Well, it's been a while hasn't it? Life has been crazy lately, too many things happening, including the loss of one of my cats. But I finally managed to finish a video and I'm hoping to get back to more frequent uploads. I hope you enjoy this one and make sure to subscribe if you haven't already so you don't miss future parts of The Eric Experiment.
So the most modern hardware I have been able to get a V2 to run has been an i7 3770 and windows xp with some extensive software finesse. And spending a few hours going through firmware settings to overcome each issue. The motherboard was an Asus z77 board that had native PCI slots, so that helped a lot. It seems like those PCI adaptors from china have issues mapping memory properly into the 32 bit memory space that the card needs. And as far as I could see, every game that would run under XP with glide did so. I didn't try with any newer OS, but it is a possibility it could work with a 32 bit vista or 7. I have now seen a card for around $50 that adds PCI Express to a normal PCI slot on a motherboard... (!) so I will be trying to see if i can get a modern video card to work on an older computer that can run the appropriate OS for it. Such as a GTX 260 under XP with a Pentium 3!
Microsoft changed the way sound worked somewhere in Windows 8, or 10, or even earlier. And over here in Europe it was S3 everywhere. They were cheap and relative good performers. (Not for 3D, though. Of course.)
@@oisnowy5368 Windows vista they introduced with Windows Audio Layer which disconnected the hardware from the software. Thus led to the end of decent soundcards.
The problem is most of those old pci cards need -12v +12v +5v and +3.3v. Those pcie to pci adapters don't provide all the needed voltages so most cards won't work or half-work, but cards which only need +5 and/or +12, the newer pci devices, usually work fine if you can find drivers.
Many of them provide 3.3v as well. Either because they use a sata power plug with the appropriate voltage line or they have a regulator. 3.3 volts is kind of necessary for the spec.
true -any card like ati 9800 pro on nvidia 1700xt cant be run by like 300 w noname powersupply to make retro computer on line amd xp cpu for win 98 or xp - and the powerdelivery just fails but an nvidia 4200 ti worked just fine
@@wishusknight3009 Yes, but it's the negative voltages causing most problems. The voodoo cards use them, and some old sound cards also for the amplifiers.
Fun fact; Windows 10 has a software rendering pipeline called WARP, which allows the system to renderin D3D11 and even D3D12 applications without a compatible graphics processor. It is basically a modernized variant of the old software rendering techniques from the 1990s to early 2000s that a lot of older games had in case you had a graphics engine that wasn't powerful enough or didn't support a specific featureset (such as DirectX, OpenGL or GLiDE) and modernizes them massively, taking advantage of the fact that modern CPUs can rasterize albeit not as efficiently as a graphics engine is capable of. This could well be why the Solitaire collection app was able to run on your Tseng ET4000, as that card clearly will lack the D3D11 / OpenGL support required to properly render a program like that. Its only job was to essentially display what the CPU had rendered. this would also explain why you were still in the frames per second range for performance instead of frames per month :)
Similar technology is used on new Intel GPUs, everything older than DX12 is just emulated, GPU doesn't support it natively. Microsoft should really give us some features and options for emulation when it obviously can work. It could improve compatibility for some old games which don't start or graphics is corrupted in native mode. Intel GPUs could have advantage for some very old games running under DX8 or older which doesn't always work on today GPUs.
@@Pidalin True - Although deprecated DirectX emulation on ARC still uses the GPU to render the final result albeit with significant API overhead because it's emulating DX11 or older draw calls on a strictly DX12 compliant card. WARP makes no use of the GPU apart from to display the computed result. the CPU is left to do the draw calls, rendering, shading, post processing if needed and then it sends that off to the GPU to be displayed. In a normal DirectX draw call, the CPU generates the draw call, sends it to the GPU, then the GPU will render the frame, shade and add post processing if needed, then it sends it to the monitor.
The S3 used to be known as the most compatible video card of all time. It has always been a great card for debugging motherboard, driver, and PCI problems.
And to think I couldn't wait to get away from mine, it's a shame nowadays that computer is all gone but I longed for a graphics accelerator so badly when my 2MB S3 card was seemingly all that was holding my gaming back...certainly not my Pentium 100 that I switched some jumpers around on to run at 110 MHz.
I used an S3 Trio64 video card to debug everything from socket 7 motherboards up to Intel Haswell systems back when I ran a computer recycling business in college. I'm really not suprised it worked.
@@circletech7745 That's impressive! I keep thinking of my old Diamond S3 card and how much I couldn't wait to get away from it. 20+ years later I'm looking back thinking maybe I'd like a simple PC again.
I had a Matrox Millennium back in the day... Back then Matrox was the highest end card you could buy. Crazy that it's now the lowest thing that's supported.
Those dedicated Voodoo accelerators are simple DMA devices, so it probably needs special adjustment to work in the x86 64-bit memory address space (a.k.a. Long Mode). The error message is rather clear what the issue is.
fun fact, in the PCIe standard, it specified compatibility for connecting PCI devices to a PCIe host and also PCIe devices to a PCI host as the standard specifies the bridges (commonly called PLX bridges as PLX was one of the biggest manufacturers of these bridges) to be bi-directional, so theoretically you could connect a modern graphics card to a machine that supports PCI and if the software is all good it should work
@@sniff122plays AGP is just PCI bus with Side Band Addressing (address can be provided on separate bus), another method for DMA, point to point architecture (instead of bus), default bus master and much faster speed by using 66MHz bus speed, DDR (x2), QDR (x4) and even ODR (x8). There is more to it, as AGP is dependent on memory controller
@@sniff122plays except that none of the adapters have full 16x support, just a 1x lane electronically and functionally. converting 32 bit parallel to 8 bit serial and retaining all the functional data lanes is pretty much impossible without losing significant functionality. and yes, AGP was PCI on steroids, but was also entirely wired up differently, having DMA, a faster bus and even data multipliers.
I think the popularity of video cards in the 90s was more tied to premade systems, rather than country. I'm in the US and IBM loved Trident for North American machines. AST used S3 and Cirrus, as did other OEMs, so I think it's more vendor/integrator than it is tied to country. Love your work, man. Keep up the great stuff :)
If you're in Melbourne... Reach out, I have plenty of old hardware, AGP graphics cards... IDE hard drives... zip disks... It's getting to where we don't need it all anymore, so happy to discuss giving it to someone who'll have fun.
Well, you could get an old original IBM PC that was the original "standard". Then you'd not have to worry about not being compatible with old standards. But I wouldn't try to run Crysis on it... the system would have it's own crisis. 😉
You could test the 3dfx under dos. Edit: There are also several AM4 motherboards with PCI slots, which negates the need for the adapter. Though they are quite pricey last time I checked.
Saying you don't need the adapter is only partially true. The newer chipsets don't have PCI natively so these motherboards just have the adapter built-in. On the Intel side some of the 2nd/3rd gen chipsets have PCI but nothing fourth and later does.
The reason why some PCI graphics cards booted with color and some didn't is the amount of VRAM. That Matrox had a whole lot more VRAM than your 1MB S3 card. You also may have gotten color by lowering the resolution to 640x480 or lower.
I don't think that's exactly why. When it is in monochrome it _is_ only 640x480 and this is conventional 640x480 non-Super VGA with 16 colors. Modern Windows forced to run with the default 16 colors is next to useless so it seems MS has decided to choose a palette of 16 grays which is much more useful.
Reason for monochrome is possibly missing pin in the used vga cable. Older cards detect color monitors by some pins. If you start the PC without an attache screen and connect it later, you have the same effect on some retro systems.
About that Voodoo 3dFX card, you can actually install a fix that will allow you to get rid of that mapmem error. or at least, this is how this guy did it:ua-cam.com/video/0s6IoQXBJNo/v-deo.html
AMD has Windows 7 drivers up to at least the B450 chipset. I run Windows 7 on a Ryzen 7 5700X and an ASUS B450M Pro S micro ATX motherboard with 64G DDR4-3200 memory. The only difficult part is that AMD messed up the driver for one of the USB3.2 controllers, but it is simply a matter of a quick edit of the corresponding INF file to match the Vendor and Device numbers. (Retro gaming PC.) (edit: unintentionally said the mobo was mini ITX when it's really micro ATX.)
Pretty astonishing that there are working PCI-E IDE adapter cards. That means you can have stuff like ZIP drives or even 3,5'' magneto-optical diskettes on completely modern PCs... provided you have drive bays in your case, which is no longer a given.
A cool attempt to get that Voodoo 2 going, it's too bad it didn't work out. Ngl though, the biggest surprise to me came when I saw that you have a working Quantum Bigfoot. I bought one of these back in that day, as my very first hard drive upgrade when I was a kid. It lasted about 6 months, and turned into a meat grinder. I came to discover later, that they were notorious for dying. Biggest pile of garbage I ever bought. 🤣 Happy to see that some still work at least.
I had been considering buying a pci expansion chassis for use with windows 10 and other OS's, good to know that its not entirely unfeasable today to do that to bring new life back into older PCI cards. thank you for taking the time to make this video and share that final result, I expected it to be hit and miss, but its nice to have confirmation that at all, some things will still work even today on 20 years newer hardware!
You would be surprized with vista and 7 running on modern systems. It is the last privacy based windows. I believe you can download a custom installation as well for newer platforms.
Loving such experiments! i recently booted my NAS with a S3 Trio PCI card because i switched the haswell core i5 4690 out for a xeon cpu without integrated graphics chip and the PCIe slots are already occupied with network and HBA controller cards. luckily that mainboard still has two pci slots (few had them when the system was made) and for just setting up stuff in the bios and loading trueNAS it works fine. i already giggled about that, after all the haswell system still feels like a recent system, has LSI pcie 3.0 raid controllers, 32GB Ram, 10gbE, SSDs and 8 18TB Hard drives...nothing a graphics card from 1996 should work in. but it does.
what a fun video 🙂 As an Aussie who built many PC's in the 90s I can confirm the S3 was popular and in many cases the "default" video solution. I've been going through some old ads (for another project) from around that era and they are everywhere and cheap!
7:12 ONE HERZ, HOLY, must have felt horrible since a single second drags on longer than people think, we've grown accustomed to 60hz commonly on low end devices and 240 on a mid range device so it's insane how we went from pentium era to now.
I've actually done this before with a less modern computer, I used a 2 MB S3 VGA card to get a display out because my PCI Express graphics card was defective. Totally worked but it was in black and white and UA-cam was all CPU encoding.
You may be able to get the voodoo to run with virtual machine that supports PCI passthrough. Also your CPU may be fast enough to the windows software 3D renderer to play some games on the Matrox card. LTT did a video where they ran Crysis on Threadripper without GPU acceleration.
Imagine where this could go if this technology could use SFF-8643 interfaces to bridge the PCI / PCIe lanes... With some advanced standards in mapping PCIe lanes in groups of four between the mainboard and peripherals we could be looking at the next advancement making the next generation of PCIe devices modular and hot swappable.
Cool video. Just discovered your channel and subscribed. I used to use S3 Verge cards all the time when building non-gaming computers back in the day. in '98 or '99 (I think) I was running TWO 12MB 3DFX VooDoo II cards in SLI. That was hot stuff back then!
PCIe has PCI Redundancy built into it, but a lot of boards after so long removed that functionality out completely and stopped providing the sister chipset to retain the PCI Bus Functionality. software wise, yes PCI function is still present within a PCIe bus, however, hardware support can only be achieved through physical adaptation with severe limited capability. Another person did this and put a Radeon 6800XT on a Pentium 3 mainboard using a riser board and a PCI to PCIe adapter. but it was electronically limited to a single PCIe lane. functionally it worked, but the BIOS even knew something was wrong, during POST the BIOS threw a SDC Error pointing to the expansion card addressed at 210H which since the expansion riser was in place and a PCI to PCIe device bridge was in-use, automatically told me..... ehh yeah. hit or miss on this. That coupled to PCIe's clocks compared to PCI's clocks at 33MHz and that PCIe is serial 8 bit data bus over PCI's 32bit parallel data bus.
some AMD boards released few years ago still have build-in PCI slots, like MSI B350 Tomahawk and Asus Prime B350-Plus, you can use old PCI cards with latest Ryzen 5000 series CPU after update to the latest bios.
The animations in Windows 8 and later work on generic VGA drivers because Microsoft put a lot of work into WARP (Windows Advanced Raster Platform), it's actually running in software, but it fully implements all of D3D9 and D3D11 (on Windows 10 and 11, even D3D12 can be implemented in software using WARP -- not Ray Tracing though) :)
In my Ryzen 9 5950X system, I'm running an RME HDSP 5296 PCI audio card in my music studio. I had two choices, try a PCIe to PCI adapter for 15 Euros and use my good old HDSP for maybe another 10 years, or invest additional 600 Euro for its PCIe successor. And because I'm low on money ;-) I gave the adapter a try and it worked like charm, just flawless.
The only problem with this, aside from modern PSU's not supplying the correct amount of 3.3V/5V for these old cards (everything shifted to 12V in the early 2000's), is getting Win10 drivers for these old devices. A lot of them are simply not going to have drivers available, especially for 64-bit Windows. You would probably have some luck getting the Voodoo 2 to work in Linux though.
I tried the sound blaster cards with a similar adapter using my custom fork of the kx audio driver for Mac on my hackintosh system and the result is that the driver gave me kernel panics at every boot attempt
I was interested in this. To run kx compatible cards on machines without PCI slot, but with windows. For now I ended buying one newer creative PCI express card that is kinda compatible with kx.
I don't use that adapter. But I do have voodoo 2 sli 12mb running under both windows xp and windows 10 on my q9550 pc. Topped with a gf 960gtx for main graphics and a 610 just för a vga connection to the voodoo and expanded display. I love making strange and bizarre machines. Thinking about making another video of that pc sometime soon =)
@@TheEricExperiment one of them should be a very recent upload on my channel :) actually I'm migrating data back and forth from drives in that pc as it's becoming more and more of a daily use pc because it has a floppy and a DVD burner along with many other things making life easy when dealing with older computers :) basically I was thinking one day what would be a cool and strange creation that would be useful in the modern Era and in the older era games. Or runs most things from quake 2 and halflife 1 and forward. No dos support though. But have other computers for that :)
I love that the S3 card works. I found an old one a few years back at a company I worked for. We'd built a AMD FX based server but neglected the video card... it just so happened we had the same model of S3 video card kicking around (I remember picking one up for my 5x86 back in 1995) and it worked great. When the card was replaced with a basic GeForce I kept hold of the card, it's in a box somewhere with an old 3COM 3C905-TX, I just can't bring myself to get rid of them, I never know when I might need them.
don't forget to use proper IDE cables as "modern" drives/hosts support UDMA66/133 on 80-conductor wires, but fall back to UDMA33 on legacy 40-conductor ones
You can manage to get the voodoo working with Linux and a Windows 98 virtualized under KVM. A brief how-to. 1- install some Linux distribution as you want. 2- install both qmeu-kvm and virt-manager 3- enable the AMD-Vi at the bios and enable the IOMMU to the Linux kernel. 4- Run the virt-manager, create a virtual machine and install Windows 98 on it. 5- at the virtual machine properties, add a PCI device related to your Voodoo card. 6- Boot up windows 98 and install the appropriate drivers for your voodoo 2. 7- Run some game.
I'm running an M-Audio Revolution 7.1 sound card with a Ryzen 5700GE CPU right now. You don't need those dodgy adapters, since you can still buy AM4 motherboards with PCI slots, like the MSI B350 Tomahawk/PC Mate/Gaming Plus and Biostar X370GT5/X470GTA. They all work fine with Ryzen 5000 after a BIOS update, and all the PCI cards I tried (including SB Live and Audigy) work fine. There are even LGA 1700 boards with a PCI slot, but those seem much harder to find.
With regards to the availability of graphics cards, I seem to recall Trident ISA cards being more popular (from my limited experience anyway) in the UK in the early 90s. When we upgraded the Trident ISA video card on our old Tiny Computers 486sx25 to a VLB card it also was a Trident card. In my first IT job (at a computer shop in 1995) the popular cards seemed to be either S3 or Cirrus Logic PCI cards. I think this may have been because they were cheap, most people who bought computers from the shop wanted a basic desktop PC for office productivity and the occasional games. I personally decided to upgrade my S3 Trio 64 (which I'd already upgraded to 2MB Ram from it's original 1MB) to a 2MB TSeng Labs ET4000/W32 PCI card. I was told by my boss that it was a nice fast card, looking back it was pretty good and I used it until I upgraded to a Matrox Mystique in 1996 when I was earning a bit more. I stuck with the Matrox card until upgrading to an Athlon 1000 and then picked up a cheap (I think S3 VIRGE AGP) card. I only seem to remember coming across ATI and NVIDIA cards in the late 90s along with the 3DFX Voodoo 3 and 4 cards and then the amazing GeForce 256 SDR.
A long shot, you try putting the install files in compatibility mode before you install them. I had Vista drivers so I put the install file in Vista compatibility, and now my old hardware runs fine on latter Win's.
This is extremely interesting and entertaining video. I love bizarre "what if" scenarios that nobody would normally try. Is there any such thing as an ISA to PCI adapter that you can daisy chain onto your PCI-E slot so you can try ISA based cards? That would be a trip 😄 P.S. I just took a look at your older videos and they look just as interesting. Subscribed. Thank you UA-cam algorithm for suggesting another gem of a channel.
Unfortunately no. However, since ISA was part of the IBM PC spec, it has to be present on every x86 compatible CPU so the ryzen does actually have it, it's just that no motherboards have the slots to use it.
OMG...... you became my favorite yoububer, wow men that was awesome i buy dose adapters for a testing but never did it in the end, was really cool what you did
You could always do something like linux kvm, and then use the hardware pass through to push the cards into the underlying OS, which of course you could boot an older version of windows on it- say 95 or so.. Could be cool to try to do that with several oses at once.. I had two of them in SLI back in the day, and I think it was kosher in the late 90s running the original team fortress on even 2.2.x kernels.. can't really remember though, it's been a minute
@@TheEricExperiment I may do something similar- I have old OS/2 Warp floppies (like all 900 of them), which would be fun to detail how much effort it takes to get out of date hardware/os going :)
I was wondering: Maybe we could use such a pci bridge (or some bridges) to build a modern retrogaming computer, i.e: modern processor and mobo, with old cards and old OSes.
@@TheEricExperiment I think you can still get modern motherboards with the compatibility support module (CSM) to provide BIOS compatibility. If not, are these adapters compatible with PCIe passthrough in virtual machines?
You need to install Glide driver to make the Voodoo 2 work with Unreal game. Most of Voodoo 2 driver package didn't include it. Also OpenGl , you need a separated installation. The method you're using here would make Voodoo 2 only working in Direct3D mode which is now overridden by the Radeon card. You 'll need to switch the Voodoo 2 to the default D3D device which needs a utility included in the official driver of the Voodoo 2.
honestly, this is probably more of a test of the adapter than of the card compatability. Some workstation boards with modern sockets still have pci slots for legacy support, and i think there would be a lot more compatability there.
that being said, for the soundblaster live, it's entirely possible that that's to do with the unique position sound cards have with the way they're handled on modern desktops. Pretty much everything to do with their operation wildly changed somewhere around the xp-vista era, and cards designed for the older method, especially with soundblasters questionable software, will give mixed results.
Well that was fun, lol. One thing I'd recommend trying if you're still interested in messing with it - try Windows 10 32-bit. With 64-bit OS you're dealing with multiple levels of emulation - running 32-bit programs, then if compatibility mode is on it could be doing further emulation techniques. Having that many levels of indirection can easily cause all kinds of problems. At least if it's a 32-bit OS, the games (assuming they're 32-bit like Unreal Tournament) are running natively. Start with no compatibility mode and work your way down from there. If none of that works, you can always try Windows 7 or Vista in their 32-bit versions (assuming you were using the 64-bit versions in your testing). When it comes to legacy stuff, the probability of it working is generally higher with less layers of emulation going on.
You can use 3dfx card, by using windows xp, but windows xp on ryzen can't support modern acpi, and in ryzen systems can be used only 1 cores and 1 thread, 2.try clean with an eraser, some cards who didn't work, and for sound blaster 5.1 and audigy series card you need use unoffical drivers by kxproject
Long ago, a buddy and I found Windows 2000 worked best for nearly every software issue we ran into under windows 95/98/XP for hardware as well as games. We never looked back. It was also nice and lean so no bloatware on install.
I just liked this even though it doesn't make so much sense, but it's something I would try. Last time I did something similar was booting Windows Vista with 5.25 Floppy disk drive and there was even a fancy drive icon.
Loved the video! I did this with an old PCI Adaptec SCSI card in order to check the contents of an old Quantum 100MB SCSI drive :) Earnt a subscription!
Brilliant. I'd like to see what the Matrox can do. Or or PCI Voodoo 4! Oh, I had a Trident card. I replaced a Hercules orange adapter with one, to get VGA graphics.
I think the memory mapping error may have to do with having too much main RAM, I see a lot of old software from this era freak out if the machine has too much RAM or VRAM because it can't read numbers that large and just assumes its a gigantic negative number. As for Windows XP crashing, that's almost definitely an incompatibility with your southbridge, you can fix that with something like nLite or WinSetupFromUSB which has options to force drivers onto the install media. I had to do that for my eMachines build and it worked.
Nice experiments bro! You surely know about nglide, don't you? xD For the sake of your mental health, stay away from the DOS-compatible PCI sound card rabbit whole... or not xD It takes a lot of time to find a right combination and at the end of the day it's pointless, but... the process is fun! Anyway, have a great day!
I was using my PCI Xonar D1 in PCI-PCI-e adapter for few years and it mostly worked well, but it happened time to time that sound was broken and I had to restart my computer, but that was like 2 times in month so it was really not a big problem, so it generally works. My adaptor had extra molex power connector (oldschool one, not sata), maybe it makes a difference for some more power consuming cards. Maybe you should try few different adapters, I had one directly to PCI-e slot designed for using low profile cards in it, so you could normaly mount it into your case. I wish there was some AGP-PCI-e adapter, but it seems like these are totaly incompatible technologies. I would probably use Windows 7 for such experiments, Win 10 and 11 are too annoying systems as you probably noticed with those not signed drivers, but there are no drivers for today HW, it's probably the best to use some late Win 7 or even XP hardware, but that would miss the point of your video I guess. 😀 Windows XP doesn't work on today HW, I tested it few times and it never worked, I think Win XP doesn't work properly since there are UEFI Bioses which is like 2013+
@@TheEricExperiment I have Ryzen too, maybe that's the problem. But I think XP didn't really work even on my previous intel. But this is stomething what will always happen, when you want to build a retro gaming PC, you always had to find something what is top from that era, but old enough to run your retro OS. I noticed that Windows 98 doesn't work well with some later Pentium 4 builds, it looks like you need motherboard from pre SATA era with IDE only.
I had NO idea that PCIE to PCI adapters existed!!! Man... I wanna play with this carp too! Gonna have to order one. This would probably all be a lot easier if you just did a specific win10 32 build JUST for playing around with this stuff... ORRR... build one of the sweet spot era PC's.... like, somewhere around ivyE to Haswell i7, running win98 or XP, on a chipset that can play with such an old os, etc.... but with an os that is much happier with the actual video card drivers that you're playing with. Could result in.... well... something.
I found out on reddit that Windows XP can run on AM4 motherboards. Here is the quote "Make sure the target disk is MBR and legacy boot is enabled. Get XP Integral Edition. Then use the optional patch integrator tool thing and choose 1, 4, 6 and 7. Burn it to a disk, there is also a tool for USB setup, you can probably use that, I used a DVD. Go through the setup and select which optional bells and non-required whistles you want. Once it's finished, get Snappy Driver Installer. Install some drivers, but be careful not to install drivers for the AHCI controller or it'll fall off and on next boot you'll get the 7B BSOD. Once that's done, you should basically be done. The MS drivers for the USB 3.0 controller worked fine or me, but not the AMD ones. As for hardware, I have a R5 1600AF and an ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming K4 motherboard."
In Victoria the S3 graphics cards were required in government PC's due to software compatibility. A lot of the older PCI VGA chipsets were used on server boards to save expansion slots for raid controllers etc, as well as embedded industrial computers so Microsoft still has basic support for them. Is there 3dfx support in Linux?
Few things, 1st Blue screens such as what you see from the audio cards, I would expect that it can be due to lack of driver support. 2nd, Not only the last couple pci video cards you placed in the pci adapter did not display, but We didnt see anything relative to booting into bios neither. By default your graphics display would output to the radeon hd 7770 card which may be why you wouldnt see anything at first power up. Not to mention that windows would need to sign in, search and grab the drivers as well before anything works from those other cards before the final VGA pci card placed into that slot. The GeForce 610 should definitely work but after installation of drivers.
that soundblaster looks like one i had in my 2003/4 era dell dimension, i could never manage to get it to work in another computer besides the one it came with
As examples of actual usage (albeit not in proper production systems and using a native PCI slot on the board rather than a converter): I'm using an S3 ViRGE DX in my home server - I needed the PCIe x16 slot for the RAID controller. I was only mildly surprised to find that the Linux _s3fb_ accelerated framebuffer console driver still works well even on a 64-bit system. I'm also using an ATI Mach64 GX in the NAS box that provides VM storage for my test lab at work. I needed the PCIe x16 slot for the 10GbE NIC there (it's using software RAID as it's got little else to do). Sadly, the _atyfb_ console driver doesn't still work, at least on that card/system combo. I've got another ViRGE DX and a Matrox Millennium in my parts box. I should really try out the MGA - I seem to recall that _matroxfb_ was crazy fast when I used to use it 20-odd years ago, but I couldn't get it to work with the embedded G200eH in the old ProLiant server that acts as the host in my test lab.
When you tried to install Windows Xp did your Xp iso include Sata drivers? (provided you used a cd and a sata cd/dvd drive to install them) (also I know this is an old video but it would be pretty cool if it got a follow up)
Not to mention that most old backward compat that used some low-level APIs are removed or broken in 64bit versions (NTVDM for example is absent) It could also be that the PCI slots where mapped to different memory addresses then the driver or applications expect them to be
You certainly can. I had an AM4 board and it had a native PCI slot on it and could use a variety of PCI stuff. In the future it will be VMs and PCI pass through with some sort of PCI to PCIe adapter that actually works and is engineered for that purpose.
I believe you are mistaken about the native part. From what I can tell the AMD FCH for desktop CPUs was their last with native PCI. Your AM4 board probably had an adapter chip onboard. My Intel Haswell system has conventional PCI slots and its manual makes clear that they are implemented in this way.
It's actually surprised me when gt610 don't want to work, because it's like a "modern adapter" compare to some other things what was tested. You even can still buy this graphics card. What I really expected that all tested device will work, at least you will have this device in device manager.
I have a old IBM Aptiva with a P2 cpu laying around. It has some linux installed on it. I dont remember what one. The Bigfoot HDD is sitting in a box. It started to get really loud so i pulled it out in about 2004. The one thing i remember was getting the PCI network adapter to work. I had to use the .inf file you can find in the windows driver install exe by opening it in 7zip and "wrap" in the... whatever things you do with linux. its been almost 20 years. Anyway it worked. Internet was sloooooooow. But the computer could play Quake over the home network for some LAN fun. :D
What I'd like to see is if this works for a virtual machine with PCI-E passthrough. If XP or even Win98 would see this as just a PCI device if PCI-E is running in a pci compat mode.
Hello , Very informative video about old PCI controller cards on a actual PC. As i learned from the listings of the 2nd hand Creative PCI sound.controller card sellers , Windows and Windows 11 does not work with them.
It would actually be a really interesting video series to combine the fastest available products with the slowest or oldest compatible hardware. Like a 13900k with an old GeForce or or voodoo card, or a 4090 with a pentium 3/4. Even mixing the best of today with the best of yesteryear like a pentium 4 extreme edition, a core 2/quad extreme edition, or a i7 980x with the fastest ram and storage from the time, like old pcie drives, and pairing it with nvlink 4090/3090. Or 4 way sli old GeForce cards with a 13900k/7950x. Could even do it with workstation server hardware. Old first gen Xeons with a bunch of rtx a6000s.
I grew up in Switzerland, and while it is certainly not representative, personally I have in fact seen significantly more Cirrus Logic chips around at that time. I think it is pretty plausible that there are differences depending on the markets.
Well, it's been a while hasn't it? Life has been crazy lately, too many things happening, including the loss of one of my cats. But I finally managed to finish a video and I'm hoping to get back to more frequent uploads. I hope you enjoy this one and make sure to subscribe if you haven't already so you don't miss future parts of The Eric Experiment.
Try to use Integral version of WinXP, adding manually ACPI patch for newer MBs should fix that BSOD you had on install.
I'm a bit late to the party, but I can help you get XP 32-bit working on that hardware if you're still interested.
So the most modern hardware I have been able to get a V2 to run has been an i7 3770 and windows xp with some extensive software finesse. And spending a few hours going through firmware settings to overcome each issue. The motherboard was an Asus z77 board that had native PCI slots, so that helped a lot. It seems like those PCI adaptors from china have issues mapping memory properly into the 32 bit memory space that the card needs. And as far as I could see, every game that would run under XP with glide did so. I didn't try with any newer OS, but it is a possibility it could work with a 32 bit vista or 7.
I have now seen a card for around $50 that adds PCI Express to a normal PCI slot on a motherboard... (!) so I will be trying to see if i can get a modern video card to work on an older computer that can run the appropriate OS for it. Such as a GTX 260 under XP with a Pentium 3!
Microsoft changed the way sound worked somewhere in Windows 8, or 10, or even earlier. And over here in Europe it was S3 everywhere. They were cheap and relative good performers. (Not for 3D, though. Of course.)
@@oisnowy5368 Windows vista they introduced with Windows Audio Layer which disconnected the hardware from the software. Thus led to the end of decent soundcards.
The problem is most of those old pci cards need -12v +12v +5v and +3.3v. Those pcie to pci adapters don't provide all the needed voltages so most cards won't work or half-work, but cards which only need +5 and/or +12, the newer pci devices, usually work fine if you can find drivers.
Many of them provide 3.3v as well. Either because they use a sata power plug with the appropriate voltage line or they have a regulator. 3.3 volts is kind of necessary for the spec.
true -any card like ati 9800 pro on nvidia 1700xt cant be run by like 300 w noname powersupply to make retro computer on line amd xp cpu for win 98 or xp - and the powerdelivery just fails but an nvidia 4200 ti worked just fine
@@wishusknight3009 Yes, but it's the negative voltages causing most problems. The voodoo cards use them, and some old sound cards also for the amplifiers.
@@Romerco77 There was only a couple of ISA sound cards that used -5 volts afaik.
@@wishusknight3009 there is no -5 volts on PCI, but -12v
Fun fact;
Windows 10 has a software rendering pipeline called WARP, which allows the system to renderin D3D11 and even D3D12 applications without a compatible graphics processor. It is basically a modernized variant of the old software rendering techniques from the 1990s to early 2000s that a lot of older games had in case you had a graphics engine that wasn't powerful enough or didn't support a specific featureset (such as DirectX, OpenGL or GLiDE) and modernizes them massively, taking advantage of the fact that modern CPUs can rasterize albeit not as efficiently as a graphics engine is capable of.
This could well be why the Solitaire collection app was able to run on your Tseng ET4000, as that card clearly will lack the D3D11 / OpenGL support required to properly render a program like that. Its only job was to essentially display what the CPU had rendered. this would also explain why you were still in the frames per second range for performance instead of frames per month :)
I didn't know that! That's awesome!
Similar technology is used on new Intel GPUs, everything older than DX12 is just emulated, GPU doesn't support it natively. Microsoft should really give us some features and options for emulation when it obviously can work. It could improve compatibility for some old games which don't start or graphics is corrupted in native mode. Intel GPUs could have advantage for some very old games running under DX8 or older which doesn't always work on today GPUs.
@@Pidalin True - Although deprecated DirectX emulation on ARC still uses the GPU to render the final result albeit with significant API overhead because it's emulating DX11 or older draw calls on a strictly DX12 compliant card. WARP makes no use of the GPU apart from to display the computed result. the CPU is left to do the draw calls, rendering, shading, post processing if needed and then it sends that off to the GPU to be displayed.
In a normal DirectX draw call, the CPU generates the draw call, sends it to the GPU, then the GPU will render the frame, shade and add post processing if needed, then it sends it to the monitor.
Protogen
@@zedoctor_ proot.mp4
The S3 used to be known as the most compatible video card of all time. It has always been a great card for debugging motherboard, driver, and PCI problems.
And to think I couldn't wait to get away from mine, it's a shame nowadays that computer is all gone but I longed for a graphics accelerator so badly when my 2MB S3 card was seemingly all that was holding my gaming back...certainly not my Pentium 100 that I switched some jumpers around on to run at 110 MHz.
Amen. Was my goto card for years when I was working on stuff.
I used an S3 Trio64 video card to debug everything from socket 7 motherboards up to Intel Haswell systems back when I ran a computer recycling business in college. I'm really not suprised it worked.
@@circletech7745 That's impressive! I keep thinking of my old Diamond S3 card and how much I couldn't wait to get away from it. 20+ years later I'm looking back thinking maybe I'd like a simple PC again.
The Matrox Mystique works so well because it (well, a sibling of it) is still in use as a on-board Server GPU for remote management and the like.
Yep, came here to post this comment, S3/Matrox cards are still common in modern servers for onboard VGA output
Just randomly found this. Fan of 3dfx and fam if modern HW.... Great vid mate, awesome quality
Matrox chipsets are used on server platforms for minimal VGA interface, so support was to be expected
I had a Matrox Millennium back in the day... Back then Matrox was the highest end card you could buy. Crazy that it's now the lowest thing that's supported.
ilo4 uses 200GE
That works on windows 11 latest
Those dedicated Voodoo accelerators are simple DMA devices, so it probably needs special adjustment to work in the x86 64-bit memory address space (a.k.a. Long Mode). The error message is rather clear what the issue is.
I'll look into that and try to fix it in the future
@@TheEricExperiment did you try a 32 bit os?
@@TheEricExperiment try them in freedos instead of windows
Maybe a downgrade to 2GB of RAM will work 🧐
fun fact, in the PCIe standard, it specified compatibility for connecting PCI devices to a PCIe host and also PCIe devices to a PCI host as the standard specifies the bridges (commonly called PLX bridges as PLX was one of the biggest manufacturers of these bridges) to be bi-directional, so theoretically you could connect a modern graphics card to a machine that supports PCI and if the software is all good it should work
And even AGP to PCIe and vice versa
AGP is PCI on steroids
@@WizardNumberNext oh interesting, didn't know that
@@sniff122plays AGP is just PCI bus with Side Band Addressing (address can be provided on separate bus), another method for DMA, point to point architecture (instead of bus), default bus master and much faster speed by using 66MHz bus speed, DDR (x2), QDR (x4) and even ODR (x8).
There is more to it, as AGP is dependent on memory controller
@@sniff122plays except that none of the adapters have full 16x support, just a 1x lane electronically and functionally.
converting 32 bit parallel to 8 bit serial and retaining all the functional data lanes is pretty much impossible without losing significant functionality.
and yes, AGP was PCI on steroids, but was also entirely wired up differently, having DMA, a faster bus and even data multipliers.
Ye it is really cool. :D Found out just a few days ago.
ua-cam.com/video/HQ7AdXPaPxc/v-deo.html
I think the popularity of video cards in the 90s was more tied to premade systems, rather than country. I'm in the US and IBM loved Trident for North American machines. AST used S3 and Cirrus, as did other OEMs, so I think it's more vendor/integrator than it is tied to country. Love your work, man. Keep up the great stuff :)
If you're in Melbourne... Reach out, I have plenty of old hardware, AGP graphics cards... IDE hard drives... zip disks... It's getting to where we don't need it all anymore, so happy to discuss giving it to someone who'll have fun.
I'm in Sydney, but I can let you know when I'm in Melbourne, what's the best way to get in touch?
PC Master race, got to love those standards! I really like these quirky setups with huge differences in age.
Well, you could get an old original IBM PC that was the original "standard". Then you'd not have to worry about not being compatible with old standards. But I wouldn't try to run Crysis on it... the system would have it's own crisis. 😉
You could test the 3dfx under dos.
Edit: There are also several AM4 motherboards with PCI slots, which negates the need for the adapter. Though they are quite pricey last time I checked.
Asus prime B350-Plus has PCI and was really common board back in 1st generation ryzen
Saying you don't need the adapter is only partially true. The newer chipsets don't have PCI natively so these motherboards just have the adapter built-in. On the Intel side some of the 2nd/3rd gen chipsets have PCI but nothing fourth and later does.
Love how he fails to Voodoo 2, but then sticks his big foot into the video and makes an amazing video!
Still had to make the video worth it somehow =)
The reason why some PCI graphics cards booted with color and some didn't is the amount of VRAM. That Matrox had a whole lot more VRAM than your 1MB S3 card. You also may have gotten color by lowering the resolution to 640x480 or lower.
I don't think that's exactly why. When it is in monochrome it _is_ only 640x480 and this is conventional 640x480 non-Super VGA with 16 colors. Modern Windows forced to run with the default 16 colors is next to useless so it seems MS has decided to choose a palette of 16 grays which is much more useful.
Reason for monochrome is possibly missing pin in the used vga cable. Older cards detect color monitors by some pins. If you start the PC without an attache screen and connect it later, you have the same effect on some retro systems.
Pretty sure it's just the rendering mode rather than anything to do with vram
About that Voodoo 3dFX card, you can actually install a fix that will allow you to get rid of that mapmem error. or at least, this is how this guy did it:ua-cam.com/video/0s6IoQXBJNo/v-deo.html
AMD has Windows 7 drivers up to at least the B450 chipset. I run Windows 7 on a Ryzen 7 5700X and an ASUS B450M Pro S micro ATX motherboard with 64G DDR4-3200 memory. The only difficult part is that AMD messed up the driver for one of the USB3.2 controllers, but it is simply a matter of a quick edit of the corresponding INF file to match the Vendor and Device numbers. (Retro gaming PC.)
(edit: unintentionally said the mobo was mini ITX when it's really micro ATX.)
Why the heck would you get 64GB RAM for a Retro gaming PC? There's no retro game (or even modern game) that will use that amount of RAM. lol
@@Crispe1Official Because I can. I also use other software (like 7-Zip) that benefit greatly from the increased memory.
I get blue screen of death with PCI lan cards with my Ryzen 5, but the Audigy line works just fine, I'm using that daily. :D
Man, I remembering using that soundcard in a windows 10 32 bits pc and I had to change the midi mapper with VirtualMidiSynth, it worked flawlessly
Pretty astonishing that there are working PCI-E IDE adapter cards. That means you can have stuff like ZIP drives or even 3,5'' magneto-optical diskettes on completely modern PCs... provided you have drive bays in your case, which is no longer a given.
Case modding ftw! =)
A cool attempt to get that Voodoo 2 going, it's too bad it didn't work out.
Ngl though, the biggest surprise to me came when I saw that you have a working Quantum Bigfoot. I bought one of these back in that day, as my very first hard drive upgrade when I was a kid. It lasted about 6 months, and turned into a meat grinder.
I came to discover later, that they were notorious for dying. Biggest pile of garbage I ever bought. 🤣 Happy to see that some still work at least.
Yeah, Quantums in general kinda suck.
This is a really great video! Fun to watch! Thanks for this!
I am most amazed by the working Bigfoot drive 🤩
I had been considering buying a pci expansion chassis for use with windows 10 and other OS's, good to know that its not entirely unfeasable today to do that to bring new life back into older PCI cards. thank you for taking the time to make this video and share that final result, I expected it to be hit and miss, but its nice to have confirmation that at all, some things will still work even today on 20 years newer hardware!
I'm glad you enjoyed it!
What would you plug into a PCI expansion chassis
You would be surprized with vista and 7 running on modern systems. It is the last privacy based windows. I believe you can download a custom installation as well for newer platforms.
Loving such experiments! i recently booted my NAS with a S3 Trio PCI card because i switched the haswell core i5 4690 out for a xeon cpu without integrated graphics chip and the PCIe slots are already occupied with network and HBA controller cards. luckily that mainboard still has two pci slots (few had them when the system was made) and for just setting up stuff in the bios and loading trueNAS it works fine. i already giggled about that, after all the haswell system still feels like a recent system, has LSI pcie 3.0 raid controllers, 32GB Ram, 10gbE, SSDs and 8 18TB Hard drives...nothing a graphics card from 1996 should work in. but it does.
The fact that this isn't something linus from linus tech tips wouldn't do on his channel is boggling.
what a fun video 🙂
As an Aussie who built many PC's in the 90s I can confirm the S3 was popular and in many cases the "default" video solution.
I've been going through some old ads (for another project) from around that era and they are everywhere and cheap!
That kinda confirms my hypothesis.
Thanks!
Amazing video man.
Who would have thought these graphics card can work in Windows 10 ??
It was very funny to see these cards in a modern system !
7:12 ONE HERZ, HOLY, must have felt horrible since a single second drags on longer than people think, we've grown accustomed to 60hz commonly on low end devices and 240 on a mid range device so it's insane how we went from pentium era to now.
I've actually done this before with a less modern computer, I used a 2 MB S3 VGA card to get a display out because my PCI Express graphics card was defective. Totally worked but it was in black and white and UA-cam was all CPU encoding.
You may be able to get the voodoo to run with virtual machine that supports PCI passthrough. Also your CPU may be fast enough to the windows software 3D renderer to play some games on the Matrox card. LTT did a video where they ran Crysis on Threadripper without GPU acceleration.
I missed that video.
Yeah all of those ideas would probably be possible. Maybe I'll try those things in the future.
Imagine where this could go if this technology could use SFF-8643 interfaces to bridge the PCI / PCIe lanes... With some advanced standards in mapping PCIe lanes in groups of four between the mainboard and peripherals we could be looking at the next advancement making the next generation of PCIe devices modular and hot swappable.
For old video cards to have splash screen and color they should support vesa vbe 2.0 video modes or the os just defaults to some standard svga modes
Cool video. Just discovered your channel and subscribed. I used to use S3 Verge cards all the time when building non-gaming computers back in the day. in '98 or '99 (I think) I was running TWO 12MB 3DFX VooDoo II cards in SLI. That was hot stuff back then!
That's awesome! Thanks for subscribing!
My AM4 Motherboard still has PCI2 slots on it and I actually used them one time to try an old pc tuner card.
PCIe has PCI Redundancy built into it, but a lot of boards after so long removed that functionality out completely and stopped providing the sister chipset to retain the PCI Bus Functionality. software wise, yes PCI function is still present within a PCIe bus, however, hardware support can only be achieved through physical adaptation with severe limited capability.
Another person did this and put a Radeon 6800XT on a Pentium 3 mainboard using a riser board and a PCI to PCIe adapter. but it was electronically limited to a single PCIe lane. functionally it worked, but the BIOS even knew something was wrong, during POST the BIOS threw a SDC Error pointing to the expansion card addressed at 210H which since the expansion riser was in place and a PCI to PCIe device bridge was in-use, automatically told me..... ehh yeah. hit or miss on this.
That coupled to PCIe's clocks compared to PCI's clocks at 33MHz and that PCIe is serial 8 bit data bus over PCI's 32bit parallel data bus.
some AMD boards released few years ago still have build-in PCI slots, like MSI B350 Tomahawk and Asus Prime B350-Plus, you can use old PCI cards with latest Ryzen 5000 series CPU after update to the latest bios.
I'd love to get one, that'd be fun to play with.
Nice content mate. In fact you made many experiments in one video and discovered some unlikely compatibilities. In my book this is good science!
The animations in Windows 8 and later work on generic VGA drivers because Microsoft put a lot of work into WARP (Windows Advanced Raster Platform), it's actually running in software, but it fully implements all of D3D9 and D3D11 (on Windows 10 and 11, even D3D12 can be implemented in software using WARP -- not Ray Tracing though) :)
@2:44 to awnser your question, sort of yes. My main computer is a Ryzen 3900x with a HD7870.
In my Ryzen 9 5950X system, I'm running an RME HDSP 5296 PCI audio card in my music studio. I had two choices, try a PCIe to PCI adapter for 15 Euros and use my good old HDSP for maybe another 10 years, or invest additional 600 Euro for its PCIe successor. And because I'm low on money ;-) I gave the adapter a try and it worked like charm, just flawless.
Which adapter model did U get and where !! Thanks
@@Minkah60 It was a PCI riser card by CSL
The only problem with this, aside from modern PSU's not supplying the correct amount of 3.3V/5V for these old cards (everything shifted to 12V in the early 2000's), is getting Win10 drivers for these old devices. A lot of them are simply not going to have drivers available, especially for 64-bit Windows. You would probably have some luck getting the Voodoo 2 to work in Linux though.
I will try that eventually! Thanks,
Great video!
Congratulations! :>
Thank you!
I tried the sound blaster cards with a similar adapter using my custom fork of the kx audio driver for Mac on my hackintosh system and the result is that the driver gave me kernel panics at every boot attempt
I was interested in this. To run kx compatible cards on machines without PCI slot, but with windows. For now I ended buying one newer creative PCI express card that is kinda compatible with kx.
I don't use that adapter. But I do have voodoo 2 sli 12mb running under both windows xp and windows 10 on my q9550 pc. Topped with a gf 960gtx for main graphics and a 610 just för a vga connection to the voodoo and expanded display. I love making strange and bizarre machines. Thinking about making another video of that pc sometime soon =)
I'd love to watch that video.
@@TheEricExperiment one of them should be a very recent upload on my channel :) actually I'm migrating data back and forth from drives in that pc as it's becoming more and more of a daily use pc because it has a floppy and a DVD burner along with many other things making life easy when dealing with older computers :) basically I was thinking one day what would be a cool and strange creation that would be useful in the modern Era and in the older era games. Or runs most things from quake 2 and halflife 1 and forward. No dos support though. But have other computers for that :)
I love that the S3 card works. I found an old one a few years back at a company I worked for. We'd built a AMD FX based server but neglected the video card... it just so happened we had the same model of S3 video card kicking around (I remember picking one up for my 5x86 back in 1995) and it worked great. When the card was replaced with a basic GeForce I kept hold of the card, it's in a box somewhere with an old 3COM 3C905-TX, I just can't bring myself to get rid of them, I never know when I might need them.
Never throw them away, they are gems!
don't forget to use proper IDE cables as "modern" drives/hosts support UDMA66/133 on 80-conductor wires, but fall back to UDMA33 on legacy 40-conductor ones
I wonder if the Bigfoot supports 66...
You can manage to get the voodoo working with Linux and a Windows 98 virtualized under KVM.
A brief how-to.
1- install some Linux distribution as you want.
2- install both qmeu-kvm and virt-manager
3- enable the AMD-Vi at the bios and enable the IOMMU to the Linux kernel.
4- Run the virt-manager, create a virtual machine and install Windows 98 on it.
5- at the virtual machine properties, add a PCI device related to your Voodoo card.
6- Boot up windows 98 and install the appropriate drivers for your voodoo 2.
7- Run some game.
Some people suggested that and I'm getting more and more interested in trying it.
@@TheEricExperiment I already did that on my old Voodoo 2 and worked very well.
I'm running an M-Audio Revolution 7.1 sound card with a Ryzen 5700GE CPU right now.
You don't need those dodgy adapters, since you can still buy AM4 motherboards with PCI slots, like the MSI B350 Tomahawk/PC Mate/Gaming Plus and Biostar X370GT5/X470GTA. They all work fine with Ryzen 5000 after a BIOS update, and all the PCI cards I tried (including SB Live and Audigy) work fine.
There are even LGA 1700 boards with a PCI slot, but those seem much harder to find.
With regards to the availability of graphics cards, I seem to recall Trident ISA cards being more popular (from my limited experience anyway) in the UK in the early 90s. When we upgraded the Trident ISA video card on our old Tiny Computers 486sx25 to a VLB card it also was a Trident card.
In my first IT job (at a computer shop in 1995) the popular cards seemed to be either S3 or Cirrus Logic PCI cards. I think this may have been because they were cheap, most people who bought computers from the shop wanted a basic desktop PC for office productivity and the occasional games. I personally decided to upgrade my S3 Trio 64 (which I'd already upgraded to 2MB Ram from it's original 1MB) to a 2MB TSeng Labs ET4000/W32 PCI card. I was told by my boss that it was a nice fast card, looking back it was pretty good and I used it until I upgraded to a Matrox Mystique in 1996 when I was earning a bit more. I stuck with the Matrox card until upgrading to an Athlon 1000 and then picked up a cheap (I think S3 VIRGE AGP) card. I only seem to remember coming across ATI and NVIDIA cards in the late 90s along with the 3DFX Voodoo 3 and 4 cards and then the amazing GeForce 256 SDR.
It's funny because the ET4000 chipset has been around since 89 I think. Of course it had revisions, but still...
A long shot, you try putting the install files in compatibility mode before you install them. I had Vista drivers so I put the install file in Vista compatibility, and now my old hardware runs fine on latter Win's.
This is extremely interesting and entertaining video. I love bizarre "what if" scenarios that nobody would normally try. Is there any such thing as an ISA to PCI adapter that you can daisy chain onto your PCI-E slot so you can try ISA based cards? That would be a trip 😄 P.S. I just took a look at your older videos and they look just as interesting. Subscribed. Thank you UA-cam algorithm for suggesting another gem of a channel.
Unfortunately no. However, since ISA was part of the IBM PC spec, it has to be present on every x86 compatible CPU so the ryzen does actually have it, it's just that no motherboards have the slots to use it.
Thank you so much, I'm glad you like it!
Yeah like chadmasta5 said, there are no ISA adaptors... =(
@@chadmasta5 It only needs to be present logically. If the chipset does have a physical connection it will be in the form of an LPC bus.
Yeah I had a Trident 9440 as well and so did my buddies, those were everywhere
By accident I'm trying to test new motherboard with modern cpu and old graphics cards - black screen. Thanks! Now I know it can be video card issue!
Good video made me chuckle as have owned most of that at some point over the past 30 years! Good memories
OMG...... you became my favorite yoububer, wow men that was awesome i buy dose adapters for a testing but never did it in the end, was really cool what you did
Thank you! I'm really glad you enjoyed it! Makes the effort so worth it!
You could always do something like linux kvm, and then use the hardware pass through to push the cards into the underlying OS, which of course you could boot an older version of windows on it- say 95 or so.. Could be cool to try to do that with several oses at once.. I had two of them in SLI back in the day, and I think it was kosher in the late 90s running the original team fortress on even 2.2.x kernels.. can't really remember though, it's been a minute
That's definitely a cool experiment to do. I might try that in the future!
@@TheEricExperiment I may do something similar- I have old OS/2 Warp floppies (like all 900 of them), which would be fun to detail how much effort it takes to get out of date hardware/os going :)
I had a voodoo 2, "sold" it to a policeman's son who never paid for it.
That sucks
If people owned Soundblaster Live it would be still good for most users and i love it :)
I had no idea you could actually do this, this is insane
I was wondering: Maybe we could use such a pci bridge (or some bridges) to build a modern retrogaming computer, i.e: modern processor and mobo, with old cards and old OSes.
It might be hard to run old OSs on UEFI bioses though.
@@TheEricExperiment I think you can still get modern motherboards with the compatibility support module (CSM) to provide BIOS compatibility. If not, are these adapters compatible with PCIe passthrough in virtual machines?
I grew up in California in the '90s and I saw a good mix of trident S3 and cirrus cards equally
Tridents used to be pretty abundant here. And I did come across alot of Cirrus Logic's, ATI Mach64's and S3's back in the day
You need to install Glide driver to make the Voodoo 2 work with Unreal game. Most of Voodoo 2 driver package didn't include it. Also OpenGl , you need a separated installation.
The method you're using here would make Voodoo 2 only working in Direct3D mode which is now overridden by the Radeon card. You 'll need to switch the Voodoo 2 to the default D3D device which needs a utility included in the official driver of the Voodoo 2.
honestly, this is probably more of a test of the adapter than of the card compatability. Some workstation boards with modern sockets still have pci slots for legacy support, and i think there would be a lot more compatability there.
that being said, for the soundblaster live, it's entirely possible that that's to do with the unique position sound cards have with the way they're handled on modern desktops. Pretty much everything to do with their operation wildly changed somewhere around the xp-vista era, and cards designed for the older method, especially with soundblasters questionable software, will give mixed results.
32bit OS might give you better luck on the Voodoo.
Well that was fun, lol. One thing I'd recommend trying if you're still interested in messing with it - try Windows 10 32-bit. With 64-bit OS you're dealing with multiple levels of emulation - running 32-bit programs, then if compatibility mode is on it could be doing further emulation techniques. Having that many levels of indirection can easily cause all kinds of problems. At least if it's a 32-bit OS, the games (assuming they're 32-bit like Unreal Tournament) are running natively. Start with no compatibility mode and work your way down from there. If none of that works, you can always try Windows 7 or Vista in their 32-bit versions (assuming you were using the 64-bit versions in your testing).
When it comes to legacy stuff, the probability of it working is generally higher with less layers of emulation going on.
You can use 3dfx card, by using windows xp, but windows xp on ryzen can't support modern acpi, and in ryzen systems can be used only 1 cores and 1 thread, 2.try clean with an eraser, some cards who didn't work, and for sound blaster 5.1 and audigy series card you need use unoffical drivers by kxproject
Thanks, I'll look into it!
Long ago, a buddy and I found Windows 2000 worked best for nearly every software issue we ran into under windows 95/98/XP for hardware as well as games. We never looked back. It was also nice and lean so no bloatware on install.
I just liked this even though it doesn't make so much sense, but it's something I would try. Last time I did something similar was booting Windows Vista with 5.25 Floppy disk drive and there was even a fancy drive icon.
How did that go?
I often find that things that make sense aren't as fun! Haha
Loved the video! I did this with an old PCI Adaptec SCSI card in order to check the contents of an old Quantum 100MB SCSI drive :) Earnt a subscription!
Thank you! =)
It is surprising how compatible and modular our PCs are.
Meanwhile 2 year old phones cant run android12
For me in Sweden S3, Cirrus Logic and Trident where all common back in the day at least for me :P
Brilliant. I'd like to see what the Matrox can do. Or or PCI Voodoo 4! Oh, I had a Trident card. I replaced a Hercules orange adapter with one, to get VGA graphics.
I think the memory mapping error may have to do with having too much main RAM, I see a lot of old software from this era freak out if the machine has too much RAM or VRAM because it can't read numbers that large and just assumes its a gigantic negative number. As for Windows XP crashing, that's almost definitely an incompatibility with your southbridge, you can fix that with something like nLite or WinSetupFromUSB which has options to force drivers onto the install media. I had to do that for my eMachines build and it worked.
Nice experiments bro! You surely know about nglide, don't you? xD
For the sake of your mental health, stay away from the DOS-compatible PCI sound card rabbit whole... or not xD
It takes a lot of time to find a right combination and at the end of the day it's pointless, but... the process is fun!
Anyway, have a great day!
I was using my PCI Xonar D1 in PCI-PCI-e adapter for few years and it mostly worked well, but it happened time to time that sound was broken and I had to restart my computer, but that was like 2 times in month so it was really not a big problem, so it generally works. My adaptor had extra molex power connector (oldschool one, not sata), maybe it makes a difference for some more power consuming cards. Maybe you should try few different adapters, I had one directly to PCI-e slot designed for using low profile cards in it, so you could normaly mount it into your case. I wish there was some AGP-PCI-e adapter, but it seems like these are totaly incompatible technologies.
I would probably use Windows 7 for such experiments, Win 10 and 11 are too annoying systems as you probably noticed with those not signed drivers, but there are no drivers for today HW, it's probably the best to use some late Win 7 or even XP hardware, but that would miss the point of your video I guess. 😀 Windows XP doesn't work on today HW, I tested it few times and it never worked, I think Win XP doesn't work properly since there are UEFI Bioses which is like 2013+
I find the Ryzen has some issues running 32-bit operating systems...
@@TheEricExperiment I have Ryzen too, maybe that's the problem. But I think XP didn't really work even on my previous intel. But this is stomething what will always happen, when you want to build a retro gaming PC, you always had to find something what is top from that era, but old enough to run your retro OS. I noticed that Windows 98 doesn't work well with some later Pentium 4 builds, it looks like you need motherboard from pre SATA era with IDE only.
The voodoo 2, possibly the best value for money graphics card, ever invented. Ahhh...those were the days!
I had NO idea that PCIE to PCI adapters existed!!! Man... I wanna play with this carp too! Gonna have to order one.
This would probably all be a lot easier if you just did a specific win10 32 build JUST for playing around with this stuff... ORRR... build one of the sweet spot era PC's.... like, somewhere around ivyE to Haswell i7, running win98 or XP, on a chipset that can play with such an old os, etc.... but with an os that is much happier with the actual video card drivers that you're playing with. Could result in.... well... something.
Too bad you didn't try 32-bit version of Vista/Win7/Win10 because it might work.
That would have been to logical
I love it, love to see PCI graphics cards
Maybe the best powerful PCI Graphics card is the Zotac GT610 PCI
I found out on reddit that Windows XP can run on AM4 motherboards. Here is the quote "Make sure the target disk is MBR and legacy boot is enabled. Get XP Integral Edition. Then use the optional patch integrator tool thing and choose 1, 4, 6 and 7. Burn it to a disk, there is also a tool for USB setup, you can probably use that, I used a DVD. Go through the setup and select which optional bells and non-required whistles you want. Once it's finished, get Snappy Driver Installer. Install some drivers, but be careful not to install drivers for the AHCI controller or it'll fall off and on next boot you'll get the 7B BSOD. Once that's done, you should basically be done. The MS drivers for the USB 3.0 controller worked fine or me, but not the AMD ones.
As for hardware, I have a R5 1600AF and an ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming K4 motherboard."
In Victoria the S3 graphics cards were required in government PC's due to software compatibility.
A lot of the older PCI VGA chipsets were used on server boards to save expansion slots for raid controllers etc, as well as embedded industrial computers so Microsoft still has basic support for them.
Is there 3dfx support in Linux?
I don't know if there is, but like people mentioned, it might be possible to pass it through to a vm.
Few things,
1st Blue screens such as what you see from the audio cards, I would expect that it can be due to lack of driver support.
2nd, Not only the last couple pci video cards you placed in the pci adapter did not display, but We didnt see anything relative to booting into bios neither.
By default your graphics display would output to the radeon hd 7770 card which may be why you wouldnt see anything at first power up. Not to mention that windows would need to sign in, search and grab the drivers as well before anything works from those other cards before the final VGA pci card placed into that slot. The GeForce 610 should definitely work but after installation of drivers.
that soundblaster looks like one i had in my 2003/4 era dell dimension, i could never manage to get it to work in another computer besides the one it came with
My appreciation to your Jazz Music mate.
As examples of actual usage (albeit not in proper production systems and using a native PCI slot on the board rather than a converter): I'm using an S3 ViRGE DX in my home server - I needed the PCIe x16 slot for the RAID controller. I was only mildly surprised to find that the Linux _s3fb_ accelerated framebuffer console driver still works well even on a 64-bit system. I'm also using an ATI Mach64 GX in the NAS box that provides VM storage for my test lab at work. I needed the PCIe x16 slot for the 10GbE NIC there (it's using software RAID as it's got little else to do). Sadly, the _atyfb_ console driver doesn't still work, at least on that card/system combo. I've got another ViRGE DX and a Matrox Millennium in my parts box. I should really try out the MGA - I seem to recall that _matroxfb_ was crazy fast when I used to use it 20-odd years ago, but I couldn't get it to work with the embedded G200eH in the old ProLiant server that acts as the host in my test lab.
When you tried to install Windows Xp did your Xp iso include Sata drivers? (provided you used a cd and a sata cd/dvd drive to install them) (also I know this is an old video but it would be pretty cool if it got a follow up)
Yeah, I tried to incorporate sata drivers
I bet you could get that to work if you used a 32-bit operating system. I bet you the 64-bit operating system is causing memory addressing errors
Not to mention that most old backward compat that used some low-level APIs are removed or broken in 64bit versions (NTVDM for example is absent)
It could also be that the PCI slots where mapped to different memory addresses then the driver or applications expect them to be
This also shows how fast CPUs are nowadays, being able to processes the GUI on its own.
Right? It's crazy!
You certainly can. I had an AM4 board and it had a native PCI slot on it and could use a variety of PCI stuff. In the future it will be VMs and PCI pass through with some sort of PCI to PCIe adapter that actually works and is engineered for that purpose.
I believe you are mistaken about the native part. From what I can tell the AMD FCH for desktop CPUs was their last with native PCI. Your AM4 board probably had an adapter chip onboard. My Intel Haswell system has conventional PCI slots and its manual makes clear that they are implemented in this way.
It's actually surprised me when gt610 don't want to work, because it's like a "modern adapter" compare to some other things what was tested. You even can still buy this graphics card. What I really expected that all tested device will work, at least you will have this device in device manager.
I have a old IBM Aptiva with a P2 cpu laying around. It has some linux installed on it. I dont remember what one. The Bigfoot HDD is sitting in a box. It started to get really loud so i pulled it out in about 2004. The one thing i remember was getting the PCI network adapter to work. I had to use the .inf file you can find in the windows driver install exe by opening it in 7zip and "wrap" in the... whatever things you do with linux. its been almost 20 years. Anyway it worked. Internet was sloooooooow. But the computer could play Quake over the home network for some LAN fun. :D
Voodoo 2 gpu......that takes me back. That was the first GPU I ever bought
about the sb live, might also be a driver issue, as official drivers for windows 10 don't exist
Indeed!
What I'd like to see is if this works for a virtual machine with PCI-E passthrough. If XP or even Win98 would see this as just a PCI device if PCI-E is running in a pci compat mode.
Some people suggested it. I'll definitely try it one day.
Hello ,
Very informative video about old PCI controller cards on a actual PC.
As i learned from the listings of the 2nd hand Creative PCI sound.controller card sellers ,
Windows and Windows 11 does not work with them.
It would actually be a really interesting video series to combine the fastest available products with the slowest or oldest compatible hardware. Like a 13900k with an old GeForce or or voodoo card, or a 4090 with a pentium 3/4. Even mixing the best of today with the best of yesteryear like a pentium 4 extreme edition, a core 2/quad extreme edition, or a i7 980x with the fastest ram and storage from the time, like old pcie drives, and pairing it with nvlink 4090/3090. Or 4 way sli old GeForce cards with a 13900k/7950x. Could even do it with workstation server hardware. Old first gen Xeons with a bunch of rtx a6000s.
It would indeed!
What is the Maximum bottleneck you can make
I grew up in Switzerland, and while it is certainly not representative, personally I have in fact seen significantly more Cirrus Logic chips around at that time. I think it is pretty plausible that there are differences depending on the markets.