VOGONS


First post, by RetroGamingNovice

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Hiya! First time on this site, recently, I took an old Essential 433c, upgraded the hardware, and swapped some out, for use as my first retro gaming rig, and here's the specs currently, and some screencaps of it in action, and its specs, probably going to get picked on for the choice of OS used for it, 🤣.

Board) WL810E.
CPU) 433MHz Celeron (Mendocino core, actually quite adequate for most retro gaming, both DOS and Win9x, as far as clock is concerned).
Graphics) Intel 82810 onboard (although if I could upgrade to a nice AGP Rage! card, I would, but unfortunately there's no AGP slots).
RAM) 192MB (upgraded from the stock 64MB because I had a 128MB PC100 stick sitting unused).
Hard drive) 18GB total combining the total capacity of both my IDE hard drives.
Sound) Creative SB Live! 5.1 SB0100 (although a nice Yamaha XG YMF724 card would be an upgrade to that).
OS) WinME (Yes, I know, the Mistake Edition, however I've only had one catastrophic fail with it so far, and it's been completely usable aside from that, plus it has some added functionality that is lacking in 95c or 98se that makes adding new games easier: native flash drive support and native ZIP archive support. Have to use 7-Zip for non-ZIP archives though).
DX) 9.0c.

Also, here's where my AL440LX board stands and what needs to be done to it.

Board) AL440LX.
CPU) 266MHz P2 Klamath core, which should be plenty for straight DOS, which is what I plan on running on the thing.
RAM) Need to get a 128MB PC100 stick.
Hard drive) Need to get a 10GB drive.
Video) Got an S3 Trio 64V and Diamond Monster 3D accellerator card, which I need to get DOS drivers for.
Sound) YMF715E onboard, which I need to get DOS drivers for.
USB) DOS drivers required for that.
OS) MS-DOS 7.1 or FreeDOS.

And here's the screencaps for the WinME (Yes, WinME) machine that is currently in use, one showing the system summary, and the rest showing it in action with some game screencaps.

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PC hardware: Ryzen 5 4500, 32GB RAM, 1TB SN 570 /500GB 970 EVO Plus/2TB 970 EVO Plus/1TB 870 EVO,, RX 6600 GPU, Arch Linux/Win10 dual-boot

Reply 1 of 5, by ODwilly

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Hey on the WL810E machine if the motherboard supports pci video cards and you have a free slot, they made pci Rage! cards. They are really cheap to.

Main pc: Asus ROG 17. R9 5900HX, RTX 3070m, 16gb ddr4 3200, 1tb NVME.
Retro PC: Soyo P4S Dragon, 3gb ddr 266, 120gb Maxtor, Geforce Fx 5950 Ultra, SB Live! 5.1

Reply 2 of 5, by RetroGamingNovice

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Nice!

PC hardware: Ryzen 5 4500, 32GB RAM, 1TB SN 570 /500GB 970 EVO Plus/2TB 970 EVO Plus/1TB 870 EVO,, RX 6600 GPU, Arch Linux/Win10 dual-boot

Reply 3 of 5, by idspispopd

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RetroGamingNovice wrote:

Video) Got an S3 Trio 64V and Diamond Monster 3D accellerator card, which I need to get DOS drivers for.
Sound) YMF715E onboard, which I need to get DOS drivers for.
USB) DOS drivers required for that.

S3 Trio64V: You don't really need drivers for that, games can just use it. For better performance you can use s3vbe20, s3spdup and some utility to enable write combining like FastVid (see eg. http://www.mdgx.com/umb.htm#FAS). Useful for SVGA games like Duke3d, Quake etc.
Monster 3D: Not actually drivers, you might need a 3dfx patch for some games. Good example for DOS would be Tomb Raider 1. Are you sure it's not a Monster 3D II? A Voodoo2 card would be faster but also less compatible with some earlier games.
YMF715E: That seems to be an ISA chip with OPL3, Sound Blaster Pro and WSS compatibility according to http://mirrors.zerg.biz/alsa/manuals/yamaha/3sa3ee.pdf. Most games should be able to use it, either configure the game or use an appropriate

SET BLASTER=

line in autoexec.bat. Pretty cool to have such a chip on board.

Regarding PCI video cards: Starting from 1997/1998 on video cards that existed as AGP card became more common than the PCI variant so these cards are still more common as AGP. (Starting from S3 Virge GX/2 | Trio3D, nVidia Riva128, Matrox Millennium II, ATI Rage II(+,c)/Pro.) What's your specific goal with the video card?

Reply 4 of 5, by RetroGamingNovice

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So for example, if I were to use:

SET BLASTER=OPL3-SA3

if there is such a variable for that chipset, it should work. Also, a potential upgrade to the SB Live! 5.1 SB0100 used in the WinME machine, or whatever better system for that OS supersedes it, could be an XG YMF724 card.

PC hardware: Ryzen 5 4500, 32GB RAM, 1TB SN 570 /500GB 970 EVO Plus/2TB 970 EVO Plus/1TB 870 EVO,, RX 6600 GPU, Arch Linux/Win10 dual-boot

Reply 5 of 5, by idspispopd

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The line should look something like

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4

Look at http://www.rinkworks.com/apogee/s/6.4.2.shtml for details. It's probably easiest to let some game (or game setup) detect the setting and then set the BLASTER variable for other games that can't detect the settings.