Vintage Computers

lukekay said:
@Gozzy Jealous of your 6600GT! Managed to get a FX5500 which is alright, not the most amazing in later era games but works well.
Click to expand...

Yeah they are gr8 retro cards and the performance is very good, infact I have 2 of them, one is a 128mb AGP and in a box somewhere (works but getting a few glitches etc, think it needs a recap) and the one in my vintage pc is the 256mb AGP variant which I was very lucky to get for free as it was reportedly a "broken" card :) the FX5500 is not bad, but atleast a bit better than the FX5200, but yeah unfortunately the AMD2400 is the bottleneck, so if I ever come across a faster socket 939 CPU ...... :p
 
Gozzy said:
Yeah they are gr8 retro cards and the performance is very good, infact I have 2 of them, one is a 128mb AGP and in a box somewhere (works but getting a few glitches etc, think it needs a recap) and the one in my vintage pc is the 256mb AGP variant which I was very lucky to get for free as it was reportedly a "broken" card :) the FX5500 is not bad, but atleast a bit better than the FX5200, but yeah unfortunately the AMD2400 is the bottleneck, so if I ever come across a faster socket 939 CPU ...... :p
Click to expand...
Ah nice! Lucky find, I've been searching for one and you've got two! Hens teeth I tell ya... I love the sense of relief when you recap something and it still works haha recently finished recapping an old P3 motherboard which resolved the random issues I was having with driver initialization. I recently cooked my AthlonXP 2800+ due to ignorance with heatsinks (ultra sad about this one as it was from the first gaming PC I built myself). You looked for any older P4s (socket 478) with AGP lots of high frequency chips floating around? Think 775 they had already begun moving over to PCI-e.
 
lukekay said:
Ah nice! Lucky find, I've been searching for one and you've got two! Hens teeth I tell ya... I love the sense of relief when you recap something and it still works haha recently finished recapping an old P3 motherboard which resolved the random issues I was having with driver initialization. I recently cooked my AthlonXP 2800+ due to ignorance with heatsinks (ultra sad about this one as it was from the first gaming PC I built myself). You looked for any older P4s (socket 478) with AGP lots of high frequency chips floating around? Think 775 they had already begun moving over to PCI-e.
Click to expand...
There are actually some 775 motherboards out there with AGP support, better still, some of them can actually accept Core2 processors up to theQ6600 with a BIOS update.

Windows 98 doesn't benefit from more than one core, so mine's running on a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 660.
 
Looking at sort of maxing my P4.

"Not many games required XP at launch in 2001–2002. Most still ran on Win98/ME. It wasn’t until around 2005 (with games like F.E.A.R. or Call of Duty 2) that XP became the minimum."

"Max Payne" (2001) is one of the last major games released just before or around the launch of Windows XP that needed a strong GPU for its time — it had advanced effects like bullet time, real-time lighting, and detailed textures that pushed GPUs like the NVIDIA GeForce2 and early GeForce3 series."

Seems that part is maybe needed.
 
Totempole said:
Windows 98SE has a 512MB RAM limit. The total actually includes Video RAM.

There's actually a patch that someone by the name of Rudolph Loew developed to get around this. It used to be for sale, but after the he sadly passed away, his family opted to allow all of his patches to be freely distributed.

RLoew's Win9x HDD and RAM utilities (Freeware since 01/2020)
Click to expand...
Used Windows 98 auto patcher, no luck when I plugged the extra 512 in.

Used your link above and used the mempatcher.

Thank you, it worked. CMD and Notepad opens so I believe all is right.
 
I am sure a lot of you are familiar with the YouTuber 'PhilsComputerLab' but he recently released the below video detailing a newer alternative to the 'SBEMU' project for DOS virtualized sound blasters. I've used SBEMU quite extensively, but it has it's quirks especially on more modern hardware (high frequency CPUs) causing high pitched audio or just plain crashing when opening certain DOS games.
SBEMU:
VSBHDASF:

Very curious to see if the alternative 'VSBHDASF' offers better compatibility, could always setup a menu script to switch between the 2 different drivers upon boot.
 
I still got a whole crate of ancient PC components in the Eastern Cape. When next visiting my fam, I'll test what works and what not.

Still haven't got a chance to work on the motherboards and video cards yet, sorry. Project's placed on the back burner for a while.

Just want to thank everybody who've shipped hardware to me, I do appreciate it.
 
airborne said:
Just put an ssd in it and be done with it??
Click to expand...
So the question I have here for myself is what I want?

I wanted a Windows 98 SE build.

But then I had to ask myself, what on Windows 98.

So basically at the time... among the best of hardware that time.

So then maybe SATA would not be that wrong for my build.

Sooo I got a SATA PCI card.

Luckily there was firmware for it, to go from RAID to SATA.
 
It looked even more beautiful when the filesystem hasn't seen a defragmentation session since the OS installation 4-5 years prior and the hard disk was written 95% full, forcing the defragmentation program to move 1 to 3 "blocks" of data around at a time.

Good times 🍻
 
Last edited:
My_King said:
So the question I have here for myself is what I want?

I wanted a Windows 98 SE build.

But then I had to ask myself, what on Windows 98.

So basically at the time... among the best of hardware that time.

So then maybe SATA would not be that wrong for my build.

Sooo I got a SATA PCI card.

Luckily there was firmware for it, to go from RAID to SATA.
Click to expand...
I’d be really interested how an old system like that would run with an SSD, it would probably make it very much usable even by modern standards because disk read/writes has always been a bottle neck right up till ssds were released with far more power machines were already the norm.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X