/vr/ - Retro Games

2000 was like ddr3 memory era, 1.8 ghz athlons, that typa thing

>>8915806
that issue is that I want to basically run a win98/dos machine. if I go for a pentium III system I'll lose ISA support and I'm not sure if I want that yet.
I think the newest games I'd want to be able to play is stuff like the sim city 3000, need for speed, the sims etc. I dont have my windows 2000 computer anymore so I'm trying to beef up this one to bridge the gap.

You should be able to build something using old ass parts for next to nothing that will run old games maxed out. Just find out what the rec specs for the games you want and +1 them across the board

>>8915839
>next to nothing
every since covid, anything older than 5 years old skyrocketed in price
$150 for a 25 year old motherboard and over $100 for a 2000 era gpu

>>8915791
Yes. Just yes. 2000 was stretching Voodoo3's asshole, not to mention your CPU, and was really the time for at least a Geforce DDR and a high end P3 or early P4. You can expect to run Unreal and Quake 2 engine games sort-of-okay with a Voodoo3 and a few others like System Shock 2. Max Payne will wreck that machine though regardless of card.

>>8916083
>voodoo
man thats got to be the most expensive old card out there right now. I'd love to get one but they cost as much as a modern GPU

>>8915791
>I have an old windows 98 machine with 333mhz Pentium II
>I wanted to be able to play 3D games from around ~2000
>2MB onboard AGP card
2MB would make for an OK DOS video card, but 16MB-32MB is more standard for Win98 gaming. And 64MB and 128MB cards came out only a few years later, and lasted into the XP era. Also, the P2 was the hot new thing in 1997, but P3's were already out in 1999. The P3 chips will handle ~2000's era games better than the P2 chips will.
Best advice I can give you is to convert your current Win98 machine to a pure DOS machine, and find a cheap P4 system to make into a Win98 beast. A P2 with a 2MB VGA card, SB/SB2/SBPro/SBPro2, and a Voodoo/Voodoo2 3D card is a damn good DOS machine only improved by a 4MB VGA card. A solid P4 with a Geforce 3, 1GB of RAM, and an Aureal Vortex PCI sound card should run just about any Win98 compatible game. You can always throw a Voodoo2/3 on top if you really want the Glide API.

>>8916094
Yeah, you shouldn't bother. You should get a GF4-6 mid-to-flagship, throw it in a P4/Athlon XP and just run a wrapper. That's what I'm doing on my P4 build. That should handle anything W98/XP well enough, least til SM3/Oblivion/Bioshock shit rolls around. Those cards too, might be completely fucked up now.

>>8916094
alternatively if you really wanna max out your P2 (though these cards are too shitty for Glide wrapping) you could just get a 420MX or 5200 PCI with 256mb of RAM. As for storage you're honestly better off getting one of those SD card IDE thingies than a crusty volatile old HDD.

Voodoo card are just a YouTube meme, forget about 3dfx garbage

>>8916116
In a retro machine you'll either need one of those or a powerful enough card to wrap Glide for games that only accelerate using that API.

you can emulate voodoo with PCem on a win 98 VM better than any real hardware

>>8916121
Bull fucking shit, dude. You're limited to ~300mhz without stutter even on newer CPUs. That's a bottleneck.

>>8916095
I already talked the ears off over at vogons but here's the situation and why im even doing this in the first place: I have 3 computers,
one is a pentium 100, DOS 6.22/Win 3.1 machine. I'm using that for all my heavy dos and early win16 stuff
the second is this win 98 machine, it has a yamaha xg soundcard with SB support and the built in 2mb AGP gfx on a 333mhz PII, maxed out for the motherboard with a 440EX chipset. and 256mb ram

the third PC, which is the one I want to get rid of and beef up the 98 machine is a Win ME Pentium III 700mhz machine with intel integrated graphics and no agp slot on a rather shitty i810e chipset. The exansion options are pretty much nil since I cant get an AGP card in there, best I could do is wipe ME and put a faster cpu in there (socket 370) but if I dont need three computers than I want to make the 98 machine some kind of middle ground.

Hell it may not even matter anyways, I only set these computers up a few times a year to play around, but I would be inclined to play more knowing it can handle most of the games I had growing up, and some new ones.

>>8916140
You're killing the wrong child. Think about it, the P2-333 doesn't have AGP anyway, so you might as well have the much better CPU, which justifies a decent-ish PCI video card. That + an FX5200/420MX will get you at least 2000-ready, cresting into 2001. Just install 98 on that. You could likely run DOS games just fine on it too, especially with a throttler. Does it have an ISA slot? What "expansions" does the 333 have that that 700mhz doesn't? The integrated sucks graphics suck balls on both, so that's not a factor.

>>8916145
The reason I ask about ISA is that can make the Yamaha XG advantage useless as you can just throw any much more compatible actual SB in there anyway. Hell just make it a DOS-9x machine if possible. You don't realllly need the 100 all that much. Throttle.exe is a pretty handy and reliable tool for speed compatibility.

>>8916118
What games are glide only?

>>8915791
If what you want to play are Windows games, it's kinda hard to justify an actual old system. 99.999999% of any Windows 9X games can be made to play on 7/10/11 on modern hardware. Even a crap modern system can pretend to be a voodoo card better than an actual voodoo card could do it.

>>8916159
Why can't zoomers google? Do you just want the parasocial interaction?

>>8916145
thats a fair point. the P100 machine has 4 ISA and 3 PCI so if I ever came across some ISA card to play around with, I could do it there.That one also has a Vibra16 ISA card and 2mb S3 PCI card. I think its fine to leave that as the dos machine. (also has a 5.25" floppy drive)

If I move the XG card to the P3 system that will cover my bases for DOS games, and MAYBE in pure dos mode. That card has the SB-LINK on it and so does my win 98 motherboard so I can get direct DMA in pure dos without needing to be on an ISA slot. I wont have that in the P3 system, but it might not matter.
but to answer your question
Win 98 has 2 PCI slots, 1 ISA slot, onboard ATI RAGE PRO agp graphics. not shitty actually
The ME has no ISA, and shitty graphics, and a bottlenecked chipset,
maybe it would be best to keep the tower and drives and just get a better PIII motherboard.one with an 815 chipset. OR go all out for an XP era machine and skip the P3 era. since the P2 can handle the lower end stuff.


In terms of money, I figure I could get a decent amount if I sold the compaq as "untouched vintage system" since I still have the keyboard and restore discs and a clean insteall of ME non it and it MIGHT fetch more money to someone out there, and I could use that money to put towards other PC parts.

>>8916182
No ISA sucks ass for DOS, that's for sure. I'd say the 333 can do just about anything the 100 could. The P3 is the best one you have for late 98-2000 shit, but yeah, it would be better to have a P3 with AGP and ISA. That's the dream combo for a DOS-98 all in one.

>>8915791
can you even set 256 colours with your onboard graphics card? My Windows 98 beast couldn't even do that until I instaled an Nvidia Riva TNT 2 @ 32MB. It does True Colour 32-bit now.
But answering your question, no I don't think so. at the very least it should be a 16MB gpu

>>8916227
He should. My old 386 could handle 16 million colors in Windows 3.1. I can't imagine what was broken with your Windows 98 system.

>>8916236
I have no idea, my guess is probably the onboard GPU was already broken when I setup my machine then. It started working fine after the AGP card though.
you should definitely have an AGP card for games around 2000

>>8916159
everything just runs better in glide. And most of the effects are accounted for when using a 3dfx card.

>>8916258
It sounds like you just had the wrong drivers installed.

>>8916264
>Hey goise Phil here from philscomputerlab

>>8916291
based PCLwatcher

>>8916227
>>8916236
>>8916258
the ati rage pro can do 16color, 256, and 16,24,and 32 bit color at 800x600 or less. 1024x768 is 16bit or less only.

>>8916236
A high end VLB ISA card like the Diamond SpeedStar 2MB could do Win3.1 16.7 million colors at 800x600, but not at 1024x768. A 1MB card could easily do 16.7 million colors at 640x480.
>>8916350
>ati rage pro
Unless you expand the VRAM above 2MB, you won't be able to do 24-bit color in 1024x768. That's the reason some old VGA cards had 2.25MBs of RAM, like the Tseng Labs ET6000. The ATI Mach64 4MB might be the only ISA card that can do 16.7 million colors at 1024x768, but I'm not even sure if the ISA bus can handle the data at that point.

>>8916415
I have the #9 GXE 64 Pro card for the dos pentium computer with 2mb of vram. it has sockets for an additional 2mb but i cant think of any dos/3.1 game that would need resolutions and colors that high. Its got a S3 Vision 964 chip in it

>>8915893
where, on fleabay? I may need to start dumping my collection

>>8916182
>maybe it would be best to keep the tower and drives and just get a better PIII motherboard
I would. You can get them with ISA slots.

>>8916437
If I keep the 98 machine and turn the ME machine into a better ME or XP machine I wont need to worry about ISA. ME and XP cant even run true dos at that point so I can focus on just pci/agp mobos which there are plenty og

>>8916426
I'll buy it from you for a decent price :)

>>8916291
What the fuck IS Phil? Australian? German? German-Australian? Accent is weird-ass.

>>8916264
not Streets of Simcity. Switching between gameplay and menus is jarring as shit

>>8915791
a lot of win98 machines could barely run games of the era, so for nostalgia purposes youre fine with that build on min settings. imo go for a high end xp build for the 00s era games, 98 is trash anyway and the forced integration of IE slows everything down

>>8916709
>here's your active desktop bro

>>8916785
So many viruses hijacked the entire system using that crap. I remember getting all my icons and program shortcuts changed to porn site links. Fun times.

but the themes man!!

>>8916702
Sim copter also had a very alpha glide mode you could run. nothing ever came of it though

A pci card will help, you can find Nvidia FX5500, 6200, 7400 & 8400 in pci format. Take a look at which got 98 drivers.
Can't remember if there is ATI analogs

>>8916785
>having that on ever
Even as a retarded kid I knew that was performance killing trash

It’s near impossible to build anything old these days because e celeb retro fags mention an item and prices jump 200% across the board

ok what I’ll probably do is sell the current OEM motherboard on this P3 computer and get one with agp and buy a faster cpu.
I can just run XP in virtual box right? That should be fine. My main computer is a 12 core 3. 8 ghz

>>8917813
Use VMware. Its D3D... emulation? Wrapping? Don't think it virtualizes that because it's not CPU related -- anyway, it does 3D acceleration far better. I've had a better time virtualizing 7 x86 to run XP era stuff, though, as 7's 3D acceleration seems more mature in VMware. Virtualization aside, a lot of stuff just needs DGvoodoo or nglide natively, but it doesn't hurt to have as many tools at your disposal as possible.

>>8917479
Eh, complete slot1s or 478s with a low-end GF4 or 5 and an SB compatible aren't too hard to get. Voodoo and mid-to-flagship GF4/5s are mad fucked, though. I see a 3 and 6600GT AGP for decent prices now, anyway.

>>8917479
Dunno, maybe if you only know how to buy on eBay, local sales sites are full of cheap trash, everything from Voodoo cards and 486 boards to later high end GPUs and dual socket systems. Sometimes I flip shit just for fun to make 500% profit, but usually not worth it.

>>8918286
You must live in a fuckhuge city or are very fortunate to just come across Voodoos from people who don't KNOW WHAT THEY HAVE.

>>8918286
way to be a scumfuck though.

I want a P4 with ISA and USB 2.0 so bad it's unreal. I could actually do DOS-XP with that shit. I have a P4 without ISA and thought I could skate by with a PCI soundcard in DOS. Only mostly, some shit just will not run with a memory manager and sound TSR.

>>8918294
It's not that cheap, I got my V2's for SLi for 30eur a pop, comparing to eBay prices, they were pretty cheap in comparison.

>>8918314
>V2
meh, you couldn't give me one of those. V3+ or bust.

>>8918309
Show me a P4 motherboard that has DDMA for ISA slots like old board do, so ISA sound cards under DOS actually work.
Just get a PCI card that has SB compatibility under DOS and has a wave header for a good MIDI synth (or use a SoundCanvas, even if you don't have a MIDI port, just get one that accepts serial, like SC-88).

>>8918321
I still prefer two V2's in SLi over a V3. Sure the V3 does slightly better dithering but the V2's in SLi are faster any day.
Shit like PCI and AGP Voodoo 3's are usually even cheaper since they are newer and don't do SLi.

>>8918323
been wondering if that's an issue. You show me, actually. So yeah, maybe not. I've tried multiple PCI soundcards. I don't have a board with that SB-link thingy, so I still have to use a TSR. The best I've tried is the YMF724 cards, but the TSR crashes or prevents certain games from starting. I've heard an ESS Maestro works well enough but I can't get it to work for fuck-all in my system, probably a board issue.

>>8918336
You don't need a SB-Link header, I actually use a ESS Maestro 2 and it works great, using a SoundCanvas for MIDI too.
Some things work under pure DOS, some under Win9x DOS box (talking about the actual Microsoft DOS box, not the modern emulator), but having like 160 games, many which are well known and popular ones, I've yet to encounter a situation where I can't play it (either under pure DOS or Win9x).

>>8918346
Well, my board fucking hates it. I forget the issue; I think it was playing OPL/Adlib shit but not digital sound in pure DOS, and was just as fucked if not more in Windows under DOS boxes. Maybe I'll try it again. It sure is nice in theory though, as it doesn't need a TSR to run, which means U7 and Turrican 2 would work.

>>8918346
mine could be fucked, too, but it plays digital audio in Windows anyway. Hard to say.

>>8918309
>tsr
Yamaha pci cards have tsr for running under dos mode with no ISA

>>8918679
Yes, that's what I'm saying. Lots of games hate it. Lots of games are fine, too, but the ones that don't work stick out as a reminder that your machine sucks for DOS.

>>8918309
I have pure DOS P3 machine right now. When I first set it up, I wanted to use my PCI Soundblaster Live card. Ultimately I had to switch to an old ISA card that requires no persistent tsr. The rationale for the switch lies with a SLOWDOWN tsr I nabbed out of FreeDOS. When it has all its features enabled, it does a splendid job of providing CPU speeds for the odd game that demands an 8086 or 486. Unfortunately it's super sensitive to certain tsr and memory managers.

>get memed into trying a shitty old card you know doesn't work, or at least with your board, again
So yeah, get a P3/Athlon ISA board if you truly care about DOS sound, kids.

>>8915806
>2000 was like ddr3 memory era
What??? DDR3 is ~2010. DDR2 was released in 2002 ffs.
2000 is clearly DDR1 (Pentium 3 and higher) or even SDR era.

>>8918309
There's industrial P4 boards that have those features. The problem is that they typically don't have AGP support if you're into that.

>>8918336
>>8918323
I have an MU440EX which had the pins for SB Link but not the header so I bought a 50cent header and soldered it in, and my ymf724 card has the sblink so just by attachng the cable, boom instant dos sound. But like you said you need an ISA board for sb link, at which point, just get an ISA SB card lol

>>8915791
lol im an idiot. i forgot i still have an 2005 era laptop with XP on it. I could use that for all my xp games, it was an inspiron 9300 with a geforce 6800 in it at 1920x1200. pretty maxed out for 05

>>8918982
You don't really need an old machine for XP games. You can just play them on new stuff.

>>8918982
>6800
>1920x1200
It must have cost like a new car in 2005.

>>8919075
$2000 back in 2005. fully loaded. Im surprised my dad actually listened to me when I told him I wanted a laptop for christmas lol

>>8919019
only thing that bugs me about old games on my current computer is that 640x480 is abysmally small on my 1440k monitor

>>8919084
Is your system not scaling to fit your screen?

>>8919158
some games do not at all, nor do they full screen. some games when in fulscreen shrink my whole display down so when i come out of the game, all my programs and folders are tiny squares that I have to manually resize

>>8919163
I think that's more about your display driver, or its settings. Or at least the lack of full screen.

>>8915791
For stuff like quake 3 you want agp, the cpu is fine. PCI can work but they are expensive for the good ones.

>>8916095
on my p4 I use a program call slowdown, it puts the cpu into a kind of low power state in about 9 steps. It did work but not as good as a real 486 or 386.

>>8919084
>use the wrong hardware
>complain it's wrong
Play games designed for 640x480 on a monitor designed for 640x480 you stupid bastard.

>>8919262
>you can just play them on new stuff

so what is new stuff then?

>>8919343
You don't need to reply to the troll.

>>8915791
It should help, since that's around the time of Geforce2-4MX era which should give you good Quake 1 and 2 results. For video that used 1-2MB of memory, I'd stick with DOS only titles that did not really attempt polygons with texture mappings, so adding in a PCI graphics card should give a nice performance boost to games with 3D visuals.

Is there a performance/speed hit in agp vs pci?

>>8919478
The obvious difference would be that the AGP cards are just newer, so faster chips in later years. There was an overlap, so you can find a few with the same chips in both PCI and AGP form.

As far as bus speed, you can push textures faster through the AGP bus. This only matters in 3D games that use the GPU for graphics. Games with optimized smaller textures, won't really care. Older games that run in software render mode, also won't really care.

>>8919478
Definitely, yes. PCI tops out somewhere between the GF1/2 effectively. Beyond the Voodoo3 every card released for both would perform slower on the PCI variant.

>>8918974
>But like you said you need an ISA board for sb link, at which point, just get an ISA SB card lol
Normal ISA boards that late usually didn't support DDMA and won't work. SB-Link is for PCI cards.

>>8919668
>>8919509
ok thanks, im just wondering if i stuck with a pentium III era motherboard whats the most ram on a gpu i'd need, and if i should upgrade to an agp board or not. 64mb? 128mb?

>>8919782
That’s true, but generally you find sb link headers on motherboards with an ISA slot on it as well, and once ISA disappeared from motherboards so did sb link.

>>8918982
Ah yes the era of dell copying Apple