TPU's Nostalgic Hardware Club

[Trekkie4]

Yes, and no... Depending on how you look at it Mostly just booting up the RetroMaster machine, this will take a looong time! I've had some difficulties getting it to work without crashing and hanging, but these are all due to BIOS settings & Windows config... I guess you can call it a "trial & error" stage, until I'll finally be able to get it up & running.

What I DID notice so far is that the system (despite occasional crash & hang) behaves better than it did with old ASRock board... I'm mainly referring to 3DMark2000 for example, where running the benchmark with the Voodoo2 cards in D3D would always crash around the same test, 2nd test right at the beginning. This time around all the tests worked out OK, and both Glide & D3D seems to be working fine. However, unlike the previous setup, this time I've decided to take advantage of Ti4200 even under Win98 environment, which means that some of the Direct3D games which used to run Voodoo2 (just for the sake of running 3dfx and not nVidia) are now using 4200, while the Voodoo2 is mainly reserved for the Glide-powered games and older titles, which seem to work better with 3dfx.

Of course, I still have to boot up WinXP, so far I've only installed XP itself (along with basic drivers & software support), but I'll get there eventually. Once I have it set up & running, I'll make sure to post some pics & let you guys know

 

[stinger608]

Kind of funny; I was fiddling with my laptop a couple of days ago.

Came to the realization that I purchased it new in 2009! It's one of the Gateway P7811FX "desktop replacement" systems. About 3 years ago or so I upgraded the CPU and memory to the max that it would support and installed an SSD about a year ago.

I still have everything that came with it when it was new. Even the Windows Vista reinstall disk.

I guess what I'm getting at, it's kind of a nostalgic piece of computer hardware now.

In the next few days, I'll get some pictures of it and all the "stuff" that came with it.

It is still in very pristine condition. 0 dead pixels and 0 scratches. Dang thing looks like it is almost new.

 

[Trekkie4]

Still booting up the Windows 98 partition, and while I'm still struggling with incompatible drivers, random hangs & crashes (as usual), it came to my attention that some of the Glide-powered games seem to run more slowly than I remember... So I ran 3DMark 99 & 2000, and came up with pretty interesting discovery - it seems that by swapping the motherboard for Asus I apparently "lost" 10x 3DMark points for the Voodoo2 cards, but gained 49x points for the GeForce card. Actually here are the numbers, so you be the judge...

With ASRock K7VT2
GeForce4 Ti4200 AGP4x: 8,249
3dfx Voodoo2 SLI: 3,912

With Asus A7V8X-X
GeForce4 Ti4200 AGP8x: 8,298
3dfx Voodoo2 SLI: 3,902

I even got the similar results under 3DMark2000... Unfortunately I don't have the old values for the ASRock board here, but according to my memory they were pretty much the same to what you just witnessed above, within 3DMark99...

GeForce4 Ti4200 AGP8x: 6,919
3dfx Voodoo2 SLI: 2,608

Now, here's the thing... You'd expect Voodoos to perform better & faster due to faster RAM memory (from 266 to 400) right? And also because of the better motherboard overall... But from what we see above, faster & newer does not always translate to better, so I'm wondering if maybe I went too far with this. The entire concept behind RetroMaster system was to find the balance between "old" & "new", Windows 9x/ME and Windows XP while having best of both worlds at the same time. And sure, it's understandable that the AGP card went up in terms of speed (since the AGP was upgraded from 4x to 8x), but this came at the cost of older PCI cards... Either way, it's something to think about if you're going to build a similar system yourself.

 

[biffzinker]

Those Voodoo2's in SLI lost a bigger chunk of performance than I expected. Are you going to leave the build as-is or change out the motherboard to possibly recover the lost performance?

Edit: Need to step away, I'll check back later.

 

[Trekkie4]

IDK... To tell you the truth I really don't know. I considered to swap the motherboard for A7A266 but that would require a whole new cable management & layout, and I've just finished the damn thing... Perhaps I can try to lower down the RAM speed & see if it'll make any impact on the Voodoo speed... Other than that, I suppose I could OC Voodoos but that would be pretty extreme solution IMHO. Especially since they don't come with any cooling, not even passive heatsinks. Some companies had them mounted (Procomp G111, for example), but reference model (Voodoo2, 1000) did not.

 

[biffzinker]

So do you at all feel like you've stepped back into the past when using RetroMaster 2500?

 

[buzzi]

@stinger608 I have an asus X51L from 2009 too! I use it everyday!
So, after how many years a piece of hw is to be considered "tpu nostalgic"??

I ask this because I am afraid my entire current rig could be labeled as such

 

[Ahhzz]

http://sploid.gizmodo.com/this-old-ass-commodore-64-is-still-being-used-to-run-an-1787196319

 

[buzzi]

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/48466/windows-3-1-brings-paris-airport-halt/

it's time to update!

 

[Trekkie4]

People seem to be so shocked with the fact that Win 3.1 is still being used for every-day purposes, but did you know that 4x86 are still in production & massively used throughout the world? In fact, you get to use one each time to use the ATM machine! Those are 4x86 chips inside, "specially" made for one (and only) purpose to run ATM machines. Well, some of them at least, it's almost impossible to find out the exact specs & diagrams for these things (due to security reasons, obviously), but some models do run on 4x86 chips because they're fast, reliable and (most importantly) cheap!

Anyhow, back to Voodoo2 development... I found out the reason behind 10 missing points! It's actually the video memory caching mode thing, UC gives out 10 points less than USWC, setting which I had on ASRock motherboard. Surprisingly enough, lowering down the RAM speed (to 266MHz, just like the ASRock board) resulted with massive FPS drop, so I restored it back to normal, DDR400. But then I decided to play with multiplier settings & pumped up the CPU speed to 1,903MHz, I think. More-less, I'd have to check... RAM speed had to be adjusted accordingly, so now it runs at 333MHz instead, but nevertheless with these two adjustments, my benchmark scores are now:

3DMark99
With ASRock K7VT2
GeForce4 Ti4200 AGP4x: 8,249
3dfx Voodoo2 SLI: 3,912

With Asus A7V8X-X
GeForce4 Ti4200 AGP8x: 8,433 (old 8,298)
3dfx Voodoo2 SLI: 3,961 (old 3,902)

3DMark2000
GeForce4 Ti4200 AGP8x: 8,240 (old 6,919)
3dfx Voodoo2 SLI: 2,662 (old 2,608)

That's 59 more 3DPoints in favor of Voodoo2 and 135 more 3DPoints for nVidia Ti4200, pretty impressive if you ask me! Benchmark config (for both cards) was set to 1024x768, running 16-bit textures with triple frame buffer & AMD 3DNow! CPU optimization

 

[stinger608]

So, after how many years a piece of hw is to be considered "tpu nostalgic"??

LOL, I don't know where a person draws the line. Heck, there have been posts with Core 2 Duo's which we both know, are from that same era.

 

[Random Murderer]

LOL, I don't know where a person draws the line. Heck, there have been posts with Core 2 Duo's which we both know, are from that same era.

Pretty sure we determined early on in the thread that the definition of nostalgia is looking back fondly on something, so any hardware you have that fits that description also fits in this thread.

 

[Trekkie4]

So do you at all feel like you've stepped back into the past when using RetroMaster 2500?

Sorry, completely missed your post... Yes, sure! I guess so, as long it doesn't crash or hang lol, reminds me of good old days! Even though I didn't have most of these games back in a day, but I wanted to! Something would always pop up, either I couldn't afford it, or I couldn't find it, or I was worrying about the school stuff, etc.

But now that I have time, patience & skills to set up the gaming rig, why not

 

[biffzinker]

Yes, sure! I guess so, as long it doesn't crash or hang lol

Have you tried out any of these additions to improve the stability of Windows 98?

http://kernelex.sourceforge.net/

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/131040-revolutions-pack-97/ & http://rp9.win98.nl/

http://www.htasoft.com/u98sesp/

 

[Trekkie4]

Have you tried out any of these additions to improve the stability of Windows 98?

http://kernelex.sourceforge.net/

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/131040-revolutions-pack-97/ & http://rp9.win98.nl/

http://www.htasoft.com/u98sesp/

Not really, can't say I did... Except for Massive storage device driver, I prefer to keep it stock, but I'll def check it out and might try some of these patches but only AFTER I back it up... I've put way too much effort into booting it up, to mess up the Windows installation now

Most of my problems originate from the driver conflicts... nVidia ForceWare to be exact, it doesn't like the older games & device drives, which are essential for the Voodoo cards & other games. So again, I had to find the compromise between those two. Versions 43.45 and 45.23 seem to be ideal, except for the fact that 45.23 was designed for DirectX 9, while the entire Win98 partition was based on DirectX 8.1b... Not sure if that had anything to do with some of the crashes & hangs I've had, so I downgraded to 43.45 & didn't have a single crash since... Then again, I didn't really fiddle with 3dfx & Glide stuff for a while, so it's yet to be confirmed.

People always recommend the latest version, but from my personal experience - the latest ForceWare brought me nothing but problems. It was incompatible with over 70% of the games I had, and it didn't even want to un-install, so I had to boot up in safe mode & remove driver files manually. That was actually long time ago, and I didn't touch the latest version ever since

 

[Trekkie4]

Once again guys, I need your help... But mostly just opinion, really

I seem to be experiencing very annoying problem with the Live! Sound card, where the actual card seems to be working just fine, no problems whatsoever until you boot into DOS mode. Or even MS-DOS prompt... It seems that my emulated SB16 that's assigned to address 220, DMA1 & IRQ5 doesn't work due to a problem (conflict?) with Asus motherboard. Of course, I already Googled it & found out that the same issue had been reported dozens of times over the last 15 years or so, people having the same problem on their Asus motherboards and ONLY with Creative Live...

So now the real question is what to do, should I ignore this fact and focus primarily on Window environment, rip out the Asus board & replace it with other brand, and/or swap it out for other sound card that's not Creative... I suppose I could grab that Aureal Vortex2 (along with Creative WaveBlaster2 MIDI daughterboard) from the previous RetroMaster system (RetroMaster 1000), and use it instead of Creative card, but IDK... I'd like to hear your opinion on this issue

 

[dorsetknob]

Plug and play enabled/ Disabled in bios ( You might have to disable in bios and manualy assign)
Correct Address DMA and irq in you start up files config.sys autoexec.bat ??

 

[Trekkie4]

Oh I've been through everything in BIOS... "PnP OS" was enabled by default and because of that it didn't recognize, identify the card during POST so I figured disabling would do the trick. But nope, it's still the same... Then I manually assigned IRQ to the card (IRQ10) but once again - nothing. Works OK in Windows, it's running under IRQ10, but doesn't work in DOS.

By the way, that IRQ10 is for the actual card (SB Live!), because the card is then split into several virtual sub-components. One of those three is "emulated SB16" which is then given 220/5/1/5 address and SHOULD work in DOS. It sure used to work OK on the ASRock board, but for some reason doesn't on Asus... Start up files also point to IRQ10 as default IRQ resource, so I'm obviously doing the right thing.

 

[biffzinker]

Change the motherboard for one that doesn't conflict with the SB Live!? Honestly I'm not sure what you should do.

 

[dorsetknob]

been a long time since i inflicted manual config of cards on my Brain or any system
Card is probably too new for a dos set up
will think and hopefully get back

 

[biffzinker]

been a long time since i inflicted manual config of cards on my Brain or any system

Ah, so I'm not the only one having trouble.

Could a Ensoniq ES1370 work in place of the SB Live? It has DOS legacy support.

It was a full-featured solution with wavetable MIDI (sample-based synthesizer), 4-speaker DirectSound3D surround sound, A3D emulation and full DOS legacy support. It was cheap due to lack of hardware acceleration. It is full-duplex but at least in MS Windows cannot play back several sources at once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster#Ensoniq_AudioPCI-based_cards

Edit: Found one in Hungary for $3.00.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Creative-La...568590?hash=item3f6a12fb8e:g:cswAAOSwvzRXyeGv

In Great Britain there's a Creative Labs CT4810 PCI Sound Audio Card.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Creative-La...835619?hash=item4193efb9a3:g:dDEAAOSwv0tVIsoX

 

[Trekkie4]

Oh crap!! Well, according to official Asus manual, the PCI slot #6 (the bottom one, which I'm using for SB Live) is not only shared with PCI slot #2 (which isn't used, anyway) but it's ALSO shared with AGP?! I mean, wow... I know the rule about AGP & 1st PCI slot, sharing the same IRQ but this is ridiculous! So yeah, apparently IRQ 10, in this particular case is also used for AGP... Not sure if that's the actual problem, but it sure is PITA!

 

[biffzinker]

Would moving the SB Live to another PCI slot alleviate the IRQ conflict you might be running into?

 

[Trekkie4]

Would moving the SB Live to another PCI slot alleviate the IRQ conflict you might be running into?

While moving the card to another slot seems like an obvious solution, getting it done is going to be a nightmare... 1st of all, there's not much room left inside the case, so wherever I put the Live card, it's either going to block something or prevent air flow for the nVidia Ti4200... 2nd, I would have to pop up those sealed PCI plates on the back, and I'm all out of blanks, so I would end up with gaping hole

Oh well, maybe I'll fiddle with some of the cards I got, and see if I can get them to work... At this stage, I backed up my progress with Win98, just in case something goes downhill, so I'm not too worried about drivers & software support.

 

[Mr.Scott]

Would moving the SB Live to another PCI slot alleviate the IRQ conflict you might be running into?

It should, but I like your choice of the other card instead.