice with a dualcore machine. "Beyond good and evil" and "Psychonauts" come to mind.

Can this be solved by setting the CPU affinity to one core?

I think GOG.com sells those, so I doubt that they wouldn't run on dual core machines somehow

Thirst wrote:

... quite a few early win xp games wont play nice with a dualcore machine. "Beyond good and evil" and "Psychonauts" come to mind.

I just installed BG&E (from a retail DVD-ROM) on to a C2D system. It seems to work OK. There's an advanced settings tab where you can adjust things if you experience problems with the game. (I didn't have to adjust anything.)

When you say games such as BG&E wont play nice with a dualcore machine, can you describe what the problem(s) are? Thanks.

It's been a while since I attempted it so memory is a little vague on the details of the rig I used but the issues I had with BG&E was primarily with sound going out of synch during cutscenes and the water behaving very eratically when on the hovercraft.

In Psychonauts the sound would stutter every 10 seconds or so. This was on my most current setup, and setting CPU affinity to one core would not alleviate the problem, though I admit I didn't search for very long for a patch to fix the issue.

The fact that GOG.com sells the games would suggest there are ways to get around the problems but these are usually game specific, and it's just easier for me to have a computer that's already compatible sitting under the desk, than to hunt down individual workarounds for every game.

Both games being console conversions, it makes you wonder if it's not just a case of lazy coding.

EDIT:

San Andreas, SW: Battlefront and Deus EX: IW also have some timing issues on C2D systems but these can iirc, be fixed by changing the core affinity.

My reasoning for the singlecore machine is to simply have a hassle-/glitchfree install and play enviroment for these games.

With regards to your Win98 machine:

Only supports up to 256MB of RAM. Wont run Outcast very well at max settings. Look into replacement.

Try bumping it down to 128MB RAM and see what happens. From what little I can find about that board, it looks to have the ALi Aladdin V chipset, and if it's one of the earlier revisions, it'll only cache up to 128MB RAM when equipped with 512K L2. That could explain lackluster performance in games.

I gave 128MB a whirl. I'm not sure if it's just my imagination or if it's actually running slightly faster. Still only getting 5-10 fps in Outcast sadly. Good idea though 😀 ty

I think I'm going to have to throw this one out for a thunderbird instead. I just hope it wont break any early Win95/98 games.

I'm not sure if it's just my imagination or if it's actually running slightly faster.

I'd say that it wasn't an issue of cacheable RAM, then. Usually when there's an issue like that, the difference in performance is large enough to leave no doubts. It was worth a shot, though.

I really don't think you're going to run into any compatibility issues by going to a 700mhz Athlon. At least, no more than you would with that 550mhz K6-2. There are several people on here using upper-end PIIIs without troubles. And you could always keep that Socket7 board around in the spare parts bin, just in case you do chance upon a game that doesn't work well.

Sounds good 😀

Another question regarding the Win98 machine; is SBLive! as good as it gets for gaming or are there alternatives I should be looking at?

I've looked around a bit online and here on the forums, and it seems that while other manufacturers have richer feature sets, the soundblaster way seems the more compatible one. I wouldn't mind switching out cards for individual games but technical sound terminology is bewildering, and I'm not sure what to look for.

The Roland Lapc-i has been heralded a lot but seems hard to get a hold of and I'm not sure it's suitable for the more modern system.

Outcast is a game known to have strange speed related compatibility issues. For example, if you run it on a fast P3, then your character's movement through any of the water sections goes in to a kind of "slow motion" mode. The game becomes unplayable. I wonder if something odd is going on, with the K6 CPU. I know if I run the game Might and Magic 6 using a T-Bird, the game's mechanics go wrong. For example, the NPCs get stuck walking on the spot. If I remove the T-Bird, and replace it with a slow Duron, this problem goes away. Also, if I run this game on any P3 CPU, this problem does not occur.

It might be an issue with the K6 specifically yeah. I wish I had a P3 of similar speed to try it on.

What was the speed difference between the duron and the t-bird that gave you trouble?

Thirst wrote:

It might be an issue with the K6 specifically yeah. I wish I had a P3 of similar speed to try it on.

What was the speed difference between the duron and the t-bird that gave you trouble?

I'm fairly sure the T-Bird CPU was 1000mhz, and the Duron CPU was 750mhz. I seem to remember trying both a B and C model T-Bird - in other words, a 100FSB and also a 133FSB version. Both T-Birds made the M&M6 game behave oddly.

I'll have a look for a PIII @ ca 800Mhz. It should push through Outcast at max settings without breaking compability with earlier games such as M&M6.

Thirst wrote:

I'll have a look for a PIII @ ca 800Mhz. It should push through Outcast at max settings without breaking compability with earlier games such as M&M6.

I'm confident that a PIII @ 800mhz will be a very good choice for both Outcast, M&M6, and a whole ton of other old Win9x games. I have used one of these CPUs for lots of testing, and found them to be a good solid performer.

I went on a retro PC building craze, then promptly a retro PC selling craze a couple years later. It turns out I enjoyed building them more than playing them.

I'm down to two PC's now. My Win98 box with a PIII 1.0Ghz running Win98 and my current rig with an E8400 C2D. DOSBox takes care of most things older than what runs on Win98.

Now mind you....both of those are decked out and I have more MIDI devices than you can shake a stick at. 😀

The P3 did wonders for Outcast. 😁

My 486 still wont behave though. With the Promise controller card in, all I get is a black screen, and without it I'm stuck without a HDD.

I was eyeing a card on ebay ( http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt … e=STRK:MEWAX:IT) but that one was for the ISA bus only, unlike mine which supports VLB. Will I experience a dramatic performance hit with the inferior card?

Will I experience a dramatic performance hit with the inferior card?

That card you linked is not even an IDE controller, it's MFM. Those things were obsolete several years before 486s even hit the market. Putting aside the considerable difficulty of finding a working MFM drive, "dramatic" wouldn't even begin to describe the performance hit... that thing would make the machine unusably slow.

A later model 16-bit ISA EIDE controller would be able to deliver passable performance, at least in comparison to your older VLB card. Yeah, there'd be a little bit of a penalty, but it wouldn't necessarily be that big of a difference as long as you got a decent card.

How much troubleshooting have you done with your existing controller, though? There's any number of things that could cause it not to work, which may or may not be any fault of the card itself.