I guess I am excited and frustrated at the same time. I am so close on three different approaches, but always miss the mark. A more positive view would be: I need only to overcome one out of three obstacles to hit the jackpot. That being a perfect Dos/Win98/Voodoo PC.

Here is the tragic story of how close one can get without getting there:

Avenue A: The Asus P3B-F R1.04 based machine.
The P3B-F in R1.04 solves most problems flat. It will run all slot 1 CPUs, with all conceivable speeds, covering from 133MHz to 1000+MHz if desired.
Two ISA Slots allow for stereo SBPro, SB32 AWE plus wavetable. (or whatever makes one happy)
The bios allows cache off for both caches, hence Wing Commander1 etc. will run nicely. 5PCI slots will allow for virtually any upgrade, includingV1, V2-SLI, net and usb2.

Tragedy A: The bios does not explicitly allow to turn off “spread spectrum”. But this is a must for my V5 5500 to run in two chip mode. When one OCs the FSB by at least 12%, the bios knows mercy and disables spread spectrum. Which means that I must constantly oc by 12% in order to get the benefits of the Voodoo5.

Solution A needed: Get the bios to turn off spread spectrum or get the V5 to live with it. Or overclock those precious antiquities permanently.

Avenue B: The AOPEN MX 6B EZ, a mATX BX board.
Since I turned spread spectrum off, my V5 5500 runs on it. It will accept any Slot 1 CPU and allow to change the multi down. It also holds only one ISA card, which I could accept as good enough (AWE32 with Yamaha Wavetable). It has limited pci space left, enough for one Voodoo PCI card and a small card (net or usb) next to the AGP. These are also limits I can live with.

Tragedy B: The bios offers only second level cache off. I used to shut off primary cache with choff in DOS. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t work anymore. I can run win98se, use PMcoff for protected mode and exit to dos. But that is a time consuming workaround I would not want to take. (Win98 shutdown without first level cache is not quick – euphemistically speaking)

Solution B needed: Get that L1 cache shut off! Either by a new way or by finding the reason, I can’t take it out any more. (would be ironic, if it were due to spread spectrum disabled)

Avenue C: The pact with hell – Kinetiz 7E-A with the evil KT133A
As one would expect, voodoo 5 works well in hell. L1, L2 and spread spectrum can be disabled. There is an ISA and enough PCI slots. An XP-M will work at fsb 100 and run between 300 and 1200 MHz. The speed can be changed on the fly between 300 and 1050 MHz in Win98. This should cover the entire win98 speed range. With L1 cache off, this speed range will throw many games back into the 286-486 league.

Tragedy C: The speed can only be changed in Windows. The CPU does not seem 100% stable. And a pact with hell lives on borrowed time or soon to die capacitors…

Solution C: A multi-changing utility that works in DOS. Or a wire mod to boot with 300 MHz. Or an undocumented jumper setting for 3x. Speed up could be done in windows if needed.

If you have any advice as to how to overcome any one of those obstacles, please share it here.