🔒 some retro hardware stuff
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25. August 2016, 21:48:07
I think it's about time to dig up some of the old junk and give it a spin or two. not going to be a full review of anything, no fillrate tests and excel sheets, just me screwing around and commenting on stuff, maybe someone will find it interesting (or even helpful). aiming to run oldschool (DX7 and earlier) 3D games as good as possible, with maximum compatibility and speed.#0
OS: I'll be going with Win98se here - I need something that would be compatible with hw that only has win9x drivers available so Win2k is out of the question, and I don't need anything that WinME has to offer. also no need to go for anything older, I want to have as much modern stuff as possible (good usb support via NUSB, for example).
CPU, mainboard and ram: definitely want something reasonably powerful here - a P3 is what I consider the best choice here, fast enough and great compatibility. got a 1GHz unit lying around, together with an intel D815EPEA2 matx board. nothing too fancy, but I have no intention of pouring money into "the best parts that exist", I just want things to work here. adding 512MB of sdram, it's the max win98se can effectively use so no need for anything more or less. the cpu cooler base will accept any 80mm fan, so swapped with a quiet arctic fan and rammed everything into an old matx case - not the prettiest thing in the universe, but compact enough and solid as a rock (all steel). it also has a lot of space around agp and pci slots, and a nice quiet psu.
Storage: not going to bother with classic hdds, noisy, slow and clunky things. tried a 32GB msata hdd via a msata->2.5 ide + 2.5 ide->3.5 ide adapters, but this didn't work out, read/write errors and the OS died a quick death. the speed was insane though, the OS install taking just a few short minutes. option no.2 was a 3.5 ide to sd card adapter with a 16GB sd card, and that worked ok, and is still faster than regular hdds with zero noise.
Graphics card(s): here is where the fun starts - I wan't to cram as much graphic apis into this machine as I can, so I'll be going with a Diamond Stealth S540 S3 Savage4 (S3 Metal), Matrox M3D PCX2 (PowerVR SGL), and some 3Dfx card (3Dfx glide). not sure which one yet, V1 is a bit too limited for what I have in mind, so a V2 most likely, but no idea whether just a regular one or one of the Quantum3D heavyweights.
this will work without any cable swapping - the Voodoo card will be connected via the passthrough cable and the M3D is a pure addon card, passing everything via pci and not requiring any external connections.
first, lets a have a look at how a no bs desktop should look like;
almost had to wipe a tear there - though to be fair, win10 has the same effect on me, though for very different reasons. not going to describe all the driver installs in detail, just going to mention that getting the correct chipset drivers from intel took a few tries, and the S3 drivers were a nightmare - finding a place that would offer ancient drivers without a malware bundle is pretty much impossible, and you probably should head straight to Vogons and ask for them there. but got everything up quickly enough. Firefox 2.0.0.20 still being usable, no problem with getting a bunch of demos from Fileplanet.
so, Savage4 first: this is what is considered the best gaming card S3 ever released - nice features like texture compression, the Metal api, 32bit color support, agp 4x, and was pretty cheap as well. this combination makes anything based on Unreal and Unreal Tournament engine look really good, something you wanted at that time. also, absolutely no graphics problems anywhere, everything I've tried looked perfect (so no screenshots, as they look as any other reference screenshots out there), no problems with z-buffer, transparency etc. (though I can imagine the final drivers help a lot). was certainly a step in the right direction, and a proper successor of the Savage3D. too bad they screwed things up with Savage2000 (hardware bugs, zero driver support, abandoned very soon). anyway, everything comes with a pricetag - the card is a bit slow. Unreal, Quake2, Half-Life and older are fine, and run at 1024*768 res without much trouble, but the card really struggles in Quake3 and UT on anything above 640*480. also, D3D is even slower - SS2 will not be playable unless you stay at 640*480 (btw, oldDark SS2, yaay). aand I also had to run Q3 in safemode for the first time to avoid the system locking up - but it "settled" after that and worked properly from that point. I also have to run the desktop at a different resolution than games, else the driver might get confused and screw the screen up when returning from 3D, forcing a soft reset. that's S3 drivers for you. but still, none of that is a show stopper, and the card was not a bad choice if you didn't mind the driver problems and usable resolution limitations. probably a better choice than some equally priced castrated TNT2 - for the great Unreal engine compatibility alone, if for nothing else.
so, continuing to the M3D PCX2. this is a card from the prehistoric times of 3D acceleration, pretty much the first generation that actually DID do something. was supposed to compete with the V1, a notion I find rather laughable - bad drivers, unfinished features, half the speed, and poor compatibility (especially with "newer" games from '98 and above). supports its own SGL api, also opengl via minigl and D3D as well (you can pretty much forget about any DX6 or newer games though, no Thief or SS2 for you, PowerVR gamers). on paper, it has some nice features like higher res support and 32bit, but they are utterly useless because the card is just too slow. was even presented as an "upgrade" from a V1, but then reality kicked in and they had to shut up - V1 can dance circles around it, defeating it completely on any field you pick. still, the card wasn't completely horrible - in '97, if you wanted some 3D card, had a cpu with a decent fpu, and only about $100, the PCX2 could get you accelerated in a quick and dirty way. just how dirty? lets see;
Q2 is fine, but even here you can see the blocky lighting problem that plagues the card if you look closely enough (second screen, wall on the right):
Turok looks good, but the speed is pretty poor:
Sub Culture is fine, but you can see a transparency problem happening on the debris in the background:
Unreal is pretty weak, low texture resolution, and lightmap issues again:
Half life, lightmaps are just awful (also the holo-woman is NOT supposed to be black and white):
Sin, the same (also some weird thing going on with the smoke on the turret):
can't deny it's a fun card to mess around with though. will add the 3Dfx stuff once I have the card running, but pretty sure it will be mostly blahblah fast, smooth and glide aw great, perfect drivers oooh I want to touch myself and stuff.
25. August 2016, 22:38:47
Was the TNT2 really that bad? I had one and could run anything that came out for quite a time.#1
Too bad my old PC went to my family and got lost somewhere, else I could have given you some of the innards.
25. August 2016, 22:57:56
I've got enough hw junk to last me a lifetime, so unless it was something unusual, I doubt I would have any use for it.#3
TNT2 was a good card, but there were oh so many versions of it, and some of those were quite bad - low clocks, half/quarter the memory and/or half the memory bus (or all of the above). also, nvidia cheating with image quality sometimes. still, a fully blown TNT2 was the best card of the time, both in features and speed, all drawbacks be damned.
25. August 2016, 23:12:05
#4
Quote by voodoo47:
Then I probably had one of those.a fully blown TNT2 was the best card of the time, both in features and speed, all drawbacks be damned.
The only thing which really sucked on my old PC was the motherboard. Some Biostar thing which crashed the moment you plugged in anything into one of the USB ports.
Luckily there was no need for USB back then.
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