RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-01-06, 07:56:

I have been testing my Geforce 2 GTS 32Mb build with Pentium III 933Mhz: […]
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I have been testing my Geforce 2 GTS 32Mb build with Pentium III 933Mhz:

Return to Castle Wolfwnstein Runs great
American McGee Alice Runs great
Halflife 1 Runs great
Unreal 1 Runs great
Serious Sam Runs great
Deus Ex rums poorly. Well under 20FPS
Black and White 1 Runs poorly. Aboout 20fps

Black and white states that you need a Pentium II 350Mhz and an 8Mb 3D Accelerator. I hate to think how it would run on such a system.

Try running Deus Ex and Black and White with a Voodoo card in GLIDE mode, that should make a world of difference.

appiah4 wrote on 2025-01-06, 08:29:

Try running Deus Ex and Black and White with a Voodoo card in GLIDE mode, that should make a world of difference.

Thanks. I plan to build this machine for glide:

DOS / Late Win98 EAX 3DFX (1998-1999)
DirectX 6.0 + Glide 3
Slot 1 Pentium III @700Mhz (Oct 1999)
Intel 440BX Chipset
256Mb PC100 RAM
Voodoo 3500 (August 1999)
Soundblaster Live (in Windows Only)

I wasn't expecting to use it for games as late as B&W though. I assumed performance would be poor beyond early 2000. Is it really OK for B&W? Or are you referring to a Voodoo 4 or 5?

appiah4 wrote on 2025-01-06, 08:29:

Try running Deus Ex and Black and White with a Voodoo card in GLIDE mode, that should make a world of difference.

Can't speak for Black and White, but Deus Ex is very CPU demanding. While the game's Glide renderer is certainly better optimized than its Direct3D counterpart, the biggest strain will always be on the CPU.

Start the game on the first level (Liberty Island) then press "T" to open the chat console, delete the "Say" message, type in "timedemo 1" and press Enter. It will then show the frame rate counter. In large outdoor areas, you'd be lucky to get a stable 30 FPS on a sub 1 GHz CPU. Indoors, the situation is much better.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-01-06, 08:53:

Can't speak for Black and White, but Deus Ex is very CPU demanding. While the game's Glide renderer is certainly better optimized than its Direct3D counterpart, the biggest strain will always be on the CPU.

Start the game on the first level (Liberty Island) then press "T" to open the chat console, delete the "Say" message, type in "timedemo 1" and press Enter. It will then show the frame rate counter. In large outdoor areas, you'd be lucky to get a stable 30 FPS on a sub 1 GHz CPU. Indoors, the situation is much better.

I think B&W is just poorly optimised. At least the launch version. I haven't applied any patches yet.

I think Deus Ex is going to be one of those games that I play on my "Ultimate" Windows 98 build with Geforce FX 5900 Ultra and Core 2 Duo X6800. Or maybe even under XP if that fails. I haven't yet tried the game on anything faster than this Geforce 2 GTS setup.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-01-06, 09:26:

I think Deus Ex is going to be one of those games that I play on my "Ultimate" Windows 98 build with Geforce FX 5900 Ultra and Core 2 Duo X6800.

Should be fine on that setup.

I was able to get 60+ FPS on Liberty Island using an Athlon64 3400+ paired with a GeForce FX 5900XT. And that was at the 1280x1024 resolution, from what I recall.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-01-06, 09:26:

I think B&W is just poorly optimised. At least the launch version. I haven't applied any patches yet.

I played the game at launch on a Pentium 4 1.4Ghz with 256MB of memory and a GeForce 2 Ultra. It was buttery smooth then and on anything I played it on after. I'm not sure what you mean by it being poorly optimized.

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-01-06, 09:41:

I played the game at launch on a Pentium 4 1.4Ghz with 256MB of memory and a GeForce 2 Ultra. It was buttery smooth then and on anything I played it on after. I'm not sure what you mean by it being poorly optimized.

Well that Graphics card is 25% faster than mine and has double the VRAM. The Pentium 4 1.4Ghz is also likely faster than my 933Mhz PIII. Though not sure by how much, as obviously the PIII has better IPC, but the P4 has more cache and higher memory bandwidth. The differences between the two will change depending on game engine.

All I can say is that at the beginning of the game I was getting low 20s for FPS. I didn't play beyond the first bit of the tutorial where you learn to move around. Maybe it gets better later, or maybe something is wrong with my setup. I can only express what I am seeing.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-01-06, 08:53:

appiah4 wrote on 2025-01-06, 08:29:

Try running Deus Ex and Black and White with a Voodoo card in GLIDE mode, that should make a world of difference.

Can't speak for Black and White, but Deus Ex is very CPU demanding. While the game's Glide renderer is certainly better optimized than its Direct3D counterpart, the biggest strain will always be on the CPU.

Start the game on the first level (Liberty Island) then press "T" to open the chat console, delete the "Say" message, type in "timedemo 1" and press Enter. It will then show the frame rate counter. In large outdoor areas, you'd be lucky to get a stable 30 FPS on a sub 1 GHz CPU. Indoors, the situation is much better.

Oh I know, I have an Athlon XP 2200+ & Voodoo 3 3000 build for exactly games like Deus Ex. That said, it just runs better on Glide than DirectX, basically because Glide has way less CPU overhead, that's all I was saying.

appiah4 wrote on 2025-01-06, 10:37:

Oh I know, I have an Athlon XP 2200+ & Voodoo 3 3000 build for exactly games like Deus Ex. That said, it just runs better on Glide than DirectX, basically because Glide has way less CPU overhead, that's all I was saying.

Sounds to me that this game is a special case that breaks the rule on how far Voodoo 3 scales with CPU then. From what I have read, the Voodoo 3 doesn't scale much after 800Mhz CPUs.

Finally got my Matrox Parhelia 512 to display a proper image. Apparently it needs a CRT - thankfully I had my Samsung-built HP Ultra VGA 1280 laying around that could help.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-01-06, 10:50:

appiah4 wrote on 2025-01-06, 10:37:

Oh I know, I have an Athlon XP 2200+ & Voodoo 3 3000 build for exactly games like Deus Ex. That said, it just runs better on Glide than DirectX, basically because Glide has way less CPU overhead, that's all I was saying.

Sounds to me that this game is a special case that breaks the rule on how far Voodoo 3 scales with CPU then. From what I have read, the Voodoo 3 doesn't scale much after 800Mhz CPUs.

That really depends on the game/engine in question and where they are bottlenecked. IIRC System Shock also scaled very well with CPU, and ran the same engine.

Half Life also scaled pretty well beyond 800MHz IIRC.

aspiringnobody wrote on 2025-01-04, 21:09:

Finished my mounts for my Asus SL730-DL. I ended up finding a generic slotket mount someone had posted and modifying it to fit […]
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Finished my mounts for my Asus SL730-DL. I ended up finding a generic slotket mount someone had posted and modifying it to fit the Asus slotket. I also didn’t like that their design required you to remove the mobo to use a custom backplate so I modified the design to let me use the stock mounting hardware that was already on the board. Came out well I think, seems pretty solid. Printed with PETG for a little heat resistance.

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Nice!

Would you mind sharing the STL (and maybe source) files? Retro 3D print topic

PcBytes wrote on 2025-01-06, 11:07:

Finally got my Matrox Parhelia 512 to display a proper image. Apparently it needs a CRT - thankfully I had my Samsung-built HP Ultra VGA 1280 laying around that could help.

I have always had problems with Matrox cards entering various display modes that whatever LCD I'm using can't sync to. The only solution to fix it when this happens is to reboot the machine.

I have some really rare DVI add-on for the G200, I think. I literally cannot use that card because whatever it syncs at during boot isn't compatible with any of my LCDs.

Has anyone managed to get the Matrox G200 flat panel add-on to work?

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-01-06, 10:16:

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-01-06, 09:41:

I played the game at launch on a Pentium 4 1.4Ghz with 256MB of memory and a GeForce 2 Ultra. It was buttery smooth then and on anything I played it on after. I'm not sure what you mean by it being poorly optimized.

Well that Graphics card is 25% faster than mine and has double the VRAM. The Pentium 4 1.4Ghz is also likely faster than my 933Mhz PIII. Though not sure by how much, as obviously the PIII has better IPC, but the P4 has more cache and higher memory bandwidth. The differences between the two will change depending on game engine.

All I can say is that at the beginning of the game I was getting low 20s for FPS. I didn't play beyond the first bit of the tutorial where you learn to move around. Maybe it gets better later, or maybe something is wrong with my setup. I can only express what I am seeing.

The game was also one of the first games to be specifically optimized for the P4 SIMD instructions. Fun fact: if you boot the game on a P4 you'll see the Intel P4 logo appear. The first generation Pentium 4 could be slower than the fastest Pentium 3 when running unoptimized titles. But when optimized properly, it could be much faster.

The slowest Pentium 4 was 1.3Ghz, I think. Mine was only 100Mhz faster than that, so pretty much the bottom of the barrel. For years I wanted to upgrade the memory but it was RDRAM and that stuff was hella expensive. I ended up saving my money and upgrading the whole machine around the release of the Athlon 64.

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-01-07, 09:15:

I have always had problems with Matrox cards entering various display modes that whatever LCD I'm using can't sync to. The only […]
Show full quote

PcBytes wrote on 2025-01-06, 11:07:

Finally got my Matrox Parhelia 512 to display a proper image. Apparently it needs a CRT - thankfully I had my Samsung-built HP Ultra VGA 1280 laying around that could help.

I have always had problems with Matrox cards entering various display modes that whatever LCD I'm using can't sync to. The only solution to fix it when this happens is to reboot the machine.

I have some really rare DVI add-on for the G200, I think. I literally cannot use that card because whatever it syncs at during boot isn't compatible with any of my LCDs.

Has anyone managed to get the Matrox G200 flat panel add-on to work?

I think that add-on *might* work with my HP CRT. That thing goes as low as 43Hz interlaced which might be what you're getting? In my Parhelia's case it didn't want to boot with a fully wired DVI-VGA adapter, but it did with another one that had less pins.

I would assume that other display modes are available. But I have no way to access the control panel to modify it to test. It's not a dual head card, unlike the G400, so it's not possible to boot from the VGA port to configure the DVI output. It's one of the other.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-01-06, 07:56:

I have been testing my Geforce 2 GTS 32Mb build with Pentium III 933Mhz: […]
Show full quote

I have been testing my Geforce 2 GTS 32Mb build with Pentium III 933Mhz:

Return to Castle Wolfwnstein Runs great
American McGee Alice Runs great
Halflife 1 Runs great
Unreal 1 Runs great
Serious Sam Runs great
Deus Ex rums poorly. Well under 20FPS
Black and White 1 Runs poorly. Aboout 20fps

Black and white states that you need a Pentium II 350Mhz and an 8Mb 3D Accelerator. I hate to think how it would run on such a system.

Which drivers are you running. I have a similar setup and, while Deus Ex doesn't run great in outdoor environments, I definitely get 30-45 FPS in the first level.

I'm running
1GHz Pentium 3 (SL4KL)
512MB PC133
Geforce 2 GTS

Windows XP SP1

smtkr wrote on 2025-01-08, 03:16:

Which drivers are you running. I have a similar setup and, while Deus Ex doesn't run great in outdoor environments, I definitely […]
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RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-01-06, 07:56:

I have been testing my Geforce 2 GTS 32Mb build with Pentium III 933Mhz: […]
Show full quote

I have been testing my Geforce 2 GTS 32Mb build with Pentium III 933Mhz:

Return to Castle Wolfwnstein Runs great
American McGee Alice Runs great
Halflife 1 Runs great
Unreal 1 Runs great
Serious Sam Runs great
Deus Ex rums poorly. Well under 20FPS
Black and White 1 Runs poorly. Aboout 20fps

Black and white states that you need a Pentium II 350Mhz and an 8Mb 3D Accelerator. I hate to think how it would run on such a system.

Which drivers are you running. I have a similar setup and, while Deus Ex doesn't run great in outdoor environments, I definitely get 30-45 FPS in the first level.

I'm running
1GHz Pentium 3 (SL4KL)
512MB PC133
Geforce 2 GTS

Windows XP SP1

You need a strong machine. Critical part, also fast for the statue of Freedom. To see you drive 2 core seeds.
E5-2640v3_HD6850_HToff_W10/64 Enterprise_DeusEx_1024x768_Window - 226 FPS

I've been "fiddling" around with my DOS 6.22 build off and on for several weeks, and in that time I've made quite a few changes based on what I find myself doing, or wanting to do, on it the most.

I finally decided to install a proper CD-ROM drive so I can use some of my physical disks to play those games instead of trying to mess with loading images in DOS. I really wish we had a GoTek style IDE CD-ROM hardware emulator. Still, there's something quite nostalgic getting to use my physical disks again.

I also expanded my storage to 4GB! Crazy for a DOS machine in my opinion. My primary is a 2GB SD card (SD to IDE) accessible from a front 5.25 bay. The other 2GB comes from an internally installed CF card (CF to IDE), and I use that mainly for storage, drivers, tracker modules, and maybe the occasional game that may have a large footprint.

Initially, I was running two sound cards, just to play around. However, I seem to gravitate toward the sound of the AWE64 over the Opti. Not surprising since I've always liked the AWE cards. The Opti (SB Pro) has excellent compatibility across all the games I've tried it on, it just works, but mine is definitely “nosier” than my AWE64 card. I've since removed the Opti and just run the AWE64, but I'm having some issues getting it configured to work with a few games, specifically Wolf 3D, the Keen games, and Petscii Robots. No matter what configuration I try, nothing, just silence. So, I'm working on that, not sure what's going on. The other 30+ games installed work.

I've also got both the GoTek and a real 1.44MB floppy installed, but I'm having problems getting both drives to run simultaneously as A and B. They seem to interfere with each other. I need to mess around with it a bit more to see if it's a cable issue, config issue, or something I'm overlooking. Accessing one drive, seems to target both drives.

Overall though, it's almost to a point where I can just leave it alone and enjoy it as-is. My initial “clean” cable-managed case interior has given way to the much more era appropriate rats nest of power, adapter, and ribbon cables, and I love it!

I'm no hardware purist, but I have to admit, doing this build brought back a lot of memories, and even through the frustrations of forgetting so much of what I once knew, it's truly been a lot of fun and relaxing to take a trip down this road. A road that's almost complete and I can enjoy the fruits of my labor!

Reflowed TMUs on a Voodoo 2 - with pretty positive results Re: Voodoo2 component map