some retro hardware stuff

[662b85e4816cdvoodoo47]

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.

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.

[662b85e481a5eOlfred]

Was the TNT2 really that bad? I had one and could run anything that came out for quite a time.

Too bad my old PC went to my family and got lost somewhere, else I could have given you some of the innards.

[662b85e481c0eZylonBane]

What? The TNT2 was a legendarily great card.

[662b85e481d40voodoo47]

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.

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.

[662b85e48211fOlfred]

a fully blown TNT2 was the best card of the time, both in features and speed, all drawbacks be damned.

Then I probably had one of those.

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.

[662b85e482223ZylonBane]

Just checked, the first PC I ever built had a Hercules TNT AGP card.

[662b85e48239fvoodoo47]

ahh, Hercules, good stuff. I was starting to build in the Virge era - you know, the "S3 things that do 2D for your Voodoo". got a box full of them in the corner, people just dumping them on me once I upgraded their pcs with something better.

anyway, about the TNT(2);
-many slow, cut down versions floating around
-pci version slow and expensive (this mattered at the time)
-worse image quality in 16bit (this mattered at the time)
-no paletted textures (this mattered at the time)
-running in 32bit slowed the card down quite a bit
-no texture compression, so the large texture support is mostly a paper feature
-image quality cheating (no true trilinear)
-drivers not exactly top notch

so yeah, not a perfect card, but hey, no such thing as perfection in this world, right?

[662b85e4825efValet2]

Wow, a great setup you have there!

I also recommend you installing KernelEx. It's a set of libraries for running more software, designed for nt systems. For example, I have Firefox 9.0.1 running on Win98se.

Also, about videocard, there's a reason to find a GeForce 2 GTX, if you're not into shaders, with shutter-glasses output socket (asus made that card, must be cheap on ebay). That would be enough for playing 98-2001 games in 32-bit.

What about soundcard - any would be enought for playing under Windows. If you're a dos-dude, get some old SoundBlaster 64 / 128, they can emulate Soundscape midi (ensoniq), which is really cool, and supported by all games I've seen. I will help you installing the stuff.

Also, cool that you're using an sd-card adapter as a system drive. Old hdd's were a really bottleneck. You can also use an sdd with pci-sata card (I'm sure some of them have drivers for Win98, or work as legacy devices).

Oh, there's also an utility for dos called vbehz which allows you to set any display refresh rate for any resolution, work with all nVidia cards from TNT to GeForce 4, at least. Doesn't work with GeForce 5 and higher, and with any Radeon cards, I've checked.

I have some useful stuff for Win98 here: ftp://ftp.valet2.com/98

Here's KernelEx: https://sourceforge.net/projects/kernelex/

[662b85e48279bvoodoo47]

not planning to have pixelshaders on this computer, as mentioned, 3D api hoarding is the intention here (a grand total of 9 once everything is set up). also not planning any DOS gaming (got other machines for that), so the integrated intel soundcard should be plenty. Diamond Monster Sound would be nice, but I don't have one at hand and I don't feel like ebay hunting (and money spending) at the moment.

I do plan to play around with ssds some more however - ordered a different set of adapters off ebay (they are dirt cheap) to hopefully get that msata drive going, but maybe I'll just give up and get a normal sata ssd with a sata->ide 3.5 adapter (no room for a pci card because of all the graphics hardware) - we'll see.

I know about kernelex, but I currently don't really need it - not planning to run anything that would require it on this computer. for now.


also, I'm thinking I'll go for a Voodoo1 after all (max old games glide compatibility) - should have a 8MB version (800*600 capable) somewhere.

[662b85e4830b3Join2]

first, lets a have a look at how a no bs desktop should look like;

Shortcuts for Half-Life, Unreal & Q3 and not SS2, Deus Ex, Doom or any other superior game. Decline of voodoo47. 

[662b85e4831e1voodoo47]

they actually are installed, but the shortcuts are not placed on the desktop just yet - first round was mostly just the PCX2 stuff so I didn't need to have those handy.

not Doom though, 'cause that's either DOS or GZDoom, and this machine is not meant for that.

[662b85e4832e3Olfred]

Sound Cards I could offer. Creative CT5803, Creative CT4810 and Terratec TTP1.
If you want any of it just give me a call and I'll send it over.
(For you for free of course)

[662b85e483484voodoo47]

you are not helping me control my hardware hoarding problem. anyway, thanks for the offer, but I'm pretty sure I won't be needing them right now. maybe I'll get back to the soundcard stuff later - in that case, I'll let you know.


//tested the msata ssd with msata->2.5 ide + 2.5 ide->3.5 ide adapters in a p4 based system and they work fine, so it looks like it's just the P3 ide controller not being compatible - that means the ide->sd adapter is there to stay, most likely. no matter - as mentioned, the solution is satisfactory. and if it ain't broke, don't fix it..

[662b85e483579Olfred]

Yeah, too bad the terratec only has the Vortex (1) chip, the follow up model had the Vortex 2. That way it would have been a good alternative to the card you originally wanted.

[662b85e483682voodoo47]

never been much of a sound geek, but as I'm expecting to have much more free time next year, maybe I'll start exploring this particular field as well - pretty sure it has some unusual and strange hardware as well.

[662b85e48377bOlfred]

I'm a sound geek. But I know more about acoustics than old computer hardware. But I basically can understand all the sound yidda yadda technical stuff when I read upon it.
I think right now Marvin would know best.

[662b85e483c03Marvin]

I think right now Marvin would know best.

God, no, I'm not a sound geek. But I'd vote for an Aureal 2.0 capable sound card, too, and maybe a Creative card with EAX 2.0 capabilities for backup.

[662b85e483d4avoodoo47]

looking for the 8MB V1 with no luck so far, but found a Diamond Stealth II S220 Rendition Verite V2100 pci, and a Voodoo5 agp 4x dvi prototype. don't even remember where and when did I get those. I'm starting to log them all into one excel sheet to see just how much of a hoarding problem do I have.

[662b85e483f0cvoodoo47]

well, the 8MB V1 is MIA, not in any of my regular hw boxes. hopefully it simply ended at some nonstandard place when I moved house, but digging through EVERYTHING is not happening any time soon, so I'll probably just pop in a regular V2 for now.

also, as far as HDD alternatives are concerned, it's either the SD card with ide bus master enabled, or a regular SSD with ide bus master disabled. would need tests, but no time for that, so it's the SD card for now as I'm already set up completely there.


and managed to put most, if not all 3d cards into an excel sheet, the current count is sitting at comfortable 140 pieces (pretty sure a few more cards are still floating around, but no more than 10 I'd guess), the highlights being a Voodoo5 6000, full boxed Obsidian X-24, boxed Obsidian S-12 AGPtv, and a Heavy Metal Mercury (basically 8 Voodoo2s on four pcbs linked together, 96MB ram total).

not AT ALL obsessed by gpu hardware.

[662b85e484000Marvin]

Jesus Christ.

[662b85e4840cfvoodoo47]

what can I say, a man's gotta have hobbies.

[662b85e4842aaJDoran]

Using period authentic hardware for older PC games is something that never appealed to me, though I can understand why people do it. Some people (such as some of the regulars at Vogons are dedicated to it, and it must be fascinating to build an old (as regard it's parts) PC and then carefully choose and experiment with games, drivers, even changing a piece of hardware or two, to get as much performance as possible out of your circa 1998 (or whatever) PC.

Personally, I wasn't a PC gamer in the DOS years, and the (few) DOS games I want to run work fine with DOSBox (a great emulator). And luckily every Windows game I want to run can be made to run on modern systems, either on it's own or with an easily found patch. Then again, I'm using Windows 7, so it's not unlikely that when I upgrade to Windows 10 (bypassing 8/8.1) then some of my games might prove troublesome.

[662b85e4843a0voodoo47]

it's about whatever makes you remember happy times again. might be an old computer, an old car, or pretty much anything else.

[662b85e4844a1Olfred]

Some games run with more/better features on old hardware. Some interfaces or stuff which just died out, and aren't or not fully supported today.
For example, System Shock 2 gains an extra level if you run it under Windows 98 and under some very specific hardware.