Excellent video bro I'm always looking forward to them. Looking forward to seeing the next build brother. And I'm glad you got to join us for an amazing time. I will be watching this again after work.
Thank you so much Patrick! I am definitely looking forward to the next build of yours as well and I really can’t thank you enough for having me for this! This was brilliant and such a fantastic time. I’m sorry for not responding sooner, but I just want you to know that it was an absolute pleasure working with you on this project. I enjoyed every second and figured I’d go for parts that you’d appreciate and get some laughs out of too! After all, who the heck puts an ISA VGA card, a GUS, and two other sound cards in a V2 SLI setup? Me, I guess? Hahaha
What a great build! I still can't believe you managed to put 3 different sound cards in there haha. Using an ISA card was also really interesting and how perfectly that worked in Windows. I wonder if someone ever honestly put in 2 Voodoo 2s in sli with an ISA video card, I think you're the first one haha! On top of it all the whole system being functional and parts being detectable by Windows pretty much seem like a miracle and I'm sure that would never happen to me! Haha! Also it was a cool choice of games to show the 2d capabilities of the system with AoE 2 and Starcraft, I usually don't go to these games for testing, but Starcraft is a timeless classic to me and you might as well use it. Congratulations on your build and the fun video you put together here. See you on the next one!
Thank you so much for the kind words and all the support Bruno! You truly are a wonderful friend, an asset to the community, and just one of the nicest people I’ve met! Thank you, thank you, thank you for all the support and for the friendship throughout all this time! I have no idea why I shoehorned 3 sound cards into there, but I guess that’s me, right? Hahaha! I am surprised that it worked so well, especially with the ISA video card. I knew the Tseng would be decently fast, but I was not expecting THAT. It was impressive, to say the least. I don’t know about that miracle never happening to you man! I didn’t think it’d happen for me, and yet it did, so I guess either we get one and I used mine and you haven’t yet, or maybe it’s just one of those things when Windows decides to get off its ass and do something hahaha! StarCraft and AOE2 are some of my personal favorites and I’m glad you liked the picks for 2D! They seemed right and StarCraft really is a classic; it’s such a great game and holds up so well, even today. Thank you man, and I couldn’t have done it without you! Thanks for joining me on this one and I can’t wait for the next one!
Thank you so much for all the kind words and support, as always, Mike! This was a wild build for sure, and I’m really glad you liked the ET4000! It’s a weird thing to put in there, but I figured, “welp, nobody’s done this so why not?” And hey, it worked! I’m so glad you enjoyed the video, though! That’s what matters to me most!
Such a great video, I played similar games when I'm used my Pentium II 350 years ago with RIVA TNT (I changed that card when I saw how Q3A and Gothic ran on that card). Sadly I'm used Voodoo 2 only when I used Pentium 133, than you very much for showing two of them working together using SLI connection especially with ISA video card. I hope you try one day Settlers 2 at higher resolutions on old cards. That's overall crazy but is always good to explore as much things as possible and go there no one gone before. You can also try with that cpu Gothic II with card like GeForce 2MX400 and you will be surprised how that game will run there especially in places around city or in Valley of Mines.
Thank you so much, good friend! I apologize for not responding sooner! I thought about you while putting this together and kept saying to myself that I knew you’d appreciate this-and I’m so glad you did! I was inspired by how you push your cards to the next level and wanted to do the same here! The RIVA TNT is a great card, but I can see where an upgrade would go far for Q3A and Gothic (Gothic for SURE). The Voodoo 2 SLI with an ISA card was just a weird, weird combo-I doubt there’s another video on it, but it had to be done, for science! I do think Settlers II might run decent on this card at higher resolutions. In fact, maybe I’ll give it a go with something a little faster like a Cirrus GD5434 ISA! But I agree-let’s explore the next level of weird tech combinations and learn and share along the way! That sounds like fun to me! And Gothic II with a GF2MX400 would be pretty interesting! I may have to give that a go before I disassemble this beast! Thank you again for all your kind words and support, good friend! You are too kind :)
Will, I have been waiting with great anticipation for this video. You did not disappoint! Love the fact that you not only built a Win98 rig with period correct hardware, but you also went EVEN MORE retro than that with the video and sound, especially. A "fine dining experience" as far as retro videos go!
Thank you so much for the wonderful words Mike! I apologize for not responding sooner. I really am just so glad that you enjoyed this. And hey, yeah, I had to go even more retro since I’m RetroTechBytes, right? But no, jokes aside, I kind of took what you and I had discussed about weird and era correct and ran with it. Sorting through a couple of bins and pulling things out, I kept saying, “this is it” or “Mike is gonna laugh at this one” and this is what I ended up with! I will tell you that the ISA video card for 2D worked much better than I expected or hoped. I was surprised and I can legitimately say that fast ISA video cards are probably pretty decent for DOS games and could even be used on a Socket 7 machine, if not a 486, despite what a lot of people claim. Anyway, I’m just so glad you enjoyed and thank you again for reaching out and having me be a part of this wonderful experience! This was awesome and a ton of fun!
Thank you both for these kind words! And thank you for all the support and I am so glad that you enjoyed and approve of this weird build! It just had to be done, right? Some crazy person (me) had to take a Voodoo 2 SLI setup and stick it with an ISA card because “why not” and because “science.” Hahaha! But no, jokes aside, thank you both for the support! This was too much fun and building cursed setups is always interesting. I love hearing all y’all’s thoughts because, well, sometimes I don’t even know what to think about the things I’ve built!
Great to see that you finished the video, Will. Oddball components, as ever, particularly that Crystal card. And an ISA graphics card on a slot 1 system? Crazy! Those GUS drivers are essentially for Win3.1/95 aren't they? I don't think I ever tried it in Win98 but those dialog boxes are a dead giveaway! 5306 is an impressive 3DMark score for this system, particularly considering how low my single Voodoo2 scored in my build, despite the faster CPU. Having seen the other videos, I think I actually posted the highest score, which surprised me. It was great fun, and that these hashtags are helping my motivation no end.
Thank you so, so much for the kind words and the support! I had to feature that Crystal card after that video I made. The ISA graphics card on a Slot 1 system thing just kind of came naturally to me, I guess! I’m a big ISA guy these days, but I will admit, that was pretty crazy. You are right about the GUS drivers. The beta GF1 drivers for Win95 are what I tried to use, but it didn’t go very well in 98SE, which I suppose makes sense. They are pretty much just repacked versions of the 3.1 drivers, which themselves are already not the greatest. For such nice hardware, it’s a shame that Gravis’s drivers were crap. I am surprised with the score myself! I found the ~100% scaling of V2 SLI in 3DMark99 to be somewhat unbelievable. I guess it’s just a good implementation! Your build was CRAZY COOL and way fast, and I’d say that trophy is well earned! This was great fun and I’m so glad that we had you as part of this awesome event! Thank you for being a part of this, and thank you for the support and friendship, as always!
I bought two of these Santa Cruz sound cards last year. Mostly because of the hype in how it's a great sound card to use for analog audio capture. They seem to be popular, but the trick for those looking to buy one cheaper, search using the DELL part number. That card was used in a lot of Dell builds back in the day.
Interesting! Thank you for this tip. These are wonderful cards and I agree, they're nice for analog capture. I really enjoy their HTRF implementation and 3D audio. They have a very clean output too, especially for such old cards. It's a shame that they have zero DOS support!
Most people: I'd pair a nice quality pci card with sli voodoo for the best compatibility and range. RetroTechBytes: hold my beer Great video and neat to see an isa card trading blows here. Love it!
Thank you so much for the kind words and support Rik! Hahaha this is definitely me. I am the contrarian for that reason and, to be honest, that’s part of what’s inspired my search for EISA VGA cards, as of late. I would love to see someone go a different route than VLB or ISA on something older. Or on a Pentium… Truth is, this was a “for science” one, and I’m so glad that you enjoyed seeing this! The ISA Tseng keeping up in Windows was pretty wild-ISA is one hell of a bus! Thank you again for watching and for all the support, as always!
Thank you! I am glad that you found the video interesting! It was pretty wild using an ISA Tseng ET4000/W32i on a Pentium III build, but I guess it HAD to be done? Haha
2 роки тому+3
Thats an interesting build and that ISA ET4000 is dam fast for ISA! Yea you did the right thing in my view ditching FastVoodoo2 drivers, 4.6 I assume. I have probably tested like 10 different Voodoo2 setups, most SLI and 9 out of 10 the stock 30202 drivers wins and its a draw in 1 out of 10. Its worth mentioning that the FastVoodoo2 drivers overclock the cards to 93Mhz instead of the stock 90Mhz of reference drivers. So using 30202 with a 93Mhz OC is even faster. I consider the FastVoodoo2 drivers a scam, I could repack the stock drivers to do the same and be even faster. In fact Voodoo Rush single board has way to high clocks out of the box compared to the double board design so they artifact out of the box, just edit the inf file clocks to match the double board design to fix that before installing. Also if you ever want to run a Via C3 CPU for socket 370 or one of the soldered to the board versions the FastVoodo2 drivers are broken, artifacts, crashes and runs just very badly, but most people dont use C3 processors but they are kind of fun and some overclocks like crazy. Well you earned a subscriber!
Thank you so much for the kind words! The ET4000 is really damn fast indeed! In fact, there’s maybe 3 other cards in ISA form that can compete, two of which have 64-bit memory buses, and one of which has a 32-bit interleaved bus like the ET4000’s. They are decent cards in 2D, even compared to PCI, and in Windows, the ISA bus bottleneck isn’t much of a worry. It’s there, but less so. Ditching the FastVoodoo2 drivers was a much needed thing. I am with you and glad to hear I made a good call. The stock drivers worked great, and I just used the modified “mismatched SLI” enabled ones. I do think that 93MHz must be pretty sweet on these. I would be interested to see a repack of the stock drivers with that kind of overclock! I clocked my cards back down, because I wasn’t sure if the ProComp and Creative could handle 93MHz equally stable. I did a video on the Rush and addressed that, actually! It really is a joke that you have to edit that one registry key just because the AT3D and Macronix whatever that they used are THAT bad at 2D. Thank you for this information! I do want to try out a Via C3 sometime and have a few, but that’s GREAT to know! Thank you so much for this; this is awesome knowledge and very helpful. And I agree-C3s seem very cool, and being an IDT-derived part, they’re pretty neat! Thank you for all the support! I am so glad that you enjoyed the video!
I have a similar type system with GUS Classic 2.1, on Win98. Getting sound to play nice was hard. Ended up going into BIOS, disabling PnP for ISA slots, which should keep Windows from taking over resources. Due to GUS utilizing so many IRQ/DMA hookups, it's almost guaranteed to clash with something else on the motherboard, if you have many expansion cards. But when it is running - GUS is heavenly.
Agreeeeeeeed! The GUS is a great device and, when it’s running, it’s heavenly for sure. It’s a shame that it’s such a resource hog. I felt that the ACE would work better, but even that was a mess. Were you able to get MIDI working in Windows 98? I was able to do so in DOS stuff when run windowed, but not otherwise.
@@RetroTechBytes I got everything working, and had it paired with AWE64 in the same box. I haven't booted it up in years. I remember that it took me 2 weeks of trial and error to get rid of all conflicts, mostly caused by plug and play cards not communicating with GUS and stepping on addresses, until I had all jumpers set and all matching addresses reserved. I can hook up that machine on the weekend and do testing. On my channel there is a clip called "Gravis Ultrasound Quick Review", where I jokingly give up on the card, but in reality I shot the clip at the end of 2 weeks just as I got it all running 100%. I had the machine running soundtrack from Transport Tycoon - one of the best things to enjoy on a GUS in my opinion. That game is my MIDI quality test for all retro boxes.
Thanks for the video. 5:35 Which drivers are people using to make the Santa Cruz sound good in a3d/EAX games? I've only ever used the VxD drivers with it, and the HRTF/surround sound via headphones experience has always been underwhelming on it. For instance, in UT99, you can barely hear when a bot is standing in front and shooting directly at you. Should I switch to WDM?
Hm, interesting. I find the VXD drivers to work pretty well. The HRTF is not as good as a Vortex2, that’s for sure; but it seems pretty solid with headphones. WDM drivers may work better in your case, but the performance with them might suffer a little. What’s the rest of your build, if you don’t mind me asking? And hey, thank you for watching and for the support! I really do appreciate it!
Indeed! I actually did play some Red Alert after the filming and it ran so well! I was shocked. That Tseng is a monster and Windows + ISA cards isn’t a bad combo at all. When you have a lot going on, it can get slower, but for 800x600 or less? It’s more than enough!
Do you happen to know how exactly the software rendering for AoE2 and StarCraft is orchestrated with the ET4000? Is the CPU just doing sprite BLITs to a framebuffer in main memory, and doing a framebuffer copy to the ET4000? (I presume it would have to be 8-bit color, which at most could give you 33 FPS given the parameters you specified). Or is it somehow utilizing some of the 2D acceleration in the ET4000? If it is just using the 2D card as a framebuffer display output, then if the games were written to support it, they could have just written the framebuffer directly to the Voodoo2 cards with a substantial bandwidth improvement (they support directly writing to the framebuffer). That probably wasn't supported, but it's interesting to know that the mechanism could have been used and wasn't.
Unfortunately, I am not entirely sure. I would imagine that there’s probably sprit BLITs being moved from a system RAM framebuffer to the ET4000’s, but I suppose it’s possible that the ET4000’s 2D acceleration-albeit rudimentary-could be of assistance here? The ET4000 is fully compliant with DirectDraw, for whatever that’s worth, and perhaps that plays into things? Honestly, I am not very knowledgeable as to this, but would love to look into this, as the Voodoo 2 framebuffer idea sounds pretty fascinating to me! Thanks for sharing your thoughts! This was an enlightening read, and I’m now going to do some research!
In my opinion the computer is slow, because all the PCI slot is fully populated, and the IRQ (Hardware Interrupt) is common with other PCI cards. This makes the Interrupt handling very difficult. For imaging we are using at least 3 IRQ (2D graphics, Voodoo2 card1 and card2). Later in Voodoo 3 AGP this 3 card are integrated into one device, and the AGP is dedicates high speed slot. So that's makes a difference.
![[Tech Byte 0010] This 386SX Motherboard has the WEIRDEST L2 Cache Setup!](/img/n.gif)
Excellent video bro I'm always looking forward to them. Looking forward to seeing the next build brother. And I'm glad you got to join us for an amazing time. I will be watching this again after work.
Thank you so much Patrick! I am definitely looking forward to the next build of yours as well and I really can’t thank you enough for having me for this! This was brilliant and such a fantastic time. I’m sorry for not responding sooner, but I just want you to know that it was an absolute pleasure working with you on this project. I enjoyed every second and figured I’d go for parts that you’d appreciate and get some laughs out of too! After all, who the heck puts an ISA VGA card, a GUS, and two other sound cards in a V2 SLI setup? Me, I guess? Hahaha
What a great build! I still can't believe you managed to put 3 different sound cards in there haha. Using an ISA card was also really interesting and how perfectly that worked in Windows. I wonder if someone ever honestly put in 2 Voodoo 2s in sli with an ISA video card, I think you're the first one haha! On top of it all the whole system being functional and parts being detectable by Windows pretty much seem like a miracle and I'm sure that would never happen to me! Haha! Also it was a cool choice of games to show the 2d capabilities of the system with AoE 2 and Starcraft, I usually don't go to these games for testing, but Starcraft is a timeless classic to me and you might as well use it. Congratulations on your build and the fun video you put together here. See you on the next one!
Thank you so much for the kind words and all the support Bruno! You truly are a wonderful friend, an asset to the community, and just one of the nicest people I’ve met! Thank you, thank you, thank you for all the support and for the friendship throughout all this time! I have no idea why I shoehorned 3 sound cards into there, but I guess that’s me, right? Hahaha! I am surprised that it worked so well, especially with the ISA video card. I knew the Tseng would be decently fast, but I was not expecting THAT. It was impressive, to say the least. I don’t know about that miracle never happening to you man! I didn’t think it’d happen for me, and yet it did, so I guess either we get one and I used mine and you haven’t yet, or maybe it’s just one of those things when Windows decides to get off its ass and do something hahaha! StarCraft and AOE2 are some of my personal favorites and I’m glad you liked the picks for 2D! They seemed right and StarCraft really is a classic; it’s such a great game and holds up so well, even today. Thank you man, and I couldn’t have done it without you! Thanks for joining me on this one and I can’t wait for the next one!
Always taking it to the next level!
Thank you man! I always try my best, and I’ve been learning and growing thanks to you and the rest of the community! This is a team effort!
Really cool build, Will! I love the unique blend of hardware, especially the ET4000. Really enjoyed the video :)
Thank you so much for all the kind words and support, as always, Mike! This was a wild build for sure, and I’m really glad you liked the ET4000! It’s a weird thing to put in there, but I figured, “welp, nobody’s done this so why not?” And hey, it worked! I’m so glad you enjoyed the video, though! That’s what matters to me most!
Such a great video, I played similar games when I'm used my Pentium II 350 years ago with RIVA TNT (I changed that card when I saw how Q3A and Gothic ran on that card). Sadly I'm used Voodoo 2 only when I used Pentium 133, than you very much for showing two of them working together using SLI connection especially with ISA video card. I hope you try one day Settlers 2 at higher resolutions on old cards. That's overall crazy but is always good to explore as much things as possible and go there no one gone before. You can also try with that cpu Gothic II with card like GeForce 2MX400 and you will be surprised how that game will run there especially in places around city or in Valley of Mines.
Thank you so much, good friend! I apologize for not responding sooner! I thought about you while putting this together and kept saying to myself that I knew you’d appreciate this-and I’m so glad you did! I was inspired by how you push your cards to the next level and wanted to do the same here! The RIVA TNT is a great card, but I can see where an upgrade would go far for Q3A and Gothic (Gothic for SURE). The Voodoo 2 SLI with an ISA card was just a weird, weird combo-I doubt there’s another video on it, but it had to be done, for science! I do think Settlers II might run decent on this card at higher resolutions. In fact, maybe I’ll give it a go with something a little faster like a Cirrus GD5434 ISA! But I agree-let’s explore the next level of weird tech combinations and learn and share along the way! That sounds like fun to me! And Gothic II with a GF2MX400 would be pretty interesting! I may have to give that a go before I disassemble this beast! Thank you again for all your kind words and support, good friend! You are too kind :)
Will, I have been waiting with great anticipation for this video. You did not disappoint!
Love the fact that you not only built a Win98 rig with period correct hardware, but you also went EVEN MORE retro than that with the video and sound, especially.
A "fine dining experience" as far as retro videos go!
Thank you so much for the wonderful words Mike! I apologize for not responding sooner. I really am just so glad that you enjoyed this. And hey, yeah, I had to go even more retro since I’m RetroTechBytes, right? But no, jokes aside, I kind of took what you and I had discussed about weird and era correct and ran with it. Sorting through a couple of bins and pulling things out, I kept saying, “this is it” or “Mike is gonna laugh at this one” and this is what I ended up with! I will tell you that the ISA video card for 2D worked much better than I expected or hoped. I was surprised and I can legitimately say that fast ISA video cards are probably pretty decent for DOS games and could even be used on a Socket 7 machine, if not a 486, despite what a lot of people claim. Anyway, I’m just so glad you enjoyed and thank you again for reaching out and having me be a part of this wonderful experience! This was awesome and a ton of fun!
Great video - loved the choices of kit :)
Thank you so much! I’m so glad you enjoyed! It was a fun one!
An excellent, and deeply cursed, build. I approve! 👍😆
Makes me miss my GUS from back in the day. I wish I'd never sold it.
Deeply cursed indeed!
Thank you both for these kind words! And thank you for all the support and I am so glad that you enjoyed and approve of this weird build! It just had to be done, right? Some crazy person (me) had to take a Voodoo 2 SLI setup and stick it with an ISA card because “why not” and because “science.” Hahaha! But no, jokes aside, thank you both for the support! This was too much fun and building cursed setups is always interesting. I love hearing all y’all’s thoughts because, well, sometimes I don’t even know what to think about the things I’ve built!
Great to see that you finished the video, Will. Oddball components, as ever, particularly that Crystal card. And an ISA graphics card on a slot 1 system? Crazy! Those GUS drivers are essentially for Win3.1/95 aren't they? I don't think I ever tried it in Win98 but those dialog boxes are a dead giveaway! 5306 is an impressive 3DMark score for this system, particularly considering how low my single Voodoo2 scored in my build, despite the faster CPU. Having seen the other videos, I think I actually posted the highest score, which surprised me. It was great fun, and that these hashtags are helping my motivation no end.
Thank you so, so much for the kind words and the support! I had to feature that Crystal card after that video I made. The ISA graphics card on a Slot 1 system thing just kind of came naturally to me, I guess! I’m a big ISA guy these days, but I will admit, that was pretty crazy. You are right about the GUS drivers. The beta GF1 drivers for Win95 are what I tried to use, but it didn’t go very well in 98SE, which I suppose makes sense. They are pretty much just repacked versions of the 3.1 drivers, which themselves are already not the greatest. For such nice hardware, it’s a shame that Gravis’s drivers were crap. I am surprised with the score myself! I found the ~100% scaling of V2 SLI in 3DMark99 to be somewhat unbelievable. I guess it’s just a good implementation! Your build was CRAZY COOL and way fast, and I’d say that trophy is well earned! This was great fun and I’m so glad that we had you as part of this awesome event! Thank you for being a part of this, and thank you for the support and friendship, as always!
ISA VGA - I'm crying :D
Well done, sir!
I bought two of these Santa Cruz sound cards last year. Mostly because of the hype in how it's a great sound card to use for analog audio capture. They seem to be popular, but the trick for those looking to buy one cheaper, search using the DELL part number. That card was used in a lot of Dell builds back in the day.
Interesting! Thank you for this tip. These are wonderful cards and I agree, they're nice for analog capture. I really enjoy their HTRF implementation and 3D audio. They have a very clean output too, especially for such old cards. It's a shame that they have zero DOS support!
Most people: I'd pair a nice quality pci card with sli voodoo for the best compatibility and range.
RetroTechBytes: hold my beer
Great video and neat to see an isa card trading blows here. Love it!
Thank you so much for the kind words and support Rik!
Hahaha this is definitely me. I am the contrarian for that reason and, to be honest, that’s part of what’s inspired my search for EISA VGA cards, as of late. I would love to see someone go a different route than VLB or ISA on something older. Or on a Pentium…
Truth is, this was a “for science” one, and I’m so glad that you enjoyed seeing this! The ISA Tseng keeping up in Windows was pretty wild-ISA is one hell of a bus!
Thank you again for watching and for all the support, as always!
Interesting video. Congrats!
Thank you! I am glad that you found the video interesting! It was pretty wild using an ISA Tseng ET4000/W32i on a Pentium III build, but I guess it HAD to be done? Haha
Thats an interesting build and that ISA ET4000 is dam fast for ISA!
Yea you did the right thing in my view ditching FastVoodoo2 drivers, 4.6 I assume.
I have probably tested like 10 different Voodoo2 setups, most SLI and 9 out of 10 the stock 30202 drivers wins and its a draw in 1 out of 10.
Its worth mentioning that the FastVoodoo2 drivers overclock the cards to 93Mhz instead of the stock 90Mhz of reference drivers.
So using 30202 with a 93Mhz OC is even faster.
I consider the FastVoodoo2 drivers a scam, I could repack the stock drivers to do the same and be even faster.
In fact Voodoo Rush single board has way to high clocks out of the box compared to the double board design so they artifact out of the box, just edit the inf file clocks to match the double board design to fix that before installing.
Also if you ever want to run a Via C3 CPU for socket 370 or one of the soldered to the board versions the FastVoodo2 drivers are broken, artifacts, crashes and runs just very badly, but most people dont use C3 processors but they are kind of fun and some overclocks like crazy.
Well you earned a subscriber!
Thank you so much for the kind words! The ET4000 is really damn fast indeed! In fact, there’s maybe 3 other cards in ISA form that can compete, two of which have 64-bit memory buses, and one of which has a 32-bit interleaved bus like the ET4000’s. They are decent cards in 2D, even compared to PCI, and in Windows, the ISA bus bottleneck isn’t much of a worry. It’s there, but less so.
Ditching the FastVoodoo2 drivers was a much needed thing. I am with you and glad to hear I made a good call. The stock drivers worked great, and I just used the modified “mismatched SLI” enabled ones. I do think that 93MHz must be pretty sweet on these. I would be interested to see a repack of the stock drivers with that kind of overclock! I clocked my cards back down, because I wasn’t sure if the ProComp and Creative could handle 93MHz equally stable.
I did a video on the Rush and addressed that, actually! It really is a joke that you have to edit that one registry key just because the AT3D and Macronix whatever that they used are THAT bad at 2D.
Thank you for this information! I do want to try out a Via C3 sometime and have a few, but that’s GREAT to know! Thank you so much for this; this is awesome knowledge and very helpful. And I agree-C3s seem very cool, and being an IDT-derived part, they’re pretty neat!
Thank you for all the support! I am so glad that you enjoyed the video!
Excellent video
you need front carbon bumper, weight reduction kit, some stickers for +5bhp effect
I have a similar type system with GUS Classic 2.1, on Win98. Getting sound to play nice was hard. Ended up going into BIOS, disabling PnP for ISA slots, which should keep Windows from taking over resources. Due to GUS utilizing so many IRQ/DMA hookups, it's almost guaranteed to clash with something else on the motherboard, if you have many expansion cards. But when it is running - GUS is heavenly.
Agreeeeeeeed! The GUS is a great device and, when it’s running, it’s heavenly for sure. It’s a shame that it’s such a resource hog. I felt that the ACE would work better, but even that was a mess. Were you able to get MIDI working in Windows 98? I was able to do so in DOS stuff when run windowed, but not otherwise.
@@RetroTechBytes I got everything working, and had it paired with AWE64 in the same box. I haven't booted it up in years. I remember that it took me 2 weeks of trial and error to get rid of all conflicts, mostly caused by plug and play cards not communicating with GUS and stepping on addresses, until I had all jumpers set and all matching addresses reserved. I can hook up that machine on the weekend and do testing. On my channel there is a clip called "Gravis Ultrasound Quick Review", where I jokingly give up on the card, but in reality I shot the clip at the end of 2 weeks just as I got it all running 100%. I had the machine running soundtrack from Transport Tycoon - one of the best things to enjoy on a GUS in my opinion. That game is my MIDI quality test for all retro boxes.
A weird slot1 build should include a slocket8 and a p2 overdrive.
OH now THAT is weird. I have heard there’s issue with S8->Slot 1 Slockets on non-LX boards. AGP and a P2OD would be a nutty combo though!
05:43 Wowww, I didn't remember Pentium 3 existed in slot 1 version.
Yep! There’s a bunch, even up to the 1GHz model!
Thanks for the video.
5:35 Which drivers are people using to make the Santa Cruz sound good in a3d/EAX games? I've only ever used the VxD drivers with it, and the HRTF/surround sound via headphones experience has always been underwhelming on it. For instance, in UT99, you can barely hear when a bot is standing in front and shooting directly at you. Should I switch to WDM?
Hm, interesting. I find the VXD drivers to work pretty well. The HRTF is not as good as a Vortex2, that’s for sure; but it seems pretty solid with headphones. WDM drivers may work better in your case, but the performance with them might suffer a little. What’s the rest of your build, if you don’t mind me asking? And hey, thank you for watching and for the support! I really do appreciate it!
what the tseng lacks in power, it makes up for in ISA! it's actually impressive how good it is. did you try C&C or Red Alert?
Indeed! I actually did play some Red Alert after the filming and it ran so well! I was shocked. That Tseng is a monster and Windows + ISA cards isn’t a bad combo at all. When you have a lot going on, it can get slower, but for 800x600 or less? It’s more than enough!
Do you happen to know how exactly the software rendering for AoE2 and StarCraft is orchestrated with the ET4000? Is the CPU just doing sprite BLITs to a framebuffer in main memory, and doing a framebuffer copy to the ET4000? (I presume it would have to be 8-bit color, which at most could give you 33 FPS given the parameters you specified). Or is it somehow utilizing some of the 2D acceleration in the ET4000?
If it is just using the 2D card as a framebuffer display output, then if the games were written to support it, they could have just written the framebuffer directly to the Voodoo2 cards with a substantial bandwidth improvement (they support directly writing to the framebuffer). That probably wasn't supported, but it's interesting to know that the mechanism could have been used and wasn't.
Unfortunately, I am not entirely sure. I would imagine that there’s probably sprit BLITs being moved from a system RAM framebuffer to the ET4000’s, but I suppose it’s possible that the ET4000’s 2D acceleration-albeit rudimentary-could be of assistance here? The ET4000 is fully compliant with DirectDraw, for whatever that’s worth, and perhaps that plays into things? Honestly, I am not very knowledgeable as to this, but would love to look into this, as the Voodoo 2 framebuffer idea sounds pretty fascinating to me! Thanks for sharing your thoughts! This was an enlightening read, and I’m now going to do some research!
In my opinion the computer is slow, because all the PCI slot is fully populated, and the IRQ (Hardware Interrupt) is common with other PCI cards. This makes the Interrupt handling very difficult. For imaging we are using at least 3 IRQ (2D graphics, Voodoo2 card1 and card2). Later in Voodoo 3 AGP this 3 card are integrated into one device, and the AGP is dedicates high speed slot. So that's makes a difference.
Late to the party, Voodoo & Voodoo 2 don't use an PCI interrupt, and his problems stem from using an ISA video card.
ja man!
Weird in that it is a reverse sleeper build